Steve_Bamlett_blog

Reading Quichotte Salman Rushdie (2019) London, Jonathan Cape

This novel ends as impressively as the stature of its author and its shortlisted status might suggest it does. There is constant reflexivity – it is a frameworking novel about the author of a novel within that novel, toying with Barthes ‘death of the author’ concept. It makes deaths and endings, even teleology more generally, into a rationale for the apocalyptic novel form, such that we end always with the fact that ‘belief’ is a necessity for construction(s) of the world, however various and potentially contradictory these constructions be. Without teleology stories are riddled by holes like the landscapes crossed by Sancho in his flight to free extinction. Stories are space & time with a sieve-like structure with nowhere for their contents to go but into the void. We have to believe in people to make novel-reading at all worth the time and space it usurps in our lives.

This novel is more than usually reflective of Rushdie’s oeuvre, as another authorly ghost construction in the machine. It is even more reflective of other oeuvres and even literary canons, and plays games with our variable knowledge of these. At one point he creates a world of people metamorphosing into mastodons which only recalls Ionesco’s Rhinoceros fully if you know that play (where there the monster is a rhinoceros not a mastodon) despite the fact he calls a central character in that section ‘Jonesco’ (sic.). Nevertheless near the end of the novel the novelist, Brother – Sam Duchamp discusses the use of Ionesco and its rationale with his son. We are never at the end of the ‘making of many books’ which then make and remake themselves in reading and interpreting Rushdie. My favourite game with Don Quixote is the absolutely correct analogy made between it and Pinocchio. Sancho becomes a puppet granted a life or, at least, an ‘insula’ (in some riff on brain function as the source of consciousness), of life that is not only mechanistic in nature.

Nevertheless, I sometimes feel that Rushdie’s style is sometimes no longer urgent, nor that it is cleverly deconstructing literary language in its process of becoming literary language. Perhaps here it feels sometimes a kind of signature style. Hopping about in a way that shouts out, I am Sir Salman Rushdie, like the unnamed Jiminy Cricket at its heart of the Sancho sub-plot.

There is much about the right to end life voluntarily in this book of endings and even much about the role of drug technology in bridging the real and the magic (or fantasy) without the help of Rushdie’s notion of ‘magic realism’. Rushdie is trying to dig deeper into his own themes and the kind of modernity they represent – not only here but in the concern with world migration and diaspora, with its heavy recall of the motif of the fall from the sky that is so important in The Satanic Verses.

Again, as in The Enchantress of Florence he pokes at the two-way traffic between Occidental and Oriental literature. Rushdie’s novels of course in theme and form and length are ambitious and I think that is why some hate them. By the time I finish them, he wins me over every time. But I have to admit, my favourite remains The Moor’s Last Sigh.