So I naturally gravitated towards Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights by Salman Rushdie. (Hamish Hamilton), the latest book by the Master, as befits a diehard fan and one who has avidly read all the pre-release breathless prose about how Rushdie had tweaked the ancient and eternally fascinating tale of One Thousand and One Nights told by the alluring Scheherazade. In this book, he has a jinnia named Dunia, a skinny rocker chick type as the pivot of the story in more ways than one and my first thought was this Scheherazade model isn’t as enticing, as alluring as the original, and then the other thoughts came flooding in as I read the book from cover to cover. Has the Master lost his touch? Have I finally got over the Master? Why is he telling the same old same old tale yet again and using the same devices too? Why must the catastrophic, the calamitous, the battle of good versus evil be fought by black- hearted jinns that is if they have hearts at all, and jinns with some semblance of human characteristics in them? Is Rushdie implying that genies with human flaws are the eventual redeemers of humanity? That what will save us in the end is our resilience?
The strangest thing is that the reader finds herself smack in the centre of things, in the vortex of the volcano right at the start of the novel, there is love, there is war, there is a lot of sex but mostly off the page, there is terrorism and sardonic humour, there is banning; however, the book was like a verbal barrage, it was a whirligig of words that flowed, surged, spurted, made frills of froth, rushed, gushed, there were almost as many characters as there were words, and the story went round and round the merry- go- round. It seemed the story was built around the flood of words which is why it is such a weak tale perhaps, then again there were words that showed the old flash of steel, words like bizarrities, misfittery, descriptions of porcupines prickling down highways and spring springing, moonlight lying uneasily on the great river, and even though irony melds with fantasy, even though the author`s brief divergence from the tale at hand to talk on matters of reason, religion, and a new take on the beginning of Time, were all pertinent, in the end it all became just a bit tiresome.
Oh, and the magic also seems to have lost its er, magic effect but loved the ending, the picture of a peaceful, orderly world peopled with peaceful, orderly beings.
The reviewer`s only takeaway was this line: the godly are God`s worst advocates.
Sheila Kumar is an independent writer and editor, as well as author of a collection of short stories titled Kith and Kin (Rupa Publications).