Early on in Shalimar the Clown, a character states the novel’s theme–in that unstable half-authorial voice that seems increasingly to speak through Rushdie’s principal characters in his recent fiction, making them all seem part of some cosmic personality:Įverywhere was now a part of everywhere else. But the sprawling, generalizing, connection-drawing Rushdie of The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet and especially the barely readable Fury imposes a presumptuous clarity on experience. He has such a wonderful fictionalizing mind, and Midnight’s Children and Shame–in particular Shame, his best novel, with its deft fusion of political parable and psychological intimacy–are beautifully written books, whose plentiful meanings are impossible to formulate outside the tales in which they are embodied. It has almost become a sadness to review a novel by Rushdie. And then they venture to say, with varying degrees of delicacy, that Rushdie himself has begun to see his path through life in similarly fantastical terms, with disappointing artistic consequences. The paradise of early achievement, the hubristic fall, redemption–such an arc is the grandiose way some people like to describe Rushdie’s journey, which they also like to suggest mirrors the mythic trajectories of his novels. Then they recount Ayatollah Khomeini’s calls for the novelist’s assassination as punishment for the latter’s disrespect toward Islam in the novel The Satanic Verses, and Rushdie’s years in hiding, and his anger and bitterness, and the lifting of Khomeini’s fatwa, and Rushdie’s re-emergence.

They praise his eclectic fabulizing and invoke the novels Midnight’s Children and Shame as Edenic perfections of Rushdie’s storytelling gifts. They note his trademark style of interweaving ancient myth, old story and contemporary incident. Reviewers often begin by declaring Rushdie’s genius as a teller of flamboyant tales. By now, there is something ritualistic about reviewing a novel by Salman Rushdie.

Shalimar rushdie