Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
Random House

Salman Rushdie's long-awaited ninth novel, "Shalimar the Clown," is a warning wrapped in a blessing. Rushdie has always been a cultural prism: Indian-born, Oxford-educated, New York-residing. An avowed liberal secular internationalist who also happens to write novels, Rushdie is in a particularly strong position to write on what preoccupies us: terrorism, culture, religion and love. His work, from "Midnight's Children" to his nonfiction to this book, has always tried to explain the world to itself. Shalimar the Clown adds another chapter in this grand gospel of life.

The story focuses on two sets of relationships: the cuckholded Clown of the title, his lover Boonyi, Max Ophuls (also her lover) and their daughter, tellingly named India. In the interplay between these characters is contained the dichotomy between East and West, culture vs. community, us vs. them. Throughout their stories (fully sketched and thoroughly realized) is a hundred years of history, three continents, and a handful of nations. Shalimar and Boonyi grow up together — in the bosom of Kashmir, an arcadia where feasts (of 35 courses maximum!) and circuses thrive. A legendary Eden in the shadow of the Himalayas, and its people, are convincingly and warmly colored. Nothing in Kashmir can be totally idyllic, however, and the forces that gather on opposing sides of this disputed land call for divisive politics and blood.

The situation is worsened by Shalimar (real name Noman Sher Noman — a hint at his encroaching nihilism) and Boonyi being members of opposing religions. This religious division is brought to a more emotional fury with Boonyi's eventual seduction by the dashing raconteur and French Resistance fighter, the American diplomat Maximilian Ophuls. Shalimar becomes a mujaheddin, Max's personal servant and chauffeur, and destroys him — in public — one bright Los Angeles afternoon. Max's daughter witnesses this revenge, glimpsing him beforehand as if in a dream: "She had seen flowers at Shalimar's feet, flowers growing from the sidewalk where he stood, also on his chest, bursting through his shirt ... his eyes like shining swords." It's this conjunction of ethereal sweetness and callow violence that marks Shalimar's degeneration from the man he was to the man he becomes.

Part of the force of this novel is Rushdie's maintaining the progression of four character's lives, revolving carousel-like through the narrative. We learn of Shalimar's youth spent tightrope walking with the circus; Boonyi's achingly tentative return to the tribe after her willing seduction by Max; Max's pleading as a young man to convince his reluctant parents to vacate the gradually Nazi-occupied Paris. The perpetual motion of these lives, caught up in the spin of history, is a needed reminder of how our lives play out on the world stage: "How could the future begin when the present had such a stranglehold on everyone and everything?"

In a world at war with itself, Rushdie's insight into the souls of some of those who once wanted to kill him becomes more precious and genuinely brave than ever. A novelist who has a distinct grasp of the porous border between the personal and the political can tell us more about the "news" than the news can. Rushdie lives up to Shelley's dictum that "(writers) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." With Iraq having just claimed 2,000 US casualties, terrorist attacks in New Delhi, ghastly hurricane damage in Pakistan — who better to illustrate the degeneration of a psyche torn to shreds by historical calamity, personal loss, and psychic disorientation?

True to his magical realism — and rightful heir to 20th-century masters such as Marquez, Kafka, Joyce and Grass — Rushdie's words have the sweep if not the sacrament of religious language: "Again with the religious imagery. New images urgently needed to be made. Images for a godless world. Until the language of irreligion caught up with the holy stuff, until there was a sufficient poetry and iconography of godlessness, these sainted echoes would never fade, would retain their problematic power ..." This is a narrative used against secularism all the time: without religion, kiddo, what justifies existence? It's a big question, and a much bigger task. Those of us who, like Rushdie, choose literature must indeed find the requisite language.

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)