Read it in spare time

Every one has off-days and Fury is Rushdie's day off. Too autobiographical and without the narrative energy typical of him, what we get is jaded Rushdie - the master sans the magic, says HASAN SUROOR.

FOR London's literary pack which decides who is the flavour of the season, Salman Rushdie has, for long, been fair game - a result of mutual hostilities between a high-strung writer who doesn't work hard enough at popular ratings, and a crowd which needs to be humoured and tickled. His exclusion from the Booker's singularly unspectacular longlist shows how deep Rushdie- scepticism runs, and why he fled to New York three years ago calling London too "bitchy".

It is in this climate that his new novel Fury has arrived and been duly trashed. He has still a few friends on the review circuit - I have been able to count two - but their voices have been drowned in a chorus of brutish notices telling Rushdie to get out of the premier league. Exit Mr Rushdie; your time is up. One reviewer said Rushdie had "long been over-rated as a novelist, but after three major duds, it must be time for his relegation from the premier league." At a BBC discussion, all of the three panellists, including the moderator, dismissed Fury as a rotten egg. The leading Irish critic Tom Paulin, invoking Mary Macarthy's famous jibe at Lillian Helman, said every word in Fury including "and" and "the" was a cliche. Rushdie, he said, had been "murdering English language for years" and was now on to mocking his own invention - Indian English.

So, is Fury really that bad? There is no point pretending that it is a great book and only the brave among Rushdie's admirers will have the courage to defend Fury without blushing. Yes, for old time's sake you can rationalise and say it happens to the greatest of writers. They all have their off-days, and Fury is Rushdie's day off. Or, like Boyd Tonkin in The Independent, you can insist that you would "rather read one page of flawed Rushdie than 1,000 of the soporific pap that passes for literary fiction in Britain today", but does it alter the truth, change the fact that on this occasion Rushdie is "flawed"? It is arguably his weakest novel-a tired reworking of his own midlife crisis so thinly disguised that if his real life were a film, Fury would be a poor frame-by-frame remake - a "Bombay-ia" copy that Rushdie - the boy from Bombay who still pines for the "forbidden city" - must be only too familiar with.

The problem is not that Fury is autobiographical - which novel is not? - but that it is only that, and nothing else. It is so unabashedly close to the bone that it could pass as his fictionalised CV with Rushdie replaced by a fiftysomething Prof. Malik Solanka who, like him, is a Cambridge man down to King's College. Who, like him, achieves celebritydom on the strength of ideas which result in his creating a series of cerebral dolls that go on to take a life of their own with one doll nearly doing to him what Satanic Verses actually did to Rushdie. Who, like Rushdie, decides to desert his family and leave London to start a new life in New York. And who, like Rushdie, falls head over heels for a staggering beauty of Indian origin - owner of such magnetic attraction that, according to both Prof. Solanka and Rushdie, she has had Manhattan motorists go berserk just by being there. Rushdie's three failed marriages and his current companion find an echo in Prof. Solanka's two failed marriages and his current companion. Rushdie's Padma Lakshmi (to whom the novel is dedicated) equals Prof. Solanka's Neela Mahendra. One can go on stacking up the parallels between Rushdie and his protagonist - right down to the nostalgia for the pre-Mumbai Bombay and the memories of "a building called Noor Ville on Methwold's Estate off Warden Road", Rushdie's boyhood address.

Prof. Solanka is so much a Rushdie-double that he is all at sea when his creator lets him go. Quite inexplicably, he lapses into moments of amnesia which leave him suspecting his own actions during the "blackouts" because it so happens that after each blackout there is a murder. "...three failures of nocturnal memory, three dead women." Is he the serial killer? A latter-day Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde? Even as that is preying on his mind, we find him playing little erotic games with a woman half his age - daughter of a political martyr from the Balkans who might or might not suffer from father fixation. But just when things begin to get interesting, he is struck by Neela Mahendra "the most beautiful Indian woman - the most beautiful woman - he had ever seen". And, for both, it is love at first sight. Strange things follow in its wake and, a few chapters later, they find themselves caught up in a political upheaval on an Indian Ocean island, Lilliput-Blefuscu, that has an uncanny resemblance to Fiji. Neela Mahendra who goes to Lilliput-Blefuscu as an undercover television journalist gets so deeply sucked into what is going on there that she is trapped for good, though she does manage to get Prof. Solanka and her TV crew out.

Rushdie has always been a story-teller rather than a story writer - someone who could keep you awake night after night with the way he teased out a wafer-thin plot. In Fury, the raconteur is missing and that's what makes it so infuriatingly disappointing. What we have here is a jaded Rushdie - the master sans the magic. He huffs and puffs, tries to break into a trot but soon starts gasping for breath. There are flashes of old Rushdie as in his reflections on the "new" post-industrial Western society with its talk of "start-ups, IPOs, interactivity" and where the "future was a casino, and everyone was gambling and everyone expected to win"; or when he has a shy at the "two great industries of the future" - culture and fame ("if culture was the world's new secularism, then its new religion was fame" and "you could be famous for anything nowadays..."). Some of us - the more old- fashioned - would share Rushdie's longing for a less hectic life and more stable relationships. What the pressures of a success- driven modern life are doing is that "when one day we shake our heads as if waking from a reverie, our friends have become strangers and can't be retrieved."

As always Rushdie is remarkably contemporary, one eye always cocked at the oddities (or are they the norm?) of modern society with its home-sick expats seething with contempt for the very hand that feeds them; high-flier academics with pat theories; maverick radicals plotting power games; and fire-spewing fundamentalists certain in the knowledge that "Islam will cleanse this street of godless m***** bad drivers... Islam will purify this whole city of... pimp assholes... and the victorious jihad will crush your balls in its unforgiving fist", as Ali Majnu, a young taxi driver in New York screams at anyone who cares to listen. For all its weaknesses, it is its contemporaneity that, in the end, redeems Fury somewhat; and you can still read it if you are not watching the telly, that is.

Fury, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Cape, hardback, £16.99; distributed in India by Rupa and Co., p., Rs. 395.

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