Book Self by C. K. Stead

Author:C. K. Stead [Stead, C. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405632
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

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1 A review of Billie’s Kiss by Elizabeth Knox (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2002), Landfall 204, November 2002.

Rushdie the Clown1

Rumour has it that Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, promoted as a return to the form of Midnight’s Children and Shame after recent less orderly fictions, made it down to the final eight before it was eliminated (along with Ian McEwan’s Saturday) from the just announced Booker short-list. In the way all book awards work (sales promotions disguised as rewards for literary merit), this will serve the novel well enough. The question of whether Rushdie should have been excluded, in favour of (for example) Zadie Smith, from the final six will attract as much attention as a short-listing would have done. Commerce rules.

Incomparably commercial since an unpleasant and famous Ayatollah invited the faithful to murder him, Rushdie is also, as it happens, a writer of huge and incontinent talent. He is a mixed blessing whose early work I read with patience and respect. Latterly I find the patience, if not the respect, has begun to wear thin. His talent for large structures, his memory for fact and detail, his command of the English sentence (some in this book would rival Sir Walter Scott’s), his quirky naming, his ear for comic variations of spoken English, his ability to make the real symbolic and the symbolic real – it is all still there and in good working overdrive.

Time and the fatwa have left their mark on Rushdie. His purpose in this novel is serious. I suppose it always was; but the feeling has become darker. The cartoon quality that gave his early writing its characteristic comic distancing still works, I think, though it has a slightly dated feel about it. In places one can feel him trying to escape from it, but the escapes are into journalism and anger.

Rushdie’s Kashmir in this novel is a symbol of the world at a proper human scale, beautiful and productive, where racial and religious differences can find accommodation. It is an ideal, a place of romantic memory, a Paradise (the word is used). Its story, as he tells it, is Paradise Lost – destroyed by nationalism, fundamentalism, fanaticism.

Boonyi Kaul, a Hindu dancer, and Shalimar Noman, a Muslim tightrope walker, from adjoining Kashmiri villages, fall in love at the age of fourteen. When they are revealed as lovers the two communities overcome their differences and the pair are married. Some years later their region is visited by the American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls. Ophuls, Jewish, born in Alsace, Second World War freedom fighter and hero, linguist, lover of women and general man-about-the-world, seduces, and/or is seduced by, Boonyi Kaul, who is called upon to dance for the visitor, and who sees in him a way of escape from the confines of Kashmir. Boonyi is taken to Delhi and set up as the ambassador’s mistress. The openings she hopes for as a dancer don’t appear, and she slides into addictions to food and drugs which destroy her beauty and talent.

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