Though fantastical in nature, Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights reads like a deeply personal work.
Salman Rushdie's latest work is a boisterous novel of ideas, a spirited manifesto for reason disguised as a tale of a jinn war lasting exactly two years, eight months and 28 nights, or 1,001 nights.
The events in the novel take place a millennium from now, as well as in present times and a millennium before. A wormhole collapses time-space and also genres in the story, and what results is hallmark Rushdie: a composite of magic realism, mythology, science fiction and straight-up fantasy.
The narrators live in a future age of reason, when humanity's better nature has triumphed over its inner darkness, when even the human genome has been mastered. The novel is their historical account of "The Dissolution," a pivotal moment in humanity's defeat of unreason.
The heroes of the Dissolution are jinns who don't know they're jinns, inhabiting a world much like today's New York. Mr. Geronimo, originally Raphael Hieronymous Manezes from Bombay, is a gardener and adherent of Voltaire's dictum: il faut cultiver son jardin. Jimmy Kapoor is a frustrated young comic-book artist working at a cousin's accountancy firm in Queens. Baby Storm appears suddenly, inexplicably, swaddled in an Indian flag, at City Hall. Teresa Saca is an invincible gold digger seething after rejection by a hedge fund nabob.
These protagonists share two traits: an absence of earlobes and an unaccountable affinity with thunderbolts. It falls to their common ancestor, the earlobe-free Dunia, Aasmaan Peri, Skyfairy, Lightning Princess of the jinn world Peristan, to teach them about their half-jinn origins and to lead them in a War of the Worlds against the dark jinn.
The battle, marked by "strangenesses" – floating, crushing, shape-shifting – is entertaining enough, but its philosophical underpinnings are more compelling.
For the dark jinn are soldiers of the long-dead Ghazali of Tus, doctrinaire theologian and author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, an attack on Aristotlean philosophy. Ghazali believes that fear can, and should, drive unbelievers to god.
His similarly dead rival, Ibn Rushd of Cordoba, is Dunia's lover circa 1195, and the father of an expansive brood of half-jinn, half-human mongrels. Ibn Rushd defends philosophies so liberal that he can't even speak them, for they lead to secularism.
The feud between these rivals continues a thousand years after death as they argue, comically, in dust form. It is when Ghazali's dust mobilizes the dark jinn to whip up religiosity that the War of the Worlds begins.
Though fantastical in nature, Two Years reads like a deeply personal work. Rushdie's father adopted their family name to honour the historical Ibn Rushd. The historical Ibn Rushd did defend Aristotlean philosophy against attacks from the historical Al Ghazali.
And the battle between reason and unreason, or specifically between secularism and fundamentalism, resonates with the author's life. Intended, in his own words, as "an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation," his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was mistaken for an attack on Islam. In his memoir Joseph Anton, Rushdie has chronicled the harrowing decade he spent in hiding following Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa and the ban on the novel in India.
Yet even in hiding Rushdie fought back with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a rousing cry for free speech, which, of all his work, most resembles Two Years. Rushdie has since defended free speech staunchly, taking an uncompromising line in even the thorniest debates, such as those around Charlie Hebdo. Though he has written about fundamentalism in previous novels, this is the first one in which he tackles it head on.
A further personal note in Two Years seems to come in the evocation of Mr. Geronimo's Bombay. This is the city that, before Hindu nationalism turned it into Mumbai, formed Rushdie. He celebrates its openhearted, mongrel spirit through this character, the illegitimate son of a local pastor, a man so bastardized that his memories of Genesis amount to joyous babble: "And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux."
Indeed, Rushdie's references to India and the novel's Indian-origin characters are so wistful that Two Years can feel like a tribute to that country's lost liberalism. Yet it is simultaneously a New York novel, with hallmarks such as St. Mark's Place, the Hudson's tidal estuaries and the Society for Ethical Culture making their appearances. Even Ed Koch gets a mention.
Like the best Rushdie novels, Two Years is playful and inventive, and also intellectually bracing. The narrators are unerringly postmodern, problematizing, as postmodern scholars must, the authenticity of their "historical" account: "We are keenly aware that much of it has degenerated from the status of a factual account towards the condition of legend, speculation or fiction."
They also end on a melancholy note about what is lost in an age of reason. This may or may not suffice as consolation for us mere mortals, stuck in our own battles between reason and unreason, with no jinns to call on.
Manjushree Thapa is a Toronto-based novelist and essayist from Nepal.