Book review: Shalimar the Clown

(Written for The Indian Express; the link to the paper's website is here.)


Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape

POUNDS 17.99, 398 pages

"My memory keeps getting in the way of your history," the late Agha Shahid Ali wrote in a poem for Kashmir that was simultaneously love letter and requiem. As Salman Rushdie exports an old, old tale of star-crossed lovers to the country without a post office, it is only appropriate that Shahid should provide one of the two epigraphs for Shalimar the Clown.

Many years ago, Rushdie wrote a tale of poisoned stories darkening a lake he called Dull, in a place menaced by silence, where only pages in a constantly shuffled history formed a thin barrier against destruction. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-shud was conquered, the Ocean of Seas of Stories was cleaned up, and along with poets, writers and dreamers everywhere, Kashmir, too, found its voice.

Shalimar the Clown is no fable, and besides, it's set in a darker time. A happy ending is a luxury that no one who writes of Kashmir, or America, can afford any longer. Rushdie's story is a complex, tangled tale that stretches from Strasbourg during World War Two to the Resistance in France, the Kashmir Valley in a time of simmering discontent, and contemporary America paying the price for its empire-building. In order to get his arms round the story, Rushdie employs black farce, slapstick comedy and melodrama, almost defiantly. Layered with legend, snarled in the roots of history, silenced and misinterpreted, Kashmir is a parable for our times. Telling it straight is not an option.

Shalimar the Clown is an actor in a village of bhands, a man who specializes in walking tightropes ("lines of gathered air"). The love of his life, the woman who will betray him and return to accept a savage judgement, is named after the chinar trees of Kashmir—Boonyi, a dancer so talented that she can embrace Anarkali's role, and, to an extent, her fate.

In this overripe soap opera, with multiple, interlocking episodes set against Grand Guignol sets, strewn with outrageous plot twists, inevitably the village dancer seeks an escape. Boonyi's temporary passport to a wider world is Maximilian Ophuls, expert forger, flier, fighter, fornicator, larger-than-life WWII hero who survived the Holocaust in which his parents died. Now Max is an ambassador for the US, a trader in the futures market that governs the history of nations. The most visible result of his ambassadorial dalliance is a daughter, a blend between Last Action Heroine and Tarantino's Bride. In search of her past, India Ophuls hates her name: "'India' still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own…"

The over-the-top exaggeration and exuberance of Shalimar the Clown is trying, though much more coherent than Fury. Rushdie's characters rattle around in the cages of symbol and metaphor; his style has all the subtlety of a smalltown marching band, making this novel a devastatingly easy target for parody.

But Pachigam, the village of actors, comes into slow focus through its small disputes over weddings, the living presence of dead soothsayers, the "pot war" over the smoothest gushtabas, the finest lotus stem curries that they wage with the village nearby. The performers could have come out of Midnight's Children, as though Parvati the Witch and her band of acrobats, jugglers and players had finally found a home.

All this is ripped apart when the jaws of history snap shut on Kashmir. The Indian military is seen first as unwilling combatants in an unacknowledged war, then as bitter oppressors driven into paranoia by the weight of intolerable, ineradicable memories. And there are the iron mullahs: "The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty… The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would hear a hollow metallic ring."


Shalimar and Boonyi's story dies, as one by one, the players are slaughtered, Max Ophuls trades suavely in distant death, India finds a new identity in combat, Pachigam loses the battles against a bitter army and an even more corrosive invasion of faith. Rushdie's prose fragments under the weight of his rage, in a passage remarkable for the naked breakdown of the writer, faced with an injustice that magic realism can no longer encompass:

"Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house?....
Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed grandmother as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?"

The naïve reader will see banality, in the denouement that leads Shalimar to assassinate the US ambassador: could this really explain terrorism, 9/11, this tired cliché of a cuckold seeking revenge on his wife's lover? It's an obtuse reader, though, who's got this far but cannot see beyond to the metaphor of an apparently noble nation assaulted by the people it has seduced, nurtured, discarded and betrayed.

