Salman Rushdie: ‘I’ve suddenly turned into a comic novelist’
Salman Rushdie finds humour in a crazy world.
Here are just a few of the happenings in Salman Rushdie’s rollicking new novel: in New York City, an abandoned newborn, the “baby of truth”, is able to sniff out the corrupt and when she does their flesh literally decays, zombie-like; in a French town, citizens start turning into rhinoceroses; unprecedented lightning strikes cause massive fires, including in Australia; some people lose their grip on gravity, existing a few centimetres above terra firma; a property developer with inhuman hair runs for the White House.
That last suggests Rushdie’s message in Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights: it’s a mad, mad world all right, and it’s here and now.
“The starting point,” Rushdie says in a phone interview from London, where he’s promoting the book, “was wanting to make a portrait of a world that’s gone crazy.’’
Note the present tense. The novel teems with unreal characters and surreal events: the author feels this is the best way to convey the world as he sees it today, one that has “changed at dizzying speed and in dramatic fashion … so that many people have the feeling — certainly I have — of living in a very strange time … but it is not a fairytale, it is where we are’’.
“One of the reasons I write books like this, as opposed to conventional realist fiction,’’ Rushdie says, “is that the premise for realism in the novel is that writer and reader will agree, in broad terms, about what the world is like. But we actually live in a time when reality is contested and argued about — it’s not one thing, it’s many things to many people.
“That fracturing of reality requires, to my mind, a different approach to writing about the world, and that’s what takes me away from conventional naturalism towards what may seem a crazier kind of writing.’’
“The strangeness” is the catch-all phrase for the time of upheaval in human affairs described in the novel, a turmoil that lasts for the two years, eight months and 28 nights of the title, a play on the 1001 nights of Scheherazade’s death-defying storytelling.
The cause of this rupture, although humanity does not know it, is the return to earth after an epochal absence of the jinn, supernatural creatures of Arabian mythology. These beings of smoke and fire and rapacious sexual appetite are near-immortal and mainly malevolent, as we are told:
“The (humans) had so much to learn. They had to learn to stop saying genie and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde ‘Jeannie’ in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her ‘master’. It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that has entered the world was jinn.’’
However the jinn do not act as one. Even among the leadership of the dark jinn, the ones bent on creating hell on earth, there is arch conflict, because the jinn are spectacularly vain and self-important. But what really causes a jinn civil war — unfortunately for mere mortals the battlefield is earth — is the intervention of a jinn princess, Dunia, on the side of humanity, aka “these wrecked people … with an exceptional ability to ignore approaching doom’’.
The reason? In the 12th century she fell in love with the human philosopher Ibn Rushd and bore him a supernatural number of children. Their descendants are living all over the planet, marked by a peculiar if unspectacular physical trait. “It isn’t bad enough being a brown dude in America,’’ says one descendant, Jimmy Kapoor, on learning his true ancestry, “you’re telling me I’m half f..king goblin as well?”
Rushdie uses the rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd and his theologian rival al-Ghazali of — where else? — Persia, who spar throughout the novel, even in the afterlife, to frame questions that matter to him and, he thinks, to all of us.
“The arguments the book articulates,’’ he says, “arguments between reason and unreason, between blind faith and disbelief, between science and ignorance, between peace and war, between tolerance and intolerance — all these things, yes they have a current manifestation that we can see on the news every day, but they’ve also always been there.
“And so for me this is an interesting way of talking about the real history of the human race, as a battle between these opposites, which are opposites in the world but are also opposites within ourselves. I think no matter how tolerant we think we are, there’s probably a small part of us that is intolerant, and so on.’’
No prize for guessing with whom Rushdie sides in the intellectual turf war between Ibn Rushd and al-Ghazali: after all, his very name, notorious in the 20th century following the Iranian death sentence imposed for The Satanic Verses, comes from his father’s decision to change the family name in honour of the 12th-century thinker.
Plus it would be hard to miss the fact that Rushdie hates religion. He describes himself as a “hardline atheist”. Indeed his novel ends — without wanting to give too much away — with a post-faith scenario he admits is a “triumph of optimism’’ on his part.
And he gets his licks in along the way, as when one of the most potent of the dark jinn, Zabardast the Sorcerer, explains the plan for human domination: “We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there’s only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god.’’
Rushdie says he’s only in recent times come to realise the extent of the influence of his father, a Cambridge-educated lawyer and businessman. (The son, born in Bombay in 1947, would go to Cambridge, too).
“I’ve come to understand as I’ve got older how much of my way of thinking derives directly from my father. That’s one of the reasons Ibn Rushd became such an important figure for me in this book, to pay homage to my dad.’’
He laughs. “Though the character also has something in common with me in that he was persecuted, driven into exile and had his books burned. I certainly know something about that!’’
