Political turmoil has provided rich fodder for Salman Rushdie, and his best work is a masala mix of barbed satire, rewritten history, mesmerizing storytelling. His narrators digress and traipse through time and place, brilliantly bringing everything together in the end.
Rushdie already has taken us to India and Pakistan with his novels ’’Midnight’s Children’’ and ’’Shame, ’’ so with his latest book, ’’Shalimar the Clown, ’’ he lands on the incessantly disputed middle ground of Kashmir. Once a place of staggering beauty that brought on comparisons to Eden, Kashmir is now a war-torn site -- destructively contested by India, Pakistan and Kashmiri militants.
In ’’Shalimar the Clown, ’’ the shredding of Kashmir becomes a metaphor mirroring the rest of the world. As the narrator points out, ’’Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettled people. There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm.’’
Rushdie is describing the early 1990s, but the parallels are clear. It’s a tense situation for us, but the perfect background for the grandest Rushdie epic -- one that he has yet to write.
Not that ’’Shalimar the Clown’’ is a bad book. The novel has Rushdie’s trademark blend of farce and political criticism, and his ability to capture the lilting syntax of Indian English remains delightful.
What’s lacking, however, is the usual magic that propels readers through his lengthy, fractured tales. Rushdie generally balances his stories and politics, never letting one throw off the other, but that isn’t the case here. Too often, the narrative falls into the background, creating tedious stretches of exposition and tiresome digressions that go nowhere.
The novel opens with the assassination of Max Ophuls, a former ambassador and celebrated hero of the French Resistance against the Nazis. Max has been ’’one of the architects of the postwar world, ’’ secretly serving as the U.S. counter-terrorism chief in his later years. He is slaughtered on the doorstep of his daughter’s Los Angeles apartment, ’’like a halal chicken dinner, bleeding to death from a deep neck wound caused by a single slash of the assassin’s blade.’’
The assassin, a Kashmiri man who goes by the name Shalimar the Clown, is Max’s driver and is intimately connected with his victim in other ways. The novel expands on their tangled history, along with the stories of Shalimar’s wife, Boonyi, and Max’s daughter, India. Rushdie smoothly ties these lives together, but the effort evokes lukewarm emotions at best.
Clearly this is a novel of ideas, designed to illustrate how what we do in this world continually ripples and ricochets until we become victims of our own actions. The book is also full of ironies, particularly in its view that the world’s never-ending cycle of violence stems from personal vendettas rather than large, philosophical differences. Jihadists in ’’Shalimar the Clown’’ don’t always see themselves in a battle against imposing cultural forces; sometimes they want revenge for the rape of their sisters or the destruction of their homes.
Ideas, especially cleverly executed ones, are important but should not come at the expense of characters. We learn about Max from a voice so detached from the ambassador that it’s difficult to feel excitement about his life or sorrow about his death. Little distinguishes the female characters in ’’Shalimar the Clown.’’ Rushdie’s women, shrewd and aggressive, tend to be the same.
The novel is at its best focusing on Shalimar and the history of his village, Pachigam. The author twists Hindu mythology, rereading and rewriting the endings of classic stories involving demon kings and tests of fidelity. Here, we watch a young performer transform into an assassin, see the spread of extremism and witness the utter destruction of a village, experiencing what Rushdie describes as ’’the bizarre sensation of living through a metaphor made real, ’’ where ’’this blind, inky night was the incontestable sign of the times.’’
In these passages, ’’Shalimar the Clown’’ projects a messy parallel of our modern world, where religious disputes revolve around beards, a country’s army uses sexual assault to demoralize a population, and victims in the middle of violence find it impossible to tell whether government security forces or rebellious militants are the worse enemy.