In Salman Rushdie’s uneasy new novel, 55-year-old Malik Solanka, “retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker”, takes refuge in New York after leaving his wife and three-year-old son in London. The United States for once, though, is not seen primarily as a place of second chances, of beginning again, even if in the course of the book Solanka is re-energised and reconciled to his past.
Solanka wants “to erase himself. To be free of attachment.” To plunge into the maelstrom of Gotham, if that is the only way to be free of his demons. His plunge into the maelstrom takes the form of long walks from a spacious Upper West Side sublet. Sometimes after night-time excursions fuelled by drink he wakes up with a blank memory. When it turns out that the murders of rich young women coincide with these nights off the record, he worries that he may be the killer.
The crime-story element is there to lend vitality to what in its early stages is a faltering narrative, made up of doldrums and little forward lurches, but such blood transfusions of genre have a way of bringing complications of their own.
No sooner is lurid material introduced than it is distanced, aestheticised. Granted, Solanka is a former academic, but when it emerges that the girls were scalped, it’s dismaying to read that “the scalp was a signifier of domination, and to remove it, to see such a relic as desirable, was to value the signifier above the signified”. Which would be wrong, I take it. The crime mystery has a solution of sorts, which could have been anticipated by a police force taking the outlandish step of checking telephone records.
Of course Solanka may be intended as a hollow man, whose Woody Allen routines are pointedly unfunny, whose insights are humdrum beneath the showiness of their phrasing: “If culture was the world’s new secularism, then its new religion was fame, and the industry — or better, the church — of celebrity would give meaningful work to a new ecclesia, a proselytising mission designed to conquer this new frontier, building its glitzy celluloid vehicles and its cathode-ray rockets, developing new fuels out of gossip, flying the Chosen Ones to the stars.”
Elsewhere, though, Rushdie shows a definite tenderness towards his creature, stepping in at an early stage to establish that Solanka “was by no means a heartless man”. Even on the evening that ended with him holding a carving knife over the sleeping bodies of his wife and child, it would have been possible for him, had things gone a little differently, to deliver lovemaking “up to the old high standard”.
Rushdie does everything in his power to make this seem graver than the standard midlife crisis — not a desertion but an act of self-sacrifice, not destroying the family but actually saving it from destruction. Yet midlife crisis seems an adequate description after all.
There’s necessarily a gap between this traumatised outsider and the city where he takes purgatorial refuge, but rather than bridge it Rushdie sets out to wear it down with the pounding of his rhetoric. The word “fury” makes a grand entrance on page 30: “Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy …” Thereafter “fury” is rarely off-stage, but without ever justifying its starring role: “In this dark bed the seeds of fury grow”, “Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave”, “the fury was in the air”, “The Furies hovered over Malik Solanka, over New York and America, and shrieked.”
Yet, as Solanka admits, the only war he had been in “was life itself, and life had been kind to him”. He has, for instance, no money worries, since one of his dolls (Little Brain, a sort of intellectual Tank Girl) has become, to his embarrassed richness, a much-merchandised icon.
There are secrets in Solanka’s past, but they underwrite the book’s hyperbole best before they are spelled out — as in this effectively syncopated passage: “This question of dollification and its. The matter of allowing oneself to be. Of having no choice but. Of the slavery of childhood when … Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand.”
Midlife crisis would be more sought-after if every fiftysomething man who leaves home could count on not one but two young beauties courting him, with no thought for his money. One of Solanka’s admirers, Mila, tall, green-eyed, with steeply slanting cheekbones, is an Internet entrepreneur who inspires him to devise a new range of puppets. The other, Neela, so perfectly beautiful that her presence triggers cascades of accidents, is an expatriate from Lilliput-Blefuscu in the South Pacific.
Solanka’s new puppets are partly inspired by Lilliput-Blefuscu, and in the novel’s magical-realist finale they come to exercise an influence of their own on the turmoil of that country. It’s the chapter in which he recounts the back-story of the Puppet Kings, though, eight pages of pure, confident fabulation, that is the highlight of an otherwise awkwardly managed novel.
While Solanka was at work on the back-story, we are told, “everything that happened to him in the city — every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream — fed his imagination …” Fury as a whole gives exactly the opposite impression, of a writer willing himself to produce a portrait of New York. Excessively mediated, basing most of its riffs and rants on television shows or the news, complete with postmodernist name-dropping (half-satirical, half-anxious), this is a portrait of the city that comes close to taking it at its own valuation.