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Sir Talk-A-Lot

Is it Rushdie's worst yet? Or is overblown fabulism out of fashion?

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Sir Talk-A-Lot
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So long trumpeted, Salman Rushdie's ninth book— a novel, as it is classified—threatens to be his worst yet. The Enchantress of Florence, his new book, is here, to be read and discussed, or at least skimmed through and talked about. But of all the novels he has written, there isn't another whose readability has been challenged quite as rigorously as this one.

The novel is "by a long chalk, the worst thing he has ever written", Peter Kemp writes in his review in The Sunday Times. "Fiendish tortures—agonising suspension from ropes, death by suffocation inside a slowly drying donkey skin—are shudderingly mentioned in it. But they are more than rivalled by the book's repertoire of excruciating effects. Merciless authorial garrulity is unleashed in chapter after chapter."

The story of Rushdie's long self-advertised Enchantress opens with a Florentine heading out for Akbar's court on a mysterious visit. Kemp writes that "long before the answers to these riddles are provided in the book's last pages, other questions are likely to have presented themselves rather more pressingly to any reader proceeding through this novel's farrago of curses, omens, potions, prophecies, aphrodisiac unguents, evil queens, sorceresses, irresistible beauties, love-struck despots, wise whores, jealous wives, wicked aunts, albino giants, phantoms, 'potato witches', magic mirrors, miraculous perfumes and telepathic bathwater. Prominent among these questions is why any author wishing to be taken seriously would put his name to such stuff."

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The customarily cautious Times Literary Supplement too speaks of a "heaped prose" that is a "shiny rattle". The novel, it says, "is a bravura entertainment, but one which is finally disappointing. In its attempt to encompass everything, it develops very little.... In the rush, many stories are sketched rather than told; no character is more than a suggestion, and no speech is individual to its speaker." Damning stuff to be spoken about an allegedly great novelist.

But the recent Rushdie does seem more acceptable if you do not regard him as a novelist at all; he is now an assumed visionary, delivering sermons in the guise of a story. He is the big name, out for a big subject with big ideas. He's out to overawe readers with cerebral exhibitions of holistic thought that dot the story as a continuing reminder of his constant elevation. And what you get to see is not that much vision either, but more Rushdie's need to have something visionary to show.

"Undoubtedly he has produced a long string of mediocre novels that are repetitive and uninspired," Rashmi Varma, who teaches English at Warwick University tells Outlook. "His last really good novel was The Moor's Last Sigh. His subsequent novels have shown sparks of greatness, but have not come together to create anything new or really exciting. In a sense, the middle or late Rushdie is burdened by the greatness and success of the early Rushdie."

Agrees prominent Indian literary critic Alok Rai: "There was a spectacular burst with Midnight's Children and Shame but after that it wasn't just a decline but a collapse. You wonder how a writer with his creative vivacity can now produce such bilge."

Fellow Indian writers are naturally less forthcoming, but as one of them put it, "Rushdie's recent books have been long and awful and this new novel doesn't sound any good."

Somewhere along the way, Rushdie collapsed from a writer to an exhibitionist with words. "Mr Rushdie ought to bear in mind that a novelist is at heart a storyteller, not a serial creator of self-delighting sentences," writes The Economist in its review. "Paragraph by paragraph, this is a carefully wrought and often exquisite book, but the overall effect is as rich and stultifying as a month-long diet of foie gras".

Once Salman Rushdie writes a book that spans matters cultural and intellectual between medieval Florence and the court of Akbar, it will have takers for the subject alone. And some of the early praise for his book has been just that. "East meets West with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks," The Guardian writes exuberantly, while pronouncing the book "a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments".

The novel is "a moving testament to what historians of the period have understood for some time now: the spirit of the Renaissance was not confined to Italy, and the Mughal, Ottoman and Persian courts were also part of the cultural and philosophical conversation of the time", Jerry Brotton writes in The Daily Telegraph. "It's about the clash of civilisations," says John Sutherland in the Financial Times. "What point is it making? That there is as much unclash as clash." But Sutherland finds that "the confluences in this novel make the point artistically".

But the Rushdie show now opens to a more divided reception than ever. Rushdie has never quite encountered such hostile response to his writing itself. "Penny-dreadful prose", Kemp calls it, "flaccid artificiality", and "guffawing facetiousness". Even The Guardian, still open to "Rushdian charm and extravagance" in this "brilliant, fascinating, generous novel", finds him "descending sometimes into facetiousness".

But some of Rushdie's 'fall' could be that the style he has adopted of late, and not just for this novel, is out of tune with the usual critical expectations. "My reading of his decline as a writer is not based on a sense that he is indulging in gimmick," says Varma. "In a curious sense, his writing is increasingly unfashionable in its ornate and over-embellished metaphors, allusions and turns of phrases—he certainly lacks the discipline and linguistic tautness that is now the in thing. In cricket, this would be called 'lack of form'."

It is the style now of the seer, the sayer. Not tuned to the times, not tailored to the characters. No doubt Rushdie intends that it should be so; what he has so persuasively allowed to be called magical realism must be free as fable, and liberated from all latitude and longitude. And so therefore must be its style. The style of the fable with a sense of the fabulous is intended of course; but that's a long way from saying it works. More and more, you get what can be classed only as the phoney-fabulous.

Embarrassingly, more than the subject the style is intended for, it's come to say only that this is a place that Rushdie wants for himself, a place where the signboard he has put up announces universality of reach, oneness of civilisations, and the power of the narrator to remind you of it. And for narrator, read Salman Rushdie, and only Salman Rushdie. One problem with that signboard, among many, is that it's not a particularly inviting one.

Rushdie's ideas, and they're now ideas draped vaguely around the form of the novel, may or may not be compelling, but they are synthetic to touch. He thrives now on the loyalty of a band with a sense of the progressive, almost a brand now of intellectual acceptance than a great read. More than any other writer, Rushdie's read not to be read, but to get talked about. If you haven't read another writer, it was choice; if you haven't read Rushdie, it's illiteracy. For too long now, a declared admiration of Rushdie has been our forged passport to literary standing.

In that, he still succeeds. The Rushdie talk is now into its new round. And between this book and the next we will have no doubt another Rushdie affair to keep us going.

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