The Urban Bedlam

In the ambit of contemporary literature, one name that immediately elicits an instant reaction and recognition is Salman Rushdie. His sophomore novel, Midnight’s Children, captivated readers across the world and is currently one of the most lauded works of literature. It is easily one of the most beloved works of literature that even earned the distinction of being the Booker of Bookers. The book’s resounding success made many a pundit call it his magnum opus. The book also exemplified Rushdie’s brand of magical realism which further catapulted him to global success and recognition. His extensive oeuvre and his powerful storytelling inevitably made him an integral part of the perennial discussion for possible awardees for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. As one traverses the vast world of literature, it is virtually impossible not to tumble upon his name.

But it was not only with his literary works that Rushdie earned notoriety. Like most writers, Rushdie was not one to hold back on his writing, hence, he and his works are magnets for controversy. Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983) stoked controversy. It came to a head in 1988, with the publication of his fourth novel The Satanic Verses. Because of the sensitive subjects it tackled, particularly with its references to the Satanic Verses of the Quran, the novel earned the ire of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the wake of the book’s publication, the Supreme Leader issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination. A flurry of death threats started to hound Rushdie; some led to actual assassination attempts. This would go down the annals of history as the Rushdie Affair.

The threat to his life prompted Rushdie to live incognito for years. After living a peripatetic existence for years following the controversy, Rushdie permanently settled in the United States in 2000. The change in setting also marked a significant shift in his prose as his novels started examining Western subjects, from culture to politics. This shift started to manifest with his sixth novel, The Ground Beneath With Her Feet, a novel partially set in New York City. It came full circle with Fury, the novel immediately succeeding it. Fury was the first of Rushdie’s novels to be fully set in the United States, particularly New York City. This earned the novel the distinction of being Rushdie’s first “American” novel; it would be eventually succeeded by his other novels such as The Golden House and Quichotte.

“That’s the worst part. There’s nothing to tell. No direct or proximate cause. You wake up one day and you aren’t a part of your life. You know this. Your life doesn’t belong to you. Your body is not, I don’t know how to make you this the force of this, yours. there’s just life, living itself. You don’t have it. You don’t have anything to do with it. That’s all. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me. It’s like when you hypnotize someone and persuade them there’s a big pile of mattresses outside their window. They no longer see a reason not to jump.”

~ Salman Rushdie, Fury

At the heart of Rushdie’s eighth novel was Professor Malik Solanka. Like Rushdie, Professor Solanka, or “Solly” as he would be fondly referred to, was born and raised in Bombay, India, on Methwold’s Estate, off Warden Road. He then moved to the United Kingdom where he pursued his studies at Cambridge. He stayed in the United Kingdom and taught as a professor of the history of ideas at King’s College, Cambridge. However, Solly got exasperated and overwhelmed by the politics that kept hounding academic life; he would describe it as the “narrowness, infighting, and ultimate provincialism” of academia. This prompted him to retire despite his age – he was just in his early to mid-fifties – from his tenured position.

Solanka then capitalized on his fascination with dolls to earn money. He created a “philosophical” doll which became the subject of a BBC television project. The doll was named Little Brain and was unexpectedly a pop phenomenon. The doll was commercialized for consumption. It was a sensation, as expected, earning Solanka a fortune. Despite channeling his energy to a different pursuit, there was still something unquenchable within Solanka. The success of Little Brain, it seems, has not quelled the fury that was brewing within him: “He was James Mason, a falling star, drinking hard, drowning in defeats, and that damn doll was flying high in the Judy Garland role.” As Little Brain gains more commercial recognition, its creator was slowly descending into pandemonium yet again. He was aghast at how he lost control yet again of something that was his brainchild.

In another act of defiance, Solinka took the radical but abrupt move of leaving London and moving to New York City, one of the world’s biggest hubs for migration. In the process, he abandoned his second wife and their four-year-old son. There was no preamble. Solanka just left in the dead of the night. In New York City, Solanka was hoping to reinvent himself. In a new environment, Solanka was hoping to seek refuge; it was this change in the landscape that formed the mantle of the story. We read about Solanka’s adventures across the Big Apple, as he walked down its alleys, navigated its nooks and crannies, and explored its well-tucked secrets. At first, he found it delightful as he found semblances of the Big Apple with the city of his birth. To Solanka’s luck, he moved to the city when it was in its prime.

But along with Solanka’s adventures were his misadventures. Symbolically the gateway to the proverbial American Dream, New York City has become a melting pot of cultures and diverse races. It houses some of the biggest migrant populations in the world, such as Italians, Chinese, Jewish, and Latin Americans. They occupy nearly every inch of the city and each has its own village or community in the bustling city. It has come as no surprise that New York City has emerged as one of the most prominent symbols, if not the heart of contemporary globalization. Unmitigated globalization, however, comes at a price, as Solanka would realize during his adventures across the city.

“When the possesor of truth was weak and the defender of the lie was strong, was it better to bend before the greater force? Or, by standing firm against it, might one discover a deaper strength in oneself and lay the despot low? When the soldiers of truth launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of the lie, should they be seen as liberators or had they, by using their enemy’s weapons against him, themselves become the scorned barbarians whose houses they had set on fire? What were the limits of tolerance? How far, in the pursuit of the right, could we go before we crossed a line, arrived at the antipodes of ourselves, and became wrong?”

~ Salman Rushdie, Fury

In the urban bedlam that New York City has transformed into as a result of unmitigated globalization, we see one of the manifold manifestations of fury that permeated the story. Beyond the glitz and glamor and the promises of the American Dream, New York City’s denizens seethed with concealed rage. Cab drivers were spewing random invectives. Strangers were having petty spats with each other. Unconcealed resentment was the unspoken currency, dispelling the glossy images of glitz and glamor, of towering skyscrapers, of the fashionable and high-end districts the city is renowned for.

All of these were captured by Solanka’s unflinching. Despite being embraced with different forms of fury, both latent and patent, he indulged in them with humor, albeit of the dark kind. Dark humor permeated the story as it developed into an indictment of modern America. References to popular culture were ubiquitous and were used as metaphors. Among the pop icons from the era named in the story are Al Pacino, Jennifer Lopez, Puff-Daddy, N’Sync, Butch Cassidy, Madonna, and Tiger Woods. There were also references to important historical events such as the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the tightly contested Bush-Gore election.

The convergence of all of these modern American icons and events captured a portrait of modern America that has become drawn to consumerism. “America is the great devourer, and so I have come to America to be devoured,” Solanka once ruminated. It surely has become a devourer, but one that empties the soul. Modern America has become a land of sitcoms and shopping malls. The hollow at the heart of contemporary America was also the subject of Rushdie’s more recent novels, more prominently his Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Quichotte. The promise of the American dream goes unfulfilled and is replaced by superficiality. The disappointment, in turn, develops into another form of fury. As Rushdie’s first novel about the United States, Fury was brimming with scathing commentaries on American culture.

Fury, in Rushdie’s vision, transcends boundaries. As Solanka interacted with other characters, we read about the fury that has unsettled the rest of the world. Nations are going after each other; warfare, bloodshed, and violence have constantly threatened harmony. Global conflicts were referenced in the story. Interestingly, the book was published before the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. However, there were lines in the story that gave some omen of what was about to happen: “terrorist anger that kept taking him hostage.” Religious fanaticism was also referenced in the story, a direct reference to the fatwas issued by the Iranian Supreme leader on Rushdie. Fury, obscured from plain view, is ever-percolating, slowly rising to the surface.

“Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise — the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.”

~ Salman Rushdie, Fury

However, the most potent of fury is when it comes too close for comfort. Solanka, for instance, was abused by his stepfather when he was younger. Dubdub, one of his closest friends, took his life after earning popularity while teaching at Princeton: ‘‘The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt.” There was also a subtle form of fury depicted in the guilt felt by Solanka after he left behind his three-year-old son, Asmaan. Eleanor, his wife, tried to establish communication with her estranged husband but there was a rootlessness and loneliness in Solanka that kept constantly pushed him to search for it elsewhere. There was too much fury brewing inside Solanka. While the source of it cannot fully be determined – at least within the ambit of the story- his fury was unquenchable.

Solanka loomed large in the story. He propelled the story forward. On his own, he was an interesting character with an equally interesting set of motivations. We read about his fears, his anxieties, and what makes him distinctly who he is. The intrinsic quality of his fury kept him from blaming others for his fury. As the story moved forward, and the voice of Solanka inhabits the readers’ minds, one can start seeing how Solanka is a projection of the author himself. Like Solanka, Rushdie was in his mid-fifties when he began working on the novel. Even the details of their provenance and their adult live uncannily resemble each other. While Rushdie has been known to insert himself in his works in various forms, his presence was never as direct as it is with Fury.

But for all its ambition, the novel does not quite fully realize its potential. The subjects were never fully explored. It was further bogged down by Solanka’s proclivity for incessant ramblings potent with sardonic remarks. But flaws aside, Fury is a welcome addition to Rushdie’s oeuvre. It had familiar components of Rushdie’s body of work while, at the same time, ushering a new era in his oeuvre. A deviation from his earlier works, Fury was anchored more on Western values. The details of the author’s origins were still there; some of the most helpful individuals Solanka encountered in New York City were Indians. But in Rushdie’s image of the Big Apple, we read about a metropolis boiling with rage while it ascends to global notoriety. New York City has become the symbol of the American dream but also of the flaws that are inherent in its globalization. Fury is a scathing commentary on the decadence of contemporary America while probing the author’s own images of fury.

“He too, was in search of a quietus, of peace. So, his old self must somehow be cancelled, put away for god. It must not rise up wile a spectre from the tomb to claim him at some future point, dragging him down into the sepulchre of the past. And if he failed, then he failed, but one did not contemplate what lay beyond failure while one was still trying to succeed. After all, Jay Gatsby, the highest bouncer of the mall, failed, too, in the end, but lived out, before he crashed, that brilliant, brittle, gold-hatted, exemplary American life.”

~ Salman Rushdie, Fury
Ratings

59%

Characters (30%) – 21%
Plot (30%) – 15%
Writing (25%) – 17%
Overall Impact (15%) – 6%

During the month, the world of literature was shocked by the news of Salman Rushdie’s stabbing. This incident reminded everyone of the looming presence of the fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini because of his controversial work, The Satanic Verses. I admit I wasn’t planning on reading Rushdie’s work last August 2022 but, in light of the incident, I resolved to return to one of the writers who has become one of my favorites. In the past seven years, Rushdie is my second most-read writer, after Haruki Murakami; I am hoping either of them would win the Nobel Prize in Literature someday. Fury is my ninth novel by the highly-regarded but controversial writer. Overall, the novel was a compelling work of literature, the vision of a writer who was visibly in transition, both in creative direction and personal direction. However, it did not entirely work as, despite the vastness of subjects that Rushdie probed into, the exploration was lacking, the impact fleeting. Personally, I find it one of Rushdie’s lesser works.

Book Specs

Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: Jan 2007 (2001)
Number of Pages: 259
Genre: Magical Realism, Literary

Synopsis

Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees to New York. There’s fury within him, and he fears that he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America’s wealth and power, seeking to ‘erase’ himself.

But fury is all around him. Cab drivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. Meanwhile, his own thoughts, emotions and desires are also running wild. A young woman in D’Angelo baseball cap is in store. Also another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn towards a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world.

About the Author

To know more about Salman Rushdie, click here.