Among The Jumbled Heap

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie

Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: “I don’t like the guy.” Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he was fortunate to have written that inflamed one quarter of the world’s population.

So I thought.

Now I know.

Rushdie is a wordsmith. His prose flows like a swill of fine scotch, thick and smooth with a slight bite, and you can almost taste the way the words aged in that graying cask of a brain.

Fury is that classic story of contemporary Western literature: the middle-aged man breaking down. Other writer’s have certainly told the tale better, with a better grasp of the plot (Updike’s Rabbit, and nearly every thing Bellow wrote), but what Rushdie brings to the tale is his turn of a phrase. The first line proves the point:

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in golden age.

This is the Rushdie charm. In one eloquent sentence, he has elucidated th character of Malik Solanka and drawn the reader in with curiosity. “A doll maker? Ohhhh, celibate?! Much criticized, but why? A golden age?” Yet Rushdie’s words are writing checks he can’t cash.

The story disintegrates, the character’s dissolve into a mass of half-formed themes and plot twists. In only 239 pages there is: not one but two (morally twisted) spring-winter romances; a murder mystery, crisis of fatherly duty; numerous attempts to tie the whole damned thing into contemporary culture, and a hapless stumbling onto the stage of geo-political conflict. Ambitious, to say the least, but ultimately unsatisfying.

But now I’ve read Rushdie. I understand his charm. I have been told , and I believe, that Fury is not the best example of his work, but reading it has expiated my hatred for the fellow.

I’m still glad that Padma left him, though.