The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah against Salman Rushdie has done great damage to Rushdie’s life. It helped bring an end to his marriage; it has made it difficult for him to arrange meetings with his young son; it has effectively exiled him from India and the city he feels to be his home, Bombay; it has forced him into a constricted existence surrounded by security agents and bodyguards.

There is one element of Rushdie’s life that the fatwah has not harmed, however, and that is his literary reputation. The implication seems to be that if people are willing to kill a writer for his expressed views, those views, and the way they are expressed, must therefore be of supreme importance. As Rushdie himself said, “I get treated more seriously as a writer in Iran than I do here.” That is no longer the case: The Satanic Verses, a book of questionable merits, was accorded automatic dignity and stature by the political furor it aroused. Rushdie, at the time of its publication just one of several fortyish English writers (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Angela Carter, among others) who seemed to be neck and neck in their generation’s competition for Great English Novelist, suddenly pulled far ahead of the pack and achieved the status of an oracle. Henceforth everything he wrote would be treated as ex cathedra utterances from a more or less infallible source rather than as mere—or even excellent—novels. It seems to be held that to criticize Rushdie’s books is tantamount to condoning the fatwah, and if a negative review has appeared either here or in England of his latest novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, I have yet to see it.

By an accident of fate Rushdie has become the international spokesman for secularism, tolerance, and intellectual freedom. Not that he is necessarily the wrong spokesman for these values; in fact, his work has always emphasized them. As a writer his strongest suit is political satire, a genre in which he is more amusing and original than most of his contemporaries. Shame, with central characters based on Zia ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was a sharp attack on the corrupt political life of Pakistan, and was quickly banned in that country. The Satanic Verses contained not only the jibes about Islam (camels speaking in the voice of the Prophet, Mecca whores named after Mohammed’s wives) that got him into trouble with the fundamentalists, but a satire on immigrant assimilation and immigrant life in England. Midnight’s Children was an intelligent critique of post-independence India and the politicians and leaders who helped to betray the promises of 1947.

The Moor’s Last Sigh’s most amusing and valuable points are also political ones. Like Midnight’s Children, its central theme is post-independence India, but this time treated in a more pessimistic vein. Rushdie obliquely attacks Indira Gandhi and her cynical self-identification as India’s mother-goddess; he spoofs the Hindu nationalist politics of the Indian populist Bal Thackeray (and the Russian nationalist politics of Zhirinovsky) with a grotesque neo-Fascist character named Raman Fielding; he mocks the absurdities of Soviet propaganda in the 1920s by introducing a gaggle of Indian ham actors hired by the Soviets to impersonate Lenin and spread the Communist gospel on the subcontinent.

But while Rushdie takes, and has always taken, admirable stands against bigotry, intolerance, and zealotry, it does not follow that because he has been the victim of persecution he is a great writer or even always a terribly good one. A quotation from page four of The Moor’s Last Sigh gives enough of the flavor of the novel to make it clear that many readers, if they are honest, might find themselves repelled by Rushdie’s tone and its implied self-love.  

Now, therefore, it is meet to sing of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was right in it, and wrong. Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns (words must suffice, video facility being unavailable) and a set of rowdy tunes for the wake. A Moor’s tale, complete with sound and fury.

What does this indicate? First of all, it is clear that Rushdie is setting out to write something important with a capital I; all this fine phrasemaking amounts to an opening fanfare telling us that what is to come will be grandiose, erudite, yet at the same time “playful,” that most hyped and phoney of postmodern values. The second announcement Rushdie is making is that he means to experiment with language. God forbid! After decades of linguistic theorizing, novels supposedly “about” language, and so-called “language poetry,” most linguistic experimentation has become nothing more than a sign of self-indulgence. Rushdie himself has said of an early, unpublished novel of his that it was written in “sub-Joyce,” and it seems to me that the description applies here as well. Take, for example, the way Rushdie’s hero Moraes (the Moor) characterizes his own mixed ancestry: he is “a jewholic anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur.” This is talk of the most self-conscious sort; even Joyce frequently stumbled under the weight of such labored neologisms, and Rushdie, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, is no Joyce. When an author becomes intoxicated by the sound of his own voice and begins fondly to see himself as a wordsmith, only trouble can be in store.

Rushdie has a professional philosophy that bespeaks overweening self-confidence. “Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody minded. Argue with the world.” Good advice? Yes—but only for really great writers. Those who are even slightly less than great would do well to experiment with control, understatement, and subtlety: unostentatious virtues, but in reality more difficult and often more valuable than the hyperbole and gigantism Rushdie shoots for. Rushdie has not, has never had, any truck with subtlety. The tradition within which he hopefully places himself is that of encyclopedic, anti-realist fantasists like Cervantes, Sterne, Rabelais, and Joyce. Fine company to be in if you can hold your own, but usually he doesn’t. Rushdie specializes in highly-colored surfaces, but everything is on the surface; there is no depth, and no subtext.

The Moor’s Last Sigh is a “saga” covering four generations in a larger-than-life family (a highbrow exploitation of the popular Judith Krantz-style formula). “Mine is the story,” says Moraes,

of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed: me, Moraes Zogoiby, called “Moor,” for most of my life the only male heir to the spice-trade-’n’-big-business crores of the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment from what I had every right to think of as my natural life by my mother Aurora, née da Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists.

Moraes comes from a South Indian merchant dynasty that has made a fortune in pepper, the “black gold” that is the treasure of Southern India. The family business is significant, for in this one family Rushdie aims to reflect all of India and its history. “If it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama’s tall ships across the ocean.”

The Moor’s mother, Aurora, India’s greatest artist, comes from a Portuguese line descended on the wrong side of the sheet from Vasco da Gama, while his father Abraham, who becomes the most powerful businessman in the country, is one of the ancient community of Cochin Jews, and is also an illegitimate descendent--possibly--of Boabdil, the last Moorish Sultan of Granada, expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella.

Rushdie’s ideal is diversity, both racial and religious. In this novel he creates several metaphors with which to celebrate it. First, the da Gama-Zogoiby family itself. Second, Bombay, the multicultural “city of mixed-up, mongrel joy” of Rushdie’s own youth. His third metaphor is an imagined Eden: Moorish Granada before the Reconquista, in which, Rushdie implausibly posits, all races and creeds existed together in a society of infinite tolerance. Aurora the artist and the mother-figure (and, as mother, a metaphor for Mother India herself) makes Granada and Boabdil, its last Sultan, the central subject for her paintings.

But the novel is written from a post-lapsarian point of view. Multicultural Bombay has been split up by racial and religious hatred, and unscrupulous leaders have exploited religious fundamentalism to further their selfish ends. India has fallen far short of the dream that seemed possible at the moment of her independence.

Rushdie relates the failures of the Zogoiby family to these historical failures. The passionate love shared by Abraham and Aurora in their youth sours over time into equally passionate hatred. Abraham uses his gift for business to become a leader of organized crime; Aurora, the devouring and all-powerful mother, effectively destroys all four of her children. The Moor himself is maimed both emotionally and physically. Like other of Rushdie’s heroes, he is plagued by symbolic maladies, in this case a life lived at double-speed: born only four and a half months after conception, he is at the time of narrating his story a thirty-six-year-old in the body of a seventy-two-year-old.

The Moor’s Last Sigh contains Rushdie’s usual glut of odd minor characters, including fascist thugs, “Bollywood” movie stars, yuppie business sharks, and even a reincarnation of Count Dracula hidden away in an Andalusian castle. All of this sounds funny, and frequently it is so, but more frequently Rushdie, in his efforts to achieve a humor of Rabelaisian excess, lays it on with so heavy a hand that he kills humor altogether. Take, for instance, the cringe-making idiolect Rushdie has invented for the female characters of the da Gama family: “Poor kids are such a bungle, seems like they are doomed to tumble,” says Aurora, adding that her eldest daughter is beautiful “just to lookofy at, not to talk-oh to. Poor girl is limitoed in brain.” All of the women in Moraes family talk this cute lingo, and if it is embarrassing in the early pages it becomes increasingly annoying as the novel wears on.

Equally annoying is Rushdie’s grandiose plan to squeeze all of Western literature (and a bit of Eastern) into his scheme. The Moor’s Last Sigh incorporates The Divine Comedy, Medea, The Thousand and One Nights, Shakespeare, Hans Christian Anderson, The Grimm Brothers, El Cid, Dracula —and these are just the ones I picked up on. What does this mean? Is he attempting to place himself in this august company? Is he trying to subsume these earlier narratives into his own? Is he trying to create a book that will encompass all of literature, as well as encompassing all of India? Whatever the inspiration, the gimmick quickly degenerates into a kind of Trivial Pursuit game in which the reader is challenged to match erudition with the writer, a pointless exercise that adds nothing of value to the work of art itself.

The Moor’s Last Sigh will obviously appeal to readers who want something big and meaty, but it is by no means for everyone, in spite of its many critical kudos and the imminent bestowal, no doubt, of important literary prizes. In light of all this, it is interesting to remember the obscenity trial over the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Various “establishment” writers were called upon by the defense to testify to the book’s importance, its integrity as a work of art, its high quality. All these writers did as they were asked, with the exception of E. M. Forster (who as the author of a homosexual novel unpublishable during his own lifetime might have been expected to be the ideal defense witness). Lady Chatterley’s Lover, said Forster, was neither indecent nor immoral, and had every right to be published and distributed; but he could not be persuaded to call it a great novel. And how correct he was, on all counts! Rushdie, likewise, has a right to write what he pleases, to publish it, and to let it find its readership; but, because he has been the victim of barbaric zealotry, we need not place him above criticism, or accept everything he produces as great fiction.

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