Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

The highlight of my reading year in 1980, I remember clearly, was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which he tells of the partition of India by the British and the catastrophic effects on the people, divided as they were by tribe, religion and race. The narrative of Midnight's Children scooted along, whirled, sparkled and wonderfully entertained as it looked at the impact of power politics and colonialism on the people. For me, Rushdie has never managed to pull that off again.

I couldn't finish The Satanic Verses even though it earned Rushdie a fatwa, a death sentence, from Ayatollah Khomeini. And honestly I finished Shalimar the Clown only because I had to to complete this review.

It's a big sprawling novel set in Kashmir, California and Europe. The main characters interact in cynical and poisonous relationships from which arises an implausible motive for the making of an international terrorist.

First comes India, the daughter of Max Ophuls. Ophuls, an American diplomat of European Jewish origin, is so superlative in the arts of perception, diplomacy, business and the seduction of beautiful women that he grows beyond credibility. Indeed, most of the characters here have various qualities that are unsurpassed, are so inflated by superlatives, they float away into the ether of unreality.

The story opens with the murder of Ophuls by Shalimar and then it goes back to explain that action was sparked by the seduction by Ophuls of Boonyi, Shalimar's beautiful, predator wife. Or rather, she seduced Shalimar to marry him, was quickly petulantly bored by Kashmir, and so seduced Ophuls to secure her flight from Kashmir. Shalimar wreaks his revenge.

Rushdie was born a Muslim in Kashmir and he gives a sure-handed and useful account here of the Kashmir conflict, of the swift change to sectarianism and escalating terrorism wrought by political leaders on a region which had traditionally seen diverse religious groups live together with some unease but a large degree of peace and interdependence.

Indeed, the parts of the story rooted in Kashmir when India and Pakistan are fighting over it are the richest and most readable, but the narrative is still damaged by flatulence, by excessive pointillistic detail. The character Rushdie gets absolutely right, though, someone at once caricatured but grounded, is the local Army commander Colonel (later General) Hammirdev Kachhwaha, as comic a character as you will find in contemporary fiction.

So, a disappointing novel that makes me wonder if Rushdie can ever do again what he once did so brilliantly.

* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.