This is not, please the God in which Rushdie has ceased to believe, the finest work of the man who has been engaged, before and after the fatwa, in the rewriting and reexamination of history. It's a deeply angry, sometimes clownish, often rough novel that marks just a return to form, not a return to the peak of that form. Shalimar the Clown is a tightrope walk by a highwire virtuoso who's not above stumbling; but it's a powerful parable, a reminder that neither East nor West can sow the seeds of intolerance, hatred and division without reaping the whirlwind.

Book review: We Need To Talk About Kevin

(Published in the Business Standard, August 2005)

[One of the things that struck me about Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin is just how sacred the myth of motherhood is in our times. Shriver's a wonderful writer, not afraid to combine a school shooting with a child not even his mother could love, not afraid to make that mother an unreliable narrator. But in order to even raise the subject of a woman who does not believe that motherhood is natural, and who does not enjoy being a mother, even Shriver has to create a monster child, a little alien. And introduce a second child, Celia, whose only narrative purpose seems to be to prove that Eva Khatchatourian could be a good, loving mother--if she had the right child. No disrespect to Shriver--or to mothers at large--but we've got a long way to go before we can accept that for many women, motherhood is not a natural or inevitable choice. Okay, off the soapbox now.]

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver

Serpents Tail

Distributed by West Land,

POUNDS 5.75, 400 pages



Before Dr Spock, before What To Expect When You're Expecting, before our era of a thousand Joy of Parenting manuals and mommy memoirs, there was Albert Camus.

Part of what Camus did in The Outsider was to challenge the idea that the bond between parents and children, mother and son, was automatic, natural, loving. Lionel Shriver's Kevin Khatchadourian could be the outsider's legitimate son.


Ever since it won the Orange Prize, the adjective most often used to describe We Need To Talk About Kevin is "controversial". It's a reassuring label to stick on a book that takes on 21st century shibboleths and taboos: it allows readers to back off, to stay at a safe distance from a writer who unleashes her enormous talent on the exploration of the dangers and hidden traps of intimacy.


The voice that draws us in belongs to Eva Khatchadourian, successful entrepreneur, indefatigable traveller, loving wife, skeptical mother, survivor. The things she's survived are many: foreign countries, the destruction of her marriage, the festering doubts of a woman who has no "maternal heat" to see her through the tribulations of motherhood, the birth of a son who, to her, is impossibly alien. Her story unfolds through the missives—urgent, wry, introspective, devastatingly honest—that she writes to her husband Franklin, after their 15-year-old son Kevin took down seven classmates and two others in a Columbine-style massacre.


"I am never able to get the full story inside me. It's larger than I am," writes Eva in the aftermath. To tell it, she has to return to territory that she once considered absolutely familiar; like her travels for A Wing and A Prayer, the guidebook imprint she owns, she must revisit the tedium of travelling to the exotic (where everything begins to look familiar after a while) while praying that for once, the journey will be a new, astonishing exploration. Eva emerges as a forceful, bright woman whose tragedy is that she cannot soften the edges of her vision; she lacks the ability to tell herself the lies that take so many men and women through the flawed intimacy of marriage, parenting and the strange countries that lie beyond.


We Need To Talk About Kevin explodes several myths (one of them is that a book about school shootings can't be hilariously funny). For Eva, motherhood is not the natural, inevitable life journey it's made out to be by modern parenting gurus; pregnancy feels like being inhabited, as she puts it, by an alien even as it forces her to live, like a child, by the rules of other people. Kevin is not an easy child to love; and love is not an emotion that Eva can dispense with ease, either. From her perspective, Kevin is a terrifying bright child who blends anomie and apathy with an intelligence that he uses to manipulate the world. Franklin, Eva's husband, holds their increasingly strained household together with blind optimism and a belief, unfounded but poignantly deep, in the power of familial love.


