Myth, too, is incorporated into the rich texture. Rushdie himself points out that Boonyi is the legendary Indian heroine Sita, kidnapped by Ravan (Max), while Shalimar is Ram, fighting to win her back, albeit under the guise of a modern warrior for Kashmiri liberation. But contemporary life, Rushdie sadly observes, can't mirror ancient myths except bitterly.
I became convinced of the this book's strength while reading its fourth section. It's an impassioned, horrified account-in-miniature of recent Kashmiri history, told via dramatic episodes that together illuminate the whole Afghani-Pakistani-Kashmiri-Indian agony. Here Rushdie's usual resourceful play-fulness breaks down -- notably in a rhetorical, frenzied diatribe against Indian inaction following the expulsion of Kashmiri Hindus, then in a lethally dead-pan account of the suffering of all Kashmiris under India's emergency regulations and extra-judicial "crackdowns."
As always with Rushdie, there are many styles in this book. The diplomatic sections about Ophuls sometimes read like John le Carre, the American ones like Philip Roth, the accounts of savage killings in Kashmir like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Even so, and despite all this stylistic versatility, what is unambiguously at this novel's heart is a plea for a desecrated, brutalized Kashmir.
The ending is excusably indulgent. With its jail-break and home-alone scariness, it seems to be written to satisfy an eventual Holly-wood treatment. This could be seen as putting into question Rushdie's essential seriousness, unambig-uously present elsewhere in the book, even though on a literary level it might be satiric of the media-manipulated perspectives of modern America. Nevertheless, a Hollywood film of this novel, with the publicity it would give to Kashmir's plight, could only be welcome.
This is a very memorable novel, full of literary grandeur, and as much a challenge to the world over the unresolved problem of Kashmir as sections of his earlier works were to other entrenched interests. The book's depiction of Islamic guerrilla training camps, incidentally, is just as intransigent as its condemnation elsewhere of India's military tactics. Salman Rushdie again proves himself both humane and stylistically resourceful (a true literary artist, in other words), and yet at the same time a voice for sanity that won't easily be silenced.
RSS