Why, oh why, did Salman Rushdie, in his new novel, “Shalimar the Clown” (Random House; $25.95), call one of his major characters Maximilian Ophuls? Max Ophuls is a highly distinctive name, well known to movie lovers as that of a German-born actor and stage director who, beginning in 1930, directed films in Germany, France, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, and, after 1946, the United States. Readers of this review will be spared, as the reviewer was not, the maddening exercise of trying to overlay Rushdie’s Ophuls with the historical one. The two have no connection save the name and a peripatetic life, including a period of Los Angeles residence and a child who becomes a maker of documentary films—the real Ophuls’s son, Marcel, made “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and the fictional Ophuls’s daughter, first called India and then called Kashmira, is the auteur of “Camino Real,” a filmed trip up the West Coast along the mission-planting trail taken by Fray Junípero Serra in the seventeen-seventies. The real Ophuls was born in 1902 in Saarbrücken, near the French border in the Saar region of Germany, and died in Hamburg in 1957, after an adult life spent entirely in theatrical precincts, whereas Rushdie’s imaginary Ophuls is born around 1911 in the French city of Strasbourg and dies in Los Angeles in 1991, after distinguishing himself as the United States Ambassador to India from 1965 to 1967 and afterward as the “U.S. counterterrorism chief.” His daughter is told, “Your father served his country in some hot zones, he swam for America through some pretty muddy water.”
Why has Rushdie attached a gaudy celebrity name to a different sort of celebrity, preventing the Ambassador from coming into sharp, living focus on his own? It is partly, perhaps, characteristic Rushdiean overflow. His novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush, each wave topped with foam, each paragraph luxurious and delicious, but the net effect perilously close to stultification. His prose hops with dropped names, compulsive puns, learned allusions, winks at the reader, and repeated bows to popular culture. His plots proceed by verbal connection and elaboration as much as by character interaction. This story begins and ends in Los Angeles, so angels are on the author’s mind, as two not unusually overloaded sentences demonstrate:
He [Fray Juan Crespi, in 1769] named the Los Angeles River after the angels of Assisi and their holy mistress and twelve years later, when a new settlement was established here, it took its title from the river’s full name, becoming El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Very Small Plot of Land. But the City of Angels now stood on a Very Large Plot of Land Indeed, thought India Ophuls, and those who dwelt there needed mightier protectors than they had been given, A-list, A-team angels, angels familiar with the violence and disorder of giant cities, butt-kicking Angeleno angels, not the small-time, underpowered, effeminate, hello-birds-hello-sky, love-and-peace, sissy-Assisi kind.
Verbal hyperactivity of the sissy-Assisi sort nudges the hip reader on page after page: “appalled by his charm, by the erotic proximity of his snappy crackle of power”; “as graceful in his movement as the incomparable Max”; “The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls”; “He went into his blighted apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty, and ceased upon the midnight with no pain.” That last pawky phrase is, of course, John Keats talking, in “Ode to a Nightingale.” James Joyce and T. S. Eliot established brainy allusions as part of modernity’s literary texture, but at the risk of making the author’s brain the most vital presence on the page.
“A plague on both your houses” is one of the novel’s two epigraphs. A studied duality gives structure to its teeming details. It sketches the ruination of two natural paradises, California and Kashmir—the former by “human bloat” in the shape of trailer parks and “the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes” and “the less-pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl . . . the dirty underbelly of paradise,” and the latter by Islamic uprising and the matched savagery of the insurgency’s attempted suppression by the government of India. Another doubling, posing the conflict of the extremes within human nature, is expressed in terms of ancient Asian myth:
There were nine grabbers in the cosmos, Surya the Sun, Soma the Moon, Budha the Mercury, Mangal the Mars, Shukra the Venus, Brihaspati the Jupiter, Shani the Saturn, and Rahu and Ketu, the two shadow planets. The shadow planets actually existed without actually existing. They were heavenly bodies without bodies. . . . “The shadow planets act upon us from a distance and focus our minds upon our instincts. Rahu is the exaggerator the intensifier! Ketu is the blocker the suppressor! The dance of the shadow planets is the dance of the struggle within us.”
The speaker in quotation marks is pandit Pyarelal Kaul, a philosophy-minded Hindu widower, with a gift for cookery, who lives in the “second-best dwelling” in the Kashmiri village of Pachigam; at the opposite end of the village lives Abdullah Noman, the village’s Muslim headman, “the sarpanch, who held them all in the palm of his hand.” When, as in the Shakespeare play that calls down “a plague on both your houses,” the offspring of the two families, not quite fourteen, fall in love and make love, the village council, the five-man panchayat, unanimously comes to a surprising decision: let them marry. “The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure . . . but they were good children, as everybody knew.” Abdullah invokes “Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences.” So beautiful Boonyi Kaul, “dark as a secret, bright as happiness,” and Shalimar Noman, “the most beautiful boy in the world,” who is called “the clown,” because he plays the comic tightrope walker in “the traditional entertainments known as bhand panther or clown stories,” marry in a blithely mixed Hindu-Muslim ceremony.
But at the time of this auspicious outcome, in the early sixties, Kashmiriyat was already under siege. The subcontinental Partition of 1947 had left this northern princely state itself divided, between an Azad region controlled by Pakistan and a larger region uneasily under Delhi’s rule. Kashmir had been the idyllic summer haven of the British colonials, who, in 1846, installed a Hindu ruler over a population that, after centuries of Mughal rule, was predominantly Muslim. The village tolerance and Hindu-Muslim coexistence that Gandhi had hoped would prevail in postcolonial India gave way, in Kashmir, to sectarian battles, fitfully halted by United Nations-arranged ceasefires, and to terrorism aligned with global Islam.