Lionel Shriver's prose packs an intensity that few contemporary writers today can match. We Need To Talk About Kevin may start with the simplest of units, the family, but it's a hugely ambitious exploration of violence, love and what lies beneath the surface of America. "I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me," Eva writes to Franklin, "that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria."


Shriver will spare the reader nothing. There are no easy answers to the question America asks itself every time there's another school shooting, another kid armed with a crossbow or a gun locking the doors of the gym before he takes out his classmates. There are no easy ways to look at parenting and motherhood with clarity in an age where these are the last shibboleths we hold on to, the last bastions of certainty in which we can deposit our faith.


We Need To Talk About Kevin explores parenting, and modern America, and motherhood, and the difference between home and away, but it's really, like all great novels, about grappling with the beauty and ineradicable strangeness of the human condition. It demands more of the reader than any other book published this year; and that's why it must be read.

The Hiroshima virtual walk

{Did this as a very rough Net tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sites for the Business Standard a few weeks ago. The first draft I wrote was too handwringing, too emotional: it might have worked at a longer word count, but it would also have been self-indulgent beyond belief. Instead, this is just a list of links. You fill in the emotional blanks yourself.)

This month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands of people gathered to honour the memory of the dead on the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic-bomb attack. Little Boy, the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945 killed between 100,000 and 180,000 citizens. Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki three days later; it killed an estimated 150,000 citizens.

My virtual walk through Hiroshima and Nagasaki six decades on starts with two raspy audio files. President Truman's voice is clear and firm: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base…. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." The next clip in the list is far more tired, almost anguished, as Robert Oppenheimer, the man who's known as the father of the atom bomb says: "Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

At 'Prey from Peace City', photographs and text document the spreading mushroom cloud, an image so familiar that we no longer look on it with dread, and down below, the effects of Little Boy. The earth is scorched; the landscapes speak of absence initially, just that: missing buildings, ashes and dust where there should be people.

Among the exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is the hair that fell from Hiroko Yamashita's head. There are pictures of twisted bridge girders; pictures of the city before and after; pictures of people desperate for elusive, hopelessly inadequate medical help. There is Shinichi Tetsutani's tricycle. The boy was a month short of four years, riding his bike when the flash came. The tricycle was buried with him and dug up forty years later by his father.

After Hiroshima, the target was Kokura, but the city was hidden under a haze. Boxcar detoured slightly to drop Fat Man on Nagasaki instead. At the Exploratorium, Yosuke Yamahata's photographs capture the devastation. "The worst was when electric wires got twisted around people's legs and they couldn't escape—they died in that position, fallen to their knees," he recalled. He shot meticulously, caught in the middle of a disaster on a scale that was too large for him to absorb.


The Atomic Bomb museum at Nagasaki has horrifying photographs; it also points to the poetry of bombing survivor Sumako Fukuda, to trees before and after the blast.


A year after the bombs had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to a story that tracked six of the survivors. John Hersey's Hiroshima shook the conscience of the world; in commemoration, the Guardian carried an abridged version of the original article.

For 25 years after Hiroshima, very little footage or news photographs could be found. In an explosive investigative article at Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell explored the reasons why the US deliberately suppressed images of the blasts.

You might want to flip back and forth between Hersey's classic piece, Mitchell's report and Hiromi Tsuchida's Hiroshima picture gallery. One section is devoted to objects: melted sake bottles, a lunch box whose contents, rice and peas, were carbonized by the blast, a damaged contact lens, taken from the burned head of a young girl.

Or read some of the transcripts from the accounts of the "hibakusha", literally, those who returned from hell—the survivors of the blasts.

Before you log out, remember Sadako Sasaki, who was two when the bombs dropped; at eleven, she was diagnosed with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease". She'd heard an old Japanese tale to the effect that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would get well; she had folded more than a thousand when she died, just twelve years old. Her story was told again and again, and paper cranes began to arrive in Japan from all over the world. Folded clumsily or with perfect creases, sixty years after Hiroshima, the cranes still arrive.