Rushdie pits reason, religion
Salman Rushdie’s new effort. Some readers, though, may find the award-winning writer’s tongue-in-cheek satire more than a tad tiresome.
Rushdie’s title adds up to the one thousand and one taletelling nights Scherezade needed to stave off her own fearful fate. It worked for her, but it may or may not work here. Magic realism, after all, is an acquired taste.
Rushdie’s highly imaginative and curious tale takes the well-worn “willing suspension of disbelief” dictum to another level. Consider the plot: A thousand years hence, Rushdie’s narrator looks back to the mid 21st century and reflects on a tear in the veil which separates the everyday human world from the forces (or spirits) which lie without. The barrier, which has divided the two worlds, has been breached and strange things have begun to happen. The otherworldly jinn, malevolent or otherwise, are now free to criss-cross time and space and to meddle, should they wish, in human affairs, “to trouble and to bless mankind.”
Rushdie’s chronicle unfolds after a severe storm hits New York City, the fissure occurs, and the bizarre becomes the norm: a graphic novelist wakes in the night to find a weird creature in his bedroom, one which resembles one of his own comic book heroes; a gardener levitates; a nuclear reactor collapses; a baby girl, abandoned in the mayor’s office, is able to identify corruption, marking the guilty with boils and blemishes, lightning bolts from fingertips; a Romanian woman lays eggs; the ghosts of two long-dead philosophers come to life and take up their former debates.
The astonished humans, unbeknownst to them, are descended from the jinn, capricious mischief makers. The jinn are the offspring and countless descendants of Dunia, a princess of the hidden world (Fairyland) who has had, over centuries, great sympathy for feckless humans. In the 12th century, in Moorish Spain, she had mated with a human, Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd, an Aristotelian thinker who believed faith and reason might manage to coexist. According to Ibn Rushd, rational thinking “may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.”
As the story progresses, Rushdie pits the claims of reason against the forces of ignorance, the possibility of good versus the reality of evil, of good jinn (Dunia) versus bad jinn, thinly disguised here as stand-ins for such up-to-date evildoers as the Taliban and ISIS.
A War of the Worlds, the book proposes, was thus ignited in the late 21st century, a war which involved a clash of ideas, a tension between secular thought and blind superstition, a confrontation in which Rushdie, with a good degree of expertise, challenges conventional wisdom. “The human race became the battleground for the struggle between the bright and the dark. And it must be said, on account of the essentially anarchic nature of the jinn, between brightness and brightness, and the dark and the dark.” Rushdie builds his tale around the unlikely circumstance of Dunia falling in love with a man of reason and of the inter-generational spinoffs of their union. The children born to them, now able to penetrate the human world, may lead in the end to human emergence from an age of religious adolescence. A thousand and one nights becomes a time of great upheaval, a time in which traditional beliefs are not only questioned, but abandoned.
Some readers will find Rushdie’s voyage through time and space a gratifying romp, while others may see his brisk, bawdy tale both confusing and irksome. An in-between opinion will be hard to come by.