Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
Salman Rushdie’s latest novel – whose title is a prosaic rendering of the Thousand and One Nights – deals with a world that has descended into ‘a time of strangeness’, a time in which genies (jinnia) wreak untold havoc and warfare on the human race. At the core of the novel is a millennium-old battle of ideas, a vindication of the Aristotelian philosophy of Al-Andalus philosopher Ibn Rushd (whose name Rushdie’s father adopted in homage). Can chaos and fear eventually push humans towards belief in God? Will religion eventually push them away from belief? Whose agendas are these, and to what ends do people so insistently cling to them? The book is narrated a thousand years from now in the future, when humans have overcome all violence, religion and irrationality. It examines the battle between the rational and chaotic sides of human nature, abstracted and depicted as an epic sci-fi superhero battle between Good and Evil, light and dark, the jinnia representing the irrational, cruel and despotic sides of humanity. If that sounds somewhat unsubtle, it’s because it is.
The book characteristically teems with characters, subplots, contradictions, meandering stories and Rushdie’s trademark unusual happenings. A man suddenly and inexplicably begins levitating; a baby capable of detecting corruption magically appears; wormholes open between the human world and Fairyland; people are struck by lightning in their thousands. But although there are moments when the magic strikes and rings true, much of the time the reader is left feeling that something is lacking, that some essential cohesion is missing. Much of the time, the tone falls short of the whimsical and playful. The events feel gratuitous; the references self-indulgent. Problematically, every single female character is a stunningly beautiful young woman (human or supernatural) who falls in love with an older man (magic realism indeed). In the end the novel manages to be both didactic and drifting, and, despite its boundless energy, is disappointing from a writer of Rushdie’s sensibility and imagination.
Words: Liza Cox
