Shalimar the Clown -review

OK, Salman Rushdie seems to have lost his touch. When I was reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet I couldn’t reach the end of it — it was so uninteresting as a story. At least this time I could finish Shalimar the Clown. He still possesses his ingenious style I must admit, and amongst current writers nobody writes the way he does, and this adds a sad dimension to his literary genius. Add to this gems like Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh and you’ll know where I’m coming from. Once you know a writer can do so much better, once you know what he or she is capable of, it is crushing to see his or her slide into the pit of mediocrity. Salman Rushdie has always been my boyhood hero and I still hold him in high regard, but he is certainly not like Dostoyevsky, whom I read no matter how badly he has written.

Shalimar the Clown bores you in the beginning, then it gradually rises like the Sphinx of a classic, loses a nose or two, holds on to the wall of lingual detritus for as long as it lasts, and then collapses in the end. The last page makes you feel as if you’ve just seen a B-grade movie.

Contrary to the current literary notion existing among modern writers (I’m currently experiencing it in Martin Amis’s book), I believe when you write, presentation is as important as content. Content is definitely the king, but you cannot sacrifice presentation for the sake of content, and vice versa. Salman Rushdie it seems focuses more on presentation. He is full of facts, he brims with historical facts and anecdotal trivia but most of the time it seems he gets lost in the labyrinth of his facts and it slips out of his mind that he is trying to tell a story. And there is some serious, gut-wrenching story here to tell, especially about the Kashmiri strife. He picks up grave issues and ends up trivializing them. At many places he endeavors to package the European as well as the Indian history in one stroke.

There are three main characters in the novel: Shalimar the Clown, Max Ophuls and Bunyi Kaul. All three of them orchestrate their individual tragedies that culminate into the super-tragedy that the book represents. All the characters falter here and there, and I firmly agree with this:

“Max is as hollow as Shalimar, and a fatal sign of Mr. Rushdie’s uneasiness with male characters when they’re meant to carry a great deal of narrative energy.” – David Thomson, The New York Observer

I had the same experience while reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet; no character had a character. To experience what I’m trying to say, read any old classic, for instance, some Dickens novel; even a beggar that appears for a few paragraphs has more character than some of the main characters of Shalimar the Clown. No character in this novel is consistent, and I think his main problem is that he is too obsessed with his own “style” if one may call it so. His writing style takes precedence over his characters and this practically throttles them. Unless he can come out of his own shadow he will keep producing shoddy novels despite being an exceptionally talented writer.

Shalimar the Clown starts with a murder and all through the narrative the reader moves backward and forward. The entire novel explains why the murder happens; the murder of the great intellectual, the great ambassador, and the great philanderer, Max Ophuls. He is murdered in Los Angeles by Shalimar the Clown, a rope dancer from a bhand village in Kashmir (the bhands mainly perform historical/mythological plays in rural India during major festivals). Rushdie captures the village life beautifully, and if you want to read the book, you can read it simply to experience that portion. He has gone into great detail sketching the everyday life of the remote, humble Kashmiri village. In this village both Hindus and Muslims live in a peaceful coexistence, complimenting each other at every stage, celebrating both Hindu and Muslim festivals with equal zeal and respect. Boonyi Kaul is the daughter of Kashmiri pandit teacher-turned-cook. Shalimar the Clown is the son of a Kashmiri Muslim who is also the sarpanch of the village.

There is so much love (to an extent of being maudlin) that even when an Indian-army rat exposes the secret love affair between Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi Kaul he is chased away by the collective will of the villagers, and both the lovers are married with mutual agreement of both the communities. The novel takes the tragic turn, and then keeps the wheel of tragedy swirling throughout the narrative, when the troop of bhands performs Anarkali in front of the American ambassador and Boonyi realizes that the ambassador can unshackle her from the constraining village life and transport her into her dream world. The ambassador too is besotted at the first sight of hers. She runs to him as soon as she can and thence lays the path of her physical and spiritual destructions.

Parallel go the incidents that depict the gore involving the fundamentalists and the Indian army. Here Rushdie tows the convenient, blinkered view of painting the Indian army as a ruthlessly evil force out to pillage and rape village after village of hapless Muslims. On the other hand, he writes about the Muslim fundamentalists as confused youths disillusioned by the transgressions of the Indian state. Of course he is clever with his words and sometimes alludes to the senseless savagery of the terrorists and fanatics. This is made evident when the Kashmiri women, who hate covering their faces, are forced to wear burqas and all things that make you happy are prohibited by the true followers of Islam. Other than these stray references, he is all out to prove that the Kashmiri terrorism is solely existing because of the repressive Indian, extremist government. Anyway, these are his political views, and he is described them engagingly, dexterously, with a garnishing of cataclysmic events. The most heart-wrenching is when the village of the bhands is destroyed by the Indian army, the mother of Shalimar the Clown is gang-raped and his father is killed after breaking his hands. This was where the novel touched me.

Magical realism has become a sine qua non of his overall oeuvre as far as his fictional works go, and this sometimes puts one off. This is very often his escape rout it seems. For instance, there is an iron man that espouses extremism and even when he dies, there is just iron in him. Then, when Boonyi is coming back to her village, many things happen to her that don’t happen in the real world. In the end of the book, even Shalimar the Clown’s escape from village involves a magical feat.

In the end, I won’t say don’t read the book. If you want some good reading experience, you’ll like it despite not falling in love with the characters. It is miles away from Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, but it’s far better than Ground Beneath Her Feet.