Kicking him while he's up
Robert Edric
FURY by Salman Rushdie Cape, £16.99, pp. 266, ISBN 0224061593 Several weeks ago, a Guardian article asked disbelievingly why the readers among us remained in thrall to the heavyweight literary quartet of Amis, Barnes, McEwan and Rushdie. Disregarding the obvious — that all four writers are at least a decade past the genuinely ground-breaking and forward-looking work once produced by two or three of them — this question reveals more about the intellectual laziness and commercial opportunism of many publishers, and the media and literary cliques which remain in obeisance to these four at a time when a vast diversity of imaginative, daring and engaging writers has risen struggling towards the light beneath the spreading shadows of this solid and unmoving foursome.
And here, following his misjudged foray into the world of popular music, comes Rushdie's latest, Fun. This, according to the advance publicity, is a work of pitchblack comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerising force. Even allowing for the excesses of the publicist's trade, it is none of these things, and the honest reader will quickly feel deceived by all these outrageous claims.
What confronts the reader is the tale of Malik Solanka, a 'historian of ideas', who communicates various philosophies through the dolls he makes, but who then grows disillusioned when these dolls become popular and exploited, making him a world-wide celebrity and fabulously wealthy. Weary of all this fame and wealth, Solanka abandons his wife and young child in London and moves to New York, city of the tired and disillusioned, where he meets a beautiful young woman, half his age, with whom he falls in love, but who, it transpires, is actually a leading figure in the fight for independence of a tiny Indian Ocean state, where. in a hurried and disap pointing ending, she finally goes to play her part in the armed struggle. The besotted Solanka follows her with his offer to medi ate (he remains a world-wide and respected name, remember) and, in what can only be described as a wholly predictable 'twist', his weary life is saved by this beautiful young woman making the ultimate sacrifice.
The real problem with Fun, lies not so much with its absurd and near non-existent
plot or with its failure to deliver, but with the writing itself. Rushdie's grip here is tight, and grows ever tighter; nothing is allowed to escape his writerly eye. Every sentence is finely wrought, awash with metaphor, allusion and word-play; whole constellations of people, places and events are described in redundant detail. (Even when characters laugh, Rushdie lets us know precisely the duration, form and intonation of that laughter.) This is an ungenerous book. The characters are held at arm's length from us. Their lives are probed and examined, explained and rendered cold and uninteresting by Rushdie's excessively explicatory and self regarding prose, and by the blinding light he insists on shining upon them. Not for the first time, Rushdie, in attempting to prove himself pre-eminent among his worthy peers, has ignored completely the needs of the reader.
There is little doubt that the publication of Fury will attract a great deal of orches trated attention — it is, after all, an event and not merely a novel — but I wonder how often the reviews will afterwards be referred to as 'respectful'.
A week ago, the Booker long-list was announced, but rather than focus on the two dozen imaginative, daring and engag ing books on offer — at least half of them by little-known or unknown writers — the main concern of much of the coverage of the announcement was the perceived insult to Rushdie and his publisher that Fury was not among them. It does not deserve to be among them. Everyone, eventually, gets tired of cheering and waving at the emperor as he imperially passes us by.
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