All the rage

Having never read any Salman Rushdie before, I'm not quite sure how to assess 'Fury'. The story - convoluted as it is, and related with a fair amount of skipping back and forth in time - is of Malik Solanka, a retired professor born in India, educated in England and now resident in New York. A dollmaker, he has made a vast fortune from a character called Little Brain who from humble beginnings has mutated into a planet-gobbling monster. Solanka's flight from England was precipitated when he found himself stood over his wife Eleanor and his son Asmaan in the night with a kitchen knife in his hand. However, even in America he finds there is no escape from the anger which builds up inside him.

The problem with 'Fury', for me, is that, impressive as the writing is at times, it just tries to do too much at once. As an exploration of fury, of the unfathomable rage that can spring from even the pettiest incidents, and as a depiction of