The novel’s knowledgeable details of military and political action, and its harrowing depictions of atrocity and counteratrocity, are apt to be news to American readers, for whom, in six decades that headlined Eastern Europe, Berlin, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East, Kashmir has been off the front page. But to Rushdie it has been a grievous personal matter. “Shalimar the Clown” is dedicated “in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents.” Pachigam and its elders, and their dynamic and dauntless wives, and the rich array of supporting performers, and the sensations of a childhood spent in the high meadows and narrow valleys, among clear lakes and rivers of snowmelt, under the aspect of shining glaciers and timeless traditions, are evoked with an affection bestowed on few other of the novel’s venues. Rushdie feels the loss of the old Kashmir so keenly that he propels his ill-named Ambassador, the usually cool and laconic Maximilian Ophuls, into uttering “a series of high-flown locutions” in a television interview, culminating in the cri de coeur “In Kashmir it is paradise itself that is falling; heaven on earth is being transformed into a living hell.”
Rushdie as a literary performer suffers, I think, from being not just an author but a cause célèbre and a free-speech martyr, thanks to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in the wake of “The Satanic Verses” (1988), a playful work that precipitated riots in India and Pakistan, and gave American and English publishers and booksellers an early taste of heightened security. The fatwa, which invited any good Muslim to kill Rushdie, was withdrawn in 1998, but a decade of living in hiding deepened this previously gregarious author’s expertise on two subjects: celebrity and human cruelty. His fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music predated the fatwa, and gives his fiction a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel. The reader squirms, a bit, at the movie-star trappings with which Rushdie cossets India Ophuls’s fabulous long-legged beauty: a horde of unsatisfactory suitors, conditioning routines that include “weekly boxing sessions at Jimmy Fish’s boxing club on Santa Monica and Vine where Tyson and Christy Martin were known to work out,” her shooting practice “out in the desert at 29 Palms,” her driving off to celebrate her birthday in her father’s DeLorean, “a silver luxury speedmobile with batwing doors.” And does her father, in his farewell fling with the opposite sex, have to settle on an Indian woman, “the color of scorched earth,” who turns out to be Zainab Azam, the subcontinent’s “hottest box-office star . . . a sex goddess such as the Indian cinema had never seen”? Wouldn’t the second-hottest box-office star have done as well, and been more plausible than such a lofty winner, in this poor world of losers stuck in less-pleasantvilles? Rushdie himself well knows, after all, what a cumbersome handicap celebrity can become, and his seeming insistence on extreme glamour for his characters limits his room for maneuver within fiction’s curious democracy.
The plot of “Shalimar the Clown,” beneath the tinsel and the outrage, the Hindu and Bollywood mythmaking, the jittery verbal razzmatazz, is as simple as a legend. It hinges on an impetuous vow. On the first night Shalimar and Boonyi make love, Shalimar, “rolling over onto his back and panting for joy,” says:
“Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.”
Boonyi takes the threat lightly:
“What a romantic you are,” she replied carelessly. “You say the sweetest things.”
Eventually, this young Asian wife attempts to break out of her confined and undereducated state. What she finds is another sort of confinement, whose freedoms enable her to indulge her most self-damaging proclivities. Her loving husband, meanwhile, becomes, in the service of Azad Kashmir, an embodiment of Muslim fury and vengefulness, a monomaniacal killing machine. His first assassination is thrillingly anticipated: he has a gun, but opts for a knife, “because he wanted to know what it would feel like when he placed the blade of his knife against the man’s skin, when he pushed the sharp and glistening horizon of the knife against the frontier of the skin, violating the sovereignty of another human soul, moving in beyond taboo, toward the blood.”
The beyond-taboo moment has a counterpart in Rushdie’s previous—and untidier and nakeder—novel, “Fury,” when the mild, scholarly Professor Malik Solanka, while consuming, alone in the kitchen, three bottles of wine, passes through self-pity and enters “a terrible, blaming anger”; he finds himself upstairs holding a carving knife over the sleeping bodies of his wife and his four-year-old son, “on his side, curled tightly into her, sleeping the pure deep sleep of innocence and trust.” Solanka then and there decides to leave them and go to New York, where violence is commonplace. Fury, it turns out, is hard to escape: in “Shalimar the Clown” we read, “Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. . . . The world was no longer calm.”
In his ten years under the fatwa, Rushdie lived with the vehemence of offended Islam, and, as a fiction writer should, he absorbed the experience and found vehemence within himself. His counterattack on his Islamic persecutors is under way in such broadsides as a recent Op-Ed piece in the Times, “India and Pakistan’s Code of Dishonor,” and in fiction that animates Islam’s tenacious rage with faces and life stories. His invention, in “Shalimar the Clown,” of the “iron mullah,” a zealot literally made of metal, is excellent caricature, and the mullah’s speech inculcating warrior zealotry is awesome in its disconnection from anything the West calls civilization. Rushdie in his Manhattan retreat is no longer a Third World writer but a bard of the grim one world we all, in a state of some dread, inhabit. The novel’s concluding pages conjure up the sensations of the hunter and the hunted wonderfully well, with, uncharacteristically, understatement, the mark of authority. The climactic ending, in one more cinematic allusion, suggests the most terrifying scene in “The Silence of the Lambs.” This time, though, the night-vision goggles are on the eyes of Jodie Foster. ♦