The fatwa remains in place, but New York-based Rushdie today lives a much more normal life than the one he describes in his 2012 memoir of the decade under British police protection, Joseph Anton (his code name, chosen for two literary heroes, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov).
One sign of this normalcy, in this day and age, is his enthusiastic use of Twitter, where he receives a lot of love from adoring readers, and a little hate from the less admiring. As of yesterday he had 1.09 million followers, almost tenfold that of Joyce Carol Oates, to pluck another famous author who is a keen tweeter out of the air for purposes of comparison. (And to be fair, Oates has in recent years been much more favoured than Rushdie in the bookies’ markets for the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I tell Rushdie I had an unsuccessful $10 on him this year, at 50-1, his response is, “Ha! Sorry about that.’’)
When I suggest he is a brave man to be so active on Twitter, Rushdie knows what I’m talking about. “Thank you!’’ he says. “I sometimes feel a bit brave myself because there are these shit storms that happen on Twitter that you have to ride out.’’ Case in point: the Charlie Hebdo affair, in which Rushdie copped a fair bit of abuse on social media.
“Yes, there is tendency on Twitter to have hate fests against a particular person or a particular point of view, and that can become something very like a mob, and that’s unattractive.’’ But he sees the flip side: “If you are involved in a political issue or a public matter and you just want to get your point across quickly, without the mediation of a journalist — and have it picked up, obviously, by the press — then it’s useful for that.’’
In case it’s not obvious, Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights is a funny novel. When the most powerful of the dark jinn, Zumurrad the Great, manifests in the plaza of New York’s Lincoln Centre and bellows “You are all my slaves’’, people take it in their stride, assuming “he was promoting a new opera at the Met’’.
There’s a wonderful extended parody of the Taliban, renamed the Swots, who “had studied deeply the art of forbidding things’’. And when an eminent persons group is formed to develop strategies for responding to radical changes happening on Earth, it comprises “telegenic biologists, mad-professor climatologists, magic-realist novelists, idiotic film actors and renegade theologians’’. Not naming any names, mind you.
“It just came out that way,’’ the author says. “I think a lot of my books have bits of humour in them but it seems at the age of 68 I’ve suddenly turned into a comic novelist. Surprising numbers of people have been telling me they have been laughing out loud, which is a good thing, right? This book was kind of zany but I think it did work out funny and I’m glad about that … I might do some more of that.’’
It’s also — again without wanting to give away too much of the game — an optimistic book. Rationalising her irrational (for a jinn) behaviour, Dunia acknowledges that “human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best” but confesses that “to love one human being was to begin to love them all’’.
“I was actually quite surprised, to tell you the truth,’’ Rushdie says, “at how cheerfully the book ended up. That just happened.’’ He pauses, then continues: “I did think a little about how many dystopian fictions there are around at the moment. Dystopia seems to be the fashionable place to go right now — everything’s awful and then it gets worse and then it ends badly — and I just thought, I don’t want to be one of them.
“So I tried to think, how else could I imagine this, and it may be that the book has a more hopeful conclusion than we have any right to expect right now, but I ended up liking the way it ended, so yes, it’s an oddly optimistic book.’’ It must be added that Rushdie’s optimistic scenario comes with some serious caveats — which readers will want to find out for themselves.
Rushdie’s literary achievements hardly need reinforcing. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, a masterpiece of magic realism and postcolonial literature, won the 1981 Booker Prize and has claim to being the greatest Booker winner, being named the Booker of Bookers in 1993 on the prize’s 25th anniversary and the Best of the Booker for its 40th in 2008. Yet while you live, you tend to be only as good as your last work, and Rushdie has had mixed notices in recent years.
His new novel, his 10th, has had mainly positive reviews so far, but also a few sharply negative ones, including by author, poet and critic Ed Wright in this newspaper. Rushdie says he speed-reads his reviews. He can never remember a line from the plus column, but the other side of the ledger is more likely to linger. The one review of the new novel he does recall is one that suggested it was time for Salman Rushdie to retire.
“I remember it because it’s funny!’’ he says with a genuine laugh, “I thought, OK, I’m not against that, maybe if several million people buy the book it will give me the money that will give me the capacity to retire.’’
He’s kidding of course. Apart from a flirtation with acting during his Cambridge years, he has had only one calling. “I write for it,’’ he says with some emphasis. “I would do it even if I wasn’t getting paid, which is not something I will ever tell my publishers.
“But it’s what I love to do. For me it’s a way of thinking about the world and responding to it and trying to work out where I am in both my life and in the moment in which I am living.
“It’s just my way of understanding the world, so why would I stop doing that?”
Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights, by Salman Rushdie, is published by Jonathan Cape ($32.99).
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