Rushdie’s new novel offers better-than-true take on fatwa years.
Old and new, truth and fiction converge in Salman Rushdie’s latest, a whimsical blockbuster of a novel
Once upon a time, there was a man who wrote a book about what it would mean to find a new way of thinking about God. After racking up no small measure of success, the man decided to reinterpret an ancient text. He was called a heretic. His books were burned, and he was forced into exile.
That man was the Spanish-Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (often called Averroës in the West), who in the very late 1100s dared to attempt to reconcile rational Aristotelian principles with the teachings of Islam. This month, the godless Ibn Rushd returns to a new kind of life, as a fictional character in Sir Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Two Years, Eight Months and 28 nights.
As the numerically inclined might guess from the title, Two Years riffs on the famous fable of 1001 Nights, but where no one knows who first imagined Scheherazade — the woman whose nightly stories tamed her murderous tyrant of a lover and staved off her own death in the process, this book shows the hand of its authors on every page; it’s classic Rushdie, surreal and thoughtful, mixing and match- ing real histories with impossible fantasy.
The novel begins with a short disquisition on jinn, magical creatures made either of smoke or fire, but never both, who live in an “upper world” distinct from our own, called Peristan or Fairyland. One of these creatures, Dunia, the lightning Princess of the jinn world, has come to earth and fallen in love with reason, with rational philosophy, by way of one man, you guessed it, Ibn Rushd. Their love produces children, and their children produce children, and 800 years after Rushd’s death, his and Dunia’s partially divine decedents are required to rally together to fight in the “War of the Worlds,” to preserve the human race against demigods who have since run amok.
When I suggest to Rushdie, reached by telephone at his home in New York, that Two Years has a fairy tale vibe, cut with a big splashy, explosion-heavy superhero movie franchise, he laughs. “I just thought that at some point, I have to go for it. If I’m suggesting that there’s going to be this supernatural conflict between these gigantic forces embodying reason and unreason and so on, I’ve got to actually make that battle ... look good. I’ve got to really go the whole hog. I hope Hollywood is listening, and I like that you said ‘franchise.’”
In interview, Rushdie is affable, laughing equally at my jokes and his own. He warms up when talking about his characters, the particular ways in which he is fond of each one in the new book. I can hear the sound of email alerts and incoming text messages over the line. Despite the fact of his frequent television appearances and occasional public lecture, despite knowing what he sounds like, his voice is softer than I was expecting, and I find myself surprised, as if I thought he would be all boom and no whisper.
Rushdie exists for many of us primarily as a big idea, a kind of living stand-in for the notion of liberty of expression. His decade of police protected hiding after the Iranian cleric and leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in 1989 made him as much a symbol as a man. In his last book, the thirdperson memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie chronicled his life both in and out of hiding, trying to reconcile the daily experience of being but one man under threat and the desire for universal freedom of expression.
In the memoir, Rushdie writes about his teenage discovery his father had assumed a new name and given it to him: Anis Rushdie was the son of Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, “a fine Old Delhi name,” but a cumbersome one to bear in a changing world. Anis chose the surname Rushdie because, his son writes, “he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time.”
Despite his publicly avowed atheism, I couldn’t help but wonder if Rushdie felt cos-micly linked to Rushd, fated to write about him. “When I was much younger, I never understood why my father had been so drawn to him,” he told me, “and then later I was drawn to him in the same way. After The Satanic Verses, I discovered these curious coincidences between his life and mine. He was exiled. His books got burned. All of that. So I thought, well, what a strange echo down the centuries,” he pauses. “And it just made him interesting to me.”
The twinned narratives (and the common nominative syllables) are hard to ignore, and even though Two Years features a man named after a pulp hero levitating 10 inches off the ground and extravagant, incorporeal orgies, it’s impossible not to feel the ticklish sense that there are more clues here to Rushdie’s interior experience of his alienation. The fiction, in my reading at least, feels truer somehow than the famous author’s starstudded memoir of exile and danger.
This is in no small part because of Dunia, the jinni creature whose love of the all-too-human thirst for knowledge propels the action. At the start of her love affair with a human philosopher, she emerges as a kind of anti-Scheherazade, insatiably demanding first sex and, failing that, stories from her elderly human lover. Unlike her literary predecessor, who a thousand years ago presaged Joan Didion by telling stories in order quite literally to live, Dunia emerges as a fantastical listener. Among her greatest divine talents is her abil- ity to put her ear on a person’s heart and know immediately everything it is they long for.
“Characteristically, my books come together kind of like jigsaw puzzles,” Rushdie says. “I have pieces of them and I don’t even initially know if they will all fit into the same book. And some of them fall out, of course, and the other bits come together. So yes, Ibn Rushd was one of the things I started with.” It wasn’t, he said, until he started writing Dunia that he could know where he was going. “When I understood Dunia, I understood how she unified the whole storyline. That’s the point at which the book really came together for me.”
