10 - Three Novels for the New Millennium

Summary

Quite apart from the constraints of space dictated for a work in this series, there are several reasons for writing about Rushdie's three most recent novels in a single chapter. First of all, these novels are inevitably linked by their historical moment: as millennial optimism is shattered by the attacks in New York of September 2001, and we have the subsequent – ongoing – ‘war on terror’, with its attendant exacerbation of sectarian hostility and mistrust worldwide; as we see the loosening of some ties, and the establishment of others, with progressive globalization; the shifts of economic power and the realignment of other power bases on the planet, underlined by the credit crisis of autumn 2008; this in turn entailing the rise in food prices, which provides the context for the ‘Arab revolution’ (or the ‘Arab spring’) across north Africa in 2011. These forces are at work, implicitly and explicitly, in the novels we are to review here. And in the case of Rushdie, with the Indian subcontinent still looming large in his work, we have to add the terrorist attack on Mumbai in June 2008 by an Islamist group based in Pakistan, which caused serious destabilization between the two countries; and also the shooting dead of Osama bin Laden by American forces on Pakistani territory in May 2011. This latter event prompted a combative intervention by Rushdie in the online press, where he argued that unless Pakistan could provide an adequate explanation for the five-year presence of bin Laden and his entourage in a fortified residence near Islamabad, ‘then perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations’.

But the feature which I think really identifies these later novels (and I include The Ground Beneath Her Feet retrospectively in this), is what I would describe as a thinning out of the verbal texture. It is as if Rushdie has developed a kind of shorthand, a technique of passing more rapidly and cursorily over events, dealing with ideas also in a more perfunctory manner (as if to say we have, and we know we have, been here before), and conceiving of characters in bold – or indistinct – outline, rather than in sympathetic or engaging depth.