7 - The Moor's Last Sigh

Summary

Rushdie's first big novel since The Satanic Verses, seven years on, was awaited with cautious expectation. His readers had willed Rushdie to carry on writing, to triumph over the adversity of his circumstances, but at the same time there was some doubt expressed as to whether he could possibly recapture the imaginative liberty of his earlier work. And in the event The Moor's Last Sigh was published to sympathetic rather than enthusiastic reviews. In the first book to include a section on the novel, Catherine Cundy offers what is (she concedes) a ‘largely negative assessment’. The novel has been marked, she feels, by the fact of Rushdie's incarceration, and breathes a stifled, exhausted air as a result; it is in her view ‘strangely flat – with the two-dimensionality of a largely cerebral reconstitution of “reality” ’. (What work of art, one reflects, is not ‘cerebral’?) But it may be that there is something preconditioned about these judgements, as if the novel could not possibly be allowed to succeed, whatever its qualities, since that would somehow contradict the comfortable, common-sense idea we have of the continuity between the writer and the work. (One might note in passing that Cundy's book frequently invokes biographical ‘facts’ to underpin critical judgements.) It should be possible to respond to the novel on its own terms, without such a reflex. It is an assumption of the present account that Rushdie was able to draw on all his resources as a writer for The Moor's Last Sigh; and the argument, that, though it is deliberately refracted through the mirror of art, the novel is as ambitious, as demanding, and as fine as anything he has previously written.

One should first note the continuities with Rushdie's earlier work. The Moor's Last Sigh returns to India, but to a different India from that of Midnight's Children (or The Satanic Verses). This is Spanish/Portuguese India, with a different colonial history; the echoes here are not of The East lndia Company, Amritsar, Mountbatten, and the Raj, but of Vasco da Gama, the Alhambra, and multicultural Goa with its Jewish and Christian communities.