His fondness for Dunia is as palpable as if she were a living and breathing relative. He takes a warm, even grandfatherly tone when her name is in his mouth. “I didn’t want to really have a Scheherazade character in the book because we’ve already got Scheherazade,” he explains. “But I wanted the kind of flavour of the story telling,” he says, he wanted to write a fairy tale in the age of reality television.
The everyday denizens of the earthly plane during Rushdie’s imagined war of the Gods live in a media saturated world. Side characters are voracious storytellers (one of them is the frequent guest of a hilariously fictionalized version of The Moth, called The Locusts), and the world is so corrupted that one magical infant (a Dunia descendent called the Storm Baby on account of the calamitously bad weather at the time of her birth) is caught up in an exploitative adoption scheme that aims to create a television show based on her divine talent for infecting corrupt people with a necrotic skin disease — a version of Honey Boo Boo imagined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“It’s the first time, really, in a novel, that I’ve tried to grapple with this new information age,” Rushdie tells me. “And how everybody in a way, is inhabiting this fictional space. This electronic space that doesn’t really exist, but everybody’s in there,” he says, thinking of Twitter, where he can often be found retweeting praise and blasting his haters, among other arenas of digital public discourse. “I feel a little lost, and a little excited by it, a little drawn to it and a little rejectionist of it. And I just thought that’s what makes it interesting to explore. Just dive in there and see what happens.”
What happens is magic, and lots of it. The novel is a delicious exercise in getting to have it both ways; while the central tension plays out as a philosophical argument about the impossibility of God’s existence, all these divine and imaginary creatures come to earth and muck around with our fragile human conceptions of reality. “Getting to have it both ways,” Rushdie tells me, “is one of the best reasons for writing fiction.” He’s not wrong.
Fiction requires a kind of faith, one that perhaps even the otherwise secular can readily access. The right to make up stories, even potentially dangerous ones, is one Rushdie can’t help but align himself with. The incredible, irony, of course, is that Rushdie’s life was altered because Ayatollah Khomeni, a dying but powerful man, believed so deeply in a dangerous story.
“God is something that human beings invented that got out of control,” Rushdie says. “There’s all this science fiction about people inventing computers that then become hostile to the people who created them. I think of God as an idea that was developed at a time where human beings understood much less about the world we’re in,” he explains. “And then God became a useful way of putting together a moral code, the commandments and so on, and now, speaking for myself, I don’t need God to explain the question of origin. And I don’t want God to determine what my commandments should be.” He takes a breath. “I find God to be an irrelevant idea. But on the other hand, there he is in the mid- dle of the room, completely out of control.”
At one point in Two Years, Dunia suggests to Ibn Rushd that, unlike, Scheherazade, he tells stories that may well do the opposite of extending his life. The invitation to read Rushdie’s autobiography into her observation is impossible to pass up. But without some underlying, even Kierkegaardian understanding of faith, reconciling a conviction in the power of language is impossible. When I ask him about how we can understand the grace that exists in the world without God, Rushdie considers his reply carefully, working out how to commit his belief in language into the very stuff he believes in: “My view is that everything is language. The way in which we name things becomes how we understand what the things are,” he says. “And so without language, there is only absurdity. Nothing has value. Language is what creates value. And language is what creates meaning. And there can be no ethics without language.
Nothing exists without language. It literally doesn’t exist, because you have to name it for it to have an existence. And so it’s one of the great magical aspects of literature, that you get to name the world.”
In Two Years, the mostly secular inhabitants of Rushdie’s imagined New York experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance, believing simultaneously that neither God nor monsters nor bottled genies could possibly exist, despite the magical terrible and miraculous happenings that Rushdie’s jinn inflict on the world. “Particularly in a time like this,” Rushdie says, speaking of the mostly nonfictional world we actually inhabit, “where the world is transforming at a great speed, and many of the old names, the old words, the old formulations seem not to apply any more, maybe it falls to writers to come up with new formulations, new ways of describing. Or at least to try to describe what they see as truthfully and accurately as they can.” It’s no small task. “By saying here’s what’s happening, you can hopefully, a little bit, help to shape the nature of the conversation, so that people have the right conversation about the right things. If language in the hands of writers has any kind of power, that’s what it is.”
That power is complex, of course, and it’s Rushdie’s blessing and curse to have it in spades. I’ve already told you that the new novel, filled as it is with superhuman feats and sentient wisps of smoke, feels truer to me than Rushdie’s non-fictional account of the time of the historic fatwa; fiction, it seems, is a better vehicle for painting an accurate portrait of absurdity, for opening up some parts of the world in order to rename them. It’s here, I suppose, that Rushdie is best able to use his power; after all, it’s where both he and his readers get to have it both ways.
God is something that human beings invented that got out of control