Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight nights by Salman Rushdie - review

Verbal virtuosity that lacks the human touch, says Ian Thomson
Circumstantial pomp: Salman Rushdie
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Ian Thomson27 August 2015

Salman Rushdie’s best known novel, The Satanic Verses, published in 1989, managed to offend devout Muslims through its perceived mockery of Islam. While the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie for blasphemy was outrageous, it was only a shame that such an “indifferent” work of literature should have put so many innocent lives at risk, said Roald Dahl.

Dahl was not the only one to express misgivings at the time. John le Carré was another who seemed sceptical of Rushdies’s literary abilities — “It seems to me he has nothing more to prove than his own insensitivity.”

Rushdie’s new, 12th novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, will not convince his detractors. It offers a familiar impasto of postmodernist self-reflexive preening, showy erudition and wordy philosophical humour. Based loosely on the Arabic folk tales contained in One Thousand and One Nights, the novel unfolds in a New York of the near future during the aftermath of a cataclysmic storm.

Strange things start happening in the storm’s wake. A 60-year-old landscape architect called Geronimo discovers to his alarm that his feet no longer touch the ground. A baby girl found abandoned in the mayor’s office has a seer-like ability to detect political corruption. How? Why? (Among the other, strenuously outlandish creations is an animal-feed impresario called Sanford Bliss, who keeps a great vault-like library full of portraits of himself.) What these New Yorkers have in common, bizarrely, is a manifest absence of earlobes. Unknown to themselves, the “lobeless” ones are the descendants of Islamic supernatural genie-creatures known as jinn.

In pages of sub-Tolkien jibber-jabber, we learn how a jinn princess called Dunia fell in love with a mortal man many moons ago and sired an improbably large number of mystically-empowered children by him. (The jinn absolutely love sex.)

Geronimo and the other spawn of Dunia’s far-flung offspring hover like tutelary spirits over the New York of Rushdie’s fantasia, causing great mischief. Religious gangs roam the city while a “new age of the irrational” dawns. The veil between the jinn’s and the human’s world has unaccountably sundered; the mayhem will continue uninterrupted in the Big Apple for 1,001 nights.

At his best, Rushdie is a deviser of elaborate literary counterfeits and wickedly effective pastiche. Here, elements of Eastern mythology, pop culture and magical-realist fantasy merge in a gallimaufry of the goofy, fabulist and plain portentous (“History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.”) With its italicised passages of Islamic jinn lore and multiplicity of stories each contained within another like a “Chinese box”, the novel is of great formal brilliance but ultimately it’s a mere pomp of words.

By Rushdie’s own admission, his writing owes a great debt to the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino, whose magnificent Fifties novel trilogy Our Ancestors is referenced countless times here. Calvino, however, was a genius; clichés cling like grime to Rushdie’s prose (“hotly disputed”, “star potential”), and much of the description has a clunky quality (“His discovery that her physical ardour could be quelled by narrative had provided some relief”).

The price Rushdie pays for verbal and technical virtuosity is a lack of human involvement. For all its razzamataz, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights never really takes flight. Certainly, it is a pale shadow of what remains Rushdie’s sole great book: the 1981 Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children. Beneath the fearsome erudition and pyrotechnic world-play, we are left with a work of negligible import, that smells too strongly of the lamp and things intellectual. One would be better employed re-reading the Koran.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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