Salman Rushdie’s first novel since he was attacked is a story of magic

However the spores of intolerance had scattered wider and lay dormant longer than anybody anticipated.

In August, whereas making ready to talk on the Chautauqua Establishment concerning the significance of offering a protected haven to exiled writers, Rushdie was attacked by a man wielding a knife. Earlier than the assailant could possibly be restrained, Rushdie had been stabbed 10 occasions. He survived, however reportedly misplaced sight in a single eye and the usage of one hand.

Salman Rushdie and the death of safe spaces

That horrific ordeal impressed a momentary surge of noble declarations concerning the sanctity of freedom of expression. However writers around the globe proceed to be harassed, jailed and even killed for his or her work. And in the US, spiritual fanatics and their most cynical political allies have found that banning books, condemning writers and threatening librarians stay efficient ways for elevating cash and spreading their propaganda.

What a delight, then, on this fraught second to be given a magical new novel by Rushdie himself. Although “Victory City” was accomplished earlier than the Chautauqua assault, it’s unimaginable to not learn elements of this grand fantasy as an allegory of the writer’s struggles in opposition to sectarian hatred and ignorance. Certainly, given the bodily and emotional sacrifices he’s made, some coincidences between this story and his personal life are nearly too poignant to bear.

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Within the tongue-in-cheek introduction, Rushdie presents these pages not as his personal creation however merely his “wholly by-product” abstract of an historical epic poem. The Sanskrit textual content, he claims, was not too long ago found in a clay pot amid the ruins of Vijayanagar. This immortal masterpiece, the “Jayaparajaya,” is the work of a prophetess named Pampa Kampana who died in 1565 on the age of 247.

A few of these particulars sound suspect; others are at the very least tenuously drawn from historical past. Vijayanagar — “Metropolis of Victory” in Sanskrit — actually was as soon as the capital of an unlimited Hindu empire in southern India. Data recommend a thriving, culturally tolerant metropolis of nice riches and elaborate infrastructure. However the everlasting metropolis ultimately succumbed to Muslim armies who so completely laid waste to it that, to borrow from Shelley,

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and naked

The lone and stage sands stretch distant.

Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, UNESCO declared the ruins on the banks of the Tungabhadra a World Heritage web site. Whereas that reclamation mission continues, Rushdie gives this equally formidable reclamation of the creativeness. Posing as a mere translator and summarizer, he treads frivolously, interrupting solely not often to notice some unusual lacuna within the authentic textual content or to supply a little bit of editorial steerage. In any other case, we race by means of the multigenerational adventures of a once-great kingdom as if we’re plunging into an Indian model of “Recreation of Thrones.”

The story begins lengthy earlier than the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar empire within the smoldering stays of a “tiny, defeated kingdom.” On this disarmingly matter-of-fact scene, the surviving widows go away their fortress, construct a terrific bonfire alongside the river after which stroll into the flames.

Left behind — and traumatized — is Pampa Kampana, the 9-year-old daughter of one of many ladies. “For a protracted second Pampa tried to persuade herself that her mom was simply being sociable and going together with the group,” Rushdie writes. However when she sees her mom’s roasted flesh fall away from the bones, she makes up her thoughts. “She wouldn’t sacrifice her physique merely to observe lifeless males into the afterworld,” she thinks. “She would refuse to die younger and dwell, as a substitute, to be impossibly, defiantly previous.”

Drawn to her fierce vitality, a goddess begins talking to and thru the decided little lady. “You’ll combat to make it possible for no extra ladies are ever burned on this style,” the goddess proclaims, “and that males get thinking about ladies in new methods.” Virtually a decade later, when two cowherds come asking for knowledge, she blesses a bag of vegetable seeds and tells the brothers to sow them on the spot the place her mom died.

At such moments — they usually’re frequent in “Victory Metropolis” — Rushdie’s magical model unfurls wonders. Inside an hour after scattering the seeds, “the air started to shimmer,” he writes, and a spectacular metropolis thrust out of the rocky floor — from the royal palace to the Monkey Temple, the canopied market stalls and the aristocrats’ villas, together with hundreds and hundreds of individuals “born full-grown from the brown earth, shaking the filth off their clothes, and thronging the streets.”

However they’re extra like zombies than Adam and Eve, and the nascent metropolis has no which means, no historical past. And so, “to treatment the multitude of its unreality,” Pampa turns to fiction. She whispers a persona and a previous into each clean resident of Vijayanagar. “Even when the tales of their heads had been fictions,” Rushdie writes, “fictions could possibly be as highly effective as histories, revealing the brand new folks to themselves, permitting them to grasp their very own natures and the natures of these round them, and making them actual.”

One can hear on this passage, the philosophy of a person who’s spent nearly 50 years spinning tales which have turn out to be as highly effective as historical past — from “Midnight’s Kids,” which received the Booker Prize in 1981, to “The Satanic Verses,” which ignited protests around the globe. “This was the paradox of the whispered tales: they had been not more than make-believe however they created the reality.”

Pampa, a deeply sympathetic and susceptible superhero, imbues her metropolis with nice knowledge, deep scholarship and gender equality. She hopes to create a type of feminist utopia, “a spot of laughter, happiness and frequent and variegated sexual delight.” However as different world creators have found, the reward of free will is problematic. For greater than two centuries, she watches her kingdom develop and stumble. New rulers stand up — some clever, some silly, just a few actually despicable. In sure eras, Pampa occupies positions of nice political energy and prominence; in others, she’s scorned and even exiled.

Regardless of its grand design, “Victory Metropolis” stays surprisingly modest in tone. The bombastic high quality that typically burdened Rushdie’s latest novels is right here tamed, changed by a gentler humor, a subtler satire. The story’s huge time-frame and the prophesied catastrophe on the finish forged a pall of melancholy over the waves of political machinations that preserve buffeting the empire.

All through Pampa’s travails, one pressure proves most toxic to her personal hopes and the town’s survival: spiritual intolerance. And Rushdie is at his finest and most skilled when he deconstructs the foundations of militant religious purity. Regardless of Pampa’s finest efforts, in every new technology, personal resentments, inadequacies and fears lure folks into cults of extremism. For a sure small however unquenchable section of the inhabitants, the information that others would possibly suppose one thing totally different or take pleasure in themselves in some totally different manner is just too insupportable to endure. Within the phrases of 1 court docket adviser, “There are unhappy sacks and lonelyhearts made sadder-sackier and lonely-heartier by all of the portraits of different folks’s pleasure.” As Gulliver traversed the globe, so Pampa sails by means of time, discovering in every period new examples of males’s self-importance and judgment.

However extraordinary as her powers could also be, she will be able to’t do every thing to maintain her metropolis affluent or, finally, even to maintain it standing. “The availability of magic isn’t limitless,” she tells one king. (Like Milton, Rushdie appears to know that omnipotence saps dramatic stress.) However Pampa can whisper, and she will be able to persuade, and even after her foes have blinded her, she will be able to write.

“The miraculous and the on a regular basis are two halves of a single entire,” she says. And that, by the way, could also be the very best description of Rushdie’s work.

Ron Charles evaluations books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Publish.

Random Home. 336 pp. $30