Book Review

Revenge tale in a riotous paradise

Shalimar the Clown

This is not a book of surprises. We begin with the murder of Max Ophuls, an apparently retired diplomat, an American born in Alsace to Jewish parents. The killer is his driver, a man from Kashmir, who goes by the name Shalimar the Clown. We then move back to the killer’s childhood; we see him, a Muslim, in love with a Hindu girl, like him involved in their village’s traditional acrobatic and theatrical troupe. Their eventual marriage is clouded by rumours of disaster, and her growing boredom. These coalesce when the American ambassador to India, Ophuls (of course), visits Kashmir. We backtrack again, through Ophuls’ early years and diplomacy; then return, to him persuading Shalimar the Clown’s wife to elope. The deserted husband vows revenge, leaves the village, and drifts into one of the many terrorist groups fighting Indians, Pakistanis, each other. Meanwhile Ophuls abandons his mistress, but not before she bears his child, a daughter who is taken away by Ophuls’ embittered wife, while the mother is packed off back to her village. Ophuls is exposed, and leaves India in disgrace; his daughter is raised in England, then America. There, at last, his wife dead, Shalimar the Clown seeks out her betrayer: which is where we began.

There is a conventional neatness to the plot, then; and, in the parts set in America and Europe, also to Rushdie’s prose, which is lazily cliché-ridden (“this California whose body was its temple and whose ignorance was its bliss”) and stuffed with trite, portentous statements. I finished the first chapter with a heavy heart, nine-tenths of the book’s 400 pages ahead of me.

As soon as we reach Kashmir, however, the tone and pace are transformed. These sections give an absorbing picture of a world that, in the memory of its exiles, is a literal paradise – a fertile valley where Hindu and Muslim live alongside each other in an indulgent tolerance that enriches both. They collaborate in the two traditional livelihoods of gymnastic theatre and cooking lavish feasts, amid whispering shadowed forests and wandering bandits, magicians, schoolmasters, spies. The gradual souring of this paradise is deftly drawn and strikes the reader with fine inevitability. The villagers may be much like the jocular, quarrelsome but good-hearted characters of many another fictional village, but they are credible and human. Rushdie has some acute observations, too, on the nature of terrorism and the terrorist. He is keenly aware of the personal or economic motives that drive men to these ends; but also of what happens to them when they get there: “Shalimar the Clown was asked to make certain revisions in his worldview. ‘It is not possible to shoot straight … if the way you see things is all screwed up.’ Ideology was primary. The infidel, obsessed with possessions and wealth, did not grasp this, and believed that men were primarily motivated by social and material self-interest. This was the mistake of all infidels, and also their weakness. The true warrior was not primarily motivated by worldly desires, but by what he believed to be true.”

Max Ophuls, however, is a cardboard cut-out hero – daring aviator, prize economist, painter, forger, hero of the French Resistance, legendary seducer of women, architect of postwar internationalism, canny diplomat, and eventually unseen hand guiding America’s war against terror. He might also have been a brain surgeon, an astronaut or an inventor for all I cared. We are repeatedly told he is irresistible, charming, wildly handsome even in his eighties, etc. etc., but he succeeds only in being implausible and faintly irritating. Historical characters – General de Gaulle, Indira Gandhi, Airey Neave – parade admiringly across his path without, alas, lending him any substance. The bit players (especially his US embassy fixer, who makes possible the fatal liaison) are much better drawn, much more humanly attractive. As a character, Max Ophuls is a dud.

His daughter, too, is a cold fish; his wife, a robust Englishwoman who still goes by her SOE sobriquet the Grey Rat, is initially engaging, but is soon relegated to the sidelines and an unconvincing villainy as our gaze is dragged, once more, back to “the incomparable Max” (yes, Rushdie does once call him this, without apparent irony).

There is, in fact, a hollowness to all the non-Kashmiri parts of this novel. The account of Ophuls’ time in the Resistance is a brisk trot through a series of familiar scenes and plot devices, historically accurate but in a perfunctory kind of way; his daughter’s life in Los Angeles is almost entirely colourless (the only character worth a glance is Olga Volga, “the last surviving descendant of the legendary potato witches of Astrakhan”, but even she is shamefully underused).

Perhaps the Kashmiri parts of the book would also be equally unconvincing to a reader whose background lies there; but I do not think so. Maybe the humanising way of life elegiacally described, and its awful, prophesied end in hatred and killing are a deliberate contrast to the isolating, disengaged societies of the West, with their security systems, panic rooms, barriers of entryphones and voicemail; but, again, I do not think so. This isolated guarded existence may be the one Rushdie has experienced in life, but (judging from its effects) it does not nourish his imagination; the cold streams, high meadows and chenar forests of Kashmir are where his heart catches fire. It is this vision, wistful, melancholy, riotous, that endures.

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