Fabulous happenings

Salman Rushdie asserts literature’s freedoms Geordie Williamson

Victory City

by Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 342 pp

Salman Rushdie has long inspired ambivalence among readers. His talent has never been seriously in question – witness the swift canonisation and enduring affection accorded his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – nor have his bona fides as a public intellectual who has stood against intolerance and cant, even under the threat of death. Yet his body of work has been marked by fictions that run the gamut from interestingly flawed to merely self-indulgent. Now comes his thirteenth adult novel – published in the wake of a brutal public attack by a fanatic nursing a decades-long grievance, which left the author blind in one eye and without the use of a hand – and it proves to be a triumph in every regard. It is as if Rushdie anticipated the threat of violence hanging over him was about to be realised and found courage and focus in that knowledge.

Victory City is a shrewdly constructed tale, ambitious in scope, written in prose that slips between registers with acrobatic litheness. Rarely has a narrative been so unillusioned in its world view, while refusing to relinquish its idealism. Never has Rushdie so successfully married imaginative play and considered political impulse.

The story it tells, of a young girl who is both blessed and cursed by a Hindu goddess with extraordinary longevity and magical powers – a woman of modest birth who grows a great city from a handful of seeds and then presides over its fortunes throughout two and half centuries – combines myth and contemporary concerns, literary experiment and folkloric plainness. The result is a book that makes the old doubts about Rushdie’s work seem petty and wrongheaded.

Just as poet Karthika Naïr’s recent collection Until the Lions rescued from the Mahabharata stories of those relegated to the margins of the original text, so, too, does Rushdie employ an idiosyncratic echoing of that South Asian epic to assert literature’s freedoms in a moment characterised by autocratic drift and rising illiberalism.

The novel’s framing device reinforces this sense of historical reclamation. Readers are told they hold the modern translation of a newly rediscovered text – an ‘immortal masterpiece’ known as the Jayaparajaya (‘Victory and Defeat’), composed in Sanskrit and stored in a clay pot, where it lay, unknown, for four and a half centuries in the ruins of an Indian temple complex. This verse chronicle tells the story of a city, Bisnaga (the ‘Victory City’ of the title), and its people. Bisnaga, we learn, produced a culture of improbable richness. It was a beacon of tolerance and openness in its time – a pre-Mughal empire which achieved not one but three golden ages. This almost-Utopia was lost to history, claims the translators, until now. Rushdie proceeds to relate Bisnaga’s extended efflorescence as a fiction embedded in the actual fabric of India’s past.

Pampa Kampana, purported author of the epic, is nine years old when her parents die. Her father, a simple potter, is killed during a one-sided battle that saw the destruction of the minor principality in which the family lived. Her mother immolates herself, along with all other women of their village, in ritual suicide following the conflict. The orphan girl is traumatised by these events, but also ennobled by them. A Goddess chooses her as a divine vessel and grants her powers, including an attenuated lifespan, in order that the girl might raise up a great city, and indeed an empire. Pampa does so in a series of swift, miraculous gestures, and the narrative that follows enters the lives of the kings and queens, courtesans and courtiers, astrologers and holy men, street vendors and Portuguese travellers who form its human fabric.

Rushdie, however, is alert to the ways in which pre-modern epics – oral in nature, characterised by repetition, bald coincidence, and what Vladimir Nabokov called ‘fatidic riffs’, in which everything happens in triplicate – can seem over-determined to present-day readers. Instead, he uses the device of the faux translation to brilliant effect. Yes, we are in a world of fabulous happenings – and Rushdie’s prose admits an Ovidian relish for transformation, rendering Bisnaga in unashamed technicolour – but the exegetes of the present keep interrupting the text, apologetically noting that their rendering is but a pale imitation of the original.

Under the cover of their admitted inferiority, Rushdie smuggles in language, concepts, and modes of thought that would have been alien to the chronicle’s author. So it is that a passage of exquisite, courtly prose is given texture by some ironic flourish, obliquely pointing to our political present – that, or a well-placed obscenity or reference to a gastric complaint.

Beyond this tactical bathos, Rushdie, through Pampa, envisions a society in which, if only briefly (and courting the forces of reaction when it does), equality between the sexes becomes settled fact; same-sex relationships are unblinkingly accepted; art, poetry, and music are valued as much as military valour; and religion is welcomed but kept at arm’s length from the state.

This ideal society falls, of course, though it rises again and again before its final dissolution. Such breadth of perspective would be impossible without Pampa’s multi-generational existence. What begins as a bit of playful magical realism takes on increasing emotional heft as the narrative proceeds. Hers becomes an intensely moving account of a life lived halfway between immortality and the tragic restrictions placed upon human life.

There is an eerie quality to the final sections of the novel, in which Pampa, wearying of her efforts and sensing that her city is set to fall, is blinded by her husband, the King, in a moment of madness. It is as this point that Pampa and her creator come to share an affliction. Both have created worlds using nothing but a kind of magic. And both have lived long enough to see their ideal vision snuffed out. Each has suffered defeat, certainly. Yet Pampa and her author remain equally adamant in their refusal to despair. g

Mysteries and motivations

Three new novels

Amarshmallow is a common confectionery, white and pink, made of gelatin, sugar, and water. We put them in hot chocolate, toast them over campfires. Marshmallow is also a plant, Althea officinalis, containing a jelly-like substance which has been used for medicinal purposes as far back as the time of Ancient Egypt. A marshmallow can also describe someone who is soft to a fault, even vulnerable. That there might be anything approaching complexity linked to this word is unlikely, but by the end of Victoria Hannan’s second novel, Marshmallow (Hachette, $29.99 pb, 292 pp), it is obvious that something as apparently innocuous as that confectionery and medicinal ingredient can have many implications; the intriguing title is an early indication that much will be going on, none of it straightforward.

Five close friends are approaching the first anniversary of a devastating event, what should be the third birthday of a child who has died. As this is clear upfront in the novel – as early as page fifteen – the mystery at the heart of the story is not that this happened, but how it happened and, more importantly, why not only the child’s parents but also the other three friends feel as implicated, indeed as guilty, as they do.

In contrast with Kokomo (2020), Hannan’s acclaimed first novel, Marshmallow is a slow burn. Readers who relished the former’s audacious beginning may need to be more patient as the author gradually folds together the intersecting lives of her characters and begins to scatter hints regarding the story’s central crisis. Softened, too, is the sharp wit which, while exhilarating in that first novel, might have been hard to sustain, and risk sounding facile. Set over two days and tightly structured, Marshmallow offers a somewhat more restrained tone and is the better for it. In any case, the subject matter here demands a sober approach.

The key event, the one brief but crucial action that everything else leans towards, which is in the back, middle, and front of the minds of the characters as they go about their respective business, is revealed perfectly (if that is the right word for such a tragedy) about three-quarters of the way through. We all know that people grieve in different ways, and Hannan confronts these miseries head on. For instance, Annie, the mother of the dead boy, is uprooting her beloved front garden the day before his birthday anniversary; the father, Nathan, is off in his own world, addicted to online card games and avoiding work, as well as handling the selfish cold grief of his materialistic parents. Neither is capable of speaking their child’s name, for obvious reasons, and it is not articulated until late in the novel. ‘Toby,’ Annie finally says, ‘I’m going to make Toby a birthday breakfast.’ It is a heartbreaking moment.

But why should the novel commence not with the parents but with a friend? We meet Al as he is gripped by a Friday morning panic attack anticipating the next day, which ‘would be a year since it happened’. Consumed with anxiety, he obsessively revisits the death of a friend when he was a teenager, then googles news reports of the recent incident. Distanced from his partner, Claire, who is secretly considering accepting a new job in another city, Al is a consummate emotional mess, but as the past unfolds via backstory, it becomes clear why.

Why too should the one remaining friend who was there on the day of the incident, Ev, be the most supportive, practical, and functional of the group? Especially when on the surface she feels the most responsible for the death of the child?

The answer is that there is no ‘how to’ book, brochure, or set of rules for grief, especially when it comes to losing a child. There are no correct words. No script. One of my litmus tests for a good novel is that I learn something yet never suspect the author is trying to instruct me. The great gift of this thoughtful, tender, and moving novel is to expose the maddening emotional effect of suffering, and the illogical, individual, and thus unique way people deal with their common experience of grief. The next time I consume a marshmallow I will pause and reflect on this.

Comparisons may be odious, but here they are unavoidable given the brief. So, by contrast, while Kira McPherson’s first novel, Higher Education (Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 323 pp), offers a promising idea, problems of style and structure occur from the start. The protagonist Sam is a law student, struggling with her independence, her sexuality, and her family. So far so good – the coming-of-age narrative is always ripe for exploitation. While academically a high achiever, Sam also feels constrained by her suburban working-class background and thus pursues a mentorship with a woman from a different class, understanding that this will validate her choices, possibly even propel her into insider status in the legal world.

Though promoted as ‘deeply funny’, Higher Education is mostly deadly serious, distinguished by a combination of overthinking as well as limitations of thought. The former is demonstrated in overlong scenes, for example tutorial sessions that might have been intellectually engaging in real life but on the page are the kiss of death, or intense scrutiny of interactions that simply try too hard; the latter is seen in the consistently short sentences and short paragraphs that prohibit the development of an idea.

Even without the unaffected authority of Marshmallow as a benchmark, Higher Education reads clunkily. The extreme brevity of sentences and paragraphs is exacerbated when the present tense of the main narrative kicks in. This is a shame because there are treasures here, flashes of insight within the unnecessarily detailed scenes and exhausting blow-by-blow dialogue. For instance, the complex dynamics of Sam, her legal mentor, Julia, and her husband, Anselm, are wryly noted: ‘Something that felt unknowable to Sam becomes clear … Anselm and Julia can perform their relationship for her, and she can change it through the act of observation.’ The novel also provides a lively and engaging domestic account of Sam’s family, with her menacing stepfather in particular depicted with great conviction.

My first reading of Laura McPhee-Browne’s Little Plum (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 256 pp) was quick and I admit to returning to it reluctantly. I am not an antipresent-tense crusader by any means, but here a deflated style adds nothing to a lean story. The protagonist, Coral, has a destiny defined by her name – her mother is called Topaz, her grandmother Beryl, her best friend Amber – and the story involves a gemstone as a symbolic token. A reporter for a community newspaper, Coral meets Jasper (yes) while on assignment at a crime scene. Soon Coral is pregnant and decides not to inform Jasper or to see him again, yet it is never indicated why she quickly flips from attraction to rejection.

The bulk of the novel tracks the pregnancy with Coral’s curiosity about the creature growing inside her, the ‘little plum’ (provided by an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Hansel and Gretel’), mixed with emotional indifference. Motivations remain unexamined, access to the characters’ interior lives is limited, actions are told rather than shown, distancing us from the story, and while Coral is anxious and naïve, this does not explain the childlike voice of the prose. Towards the end, when a nurse tells Coral her baby is a boy, she ‘doesn’t know what this means’. But she names the baby Flint, presumably tying up the novel’s mineral theme. I was puzzled too. g

Debra Adelaide has published eighteen books, including novels, short fiction, and essays, the most recent of which is The Innocent Reader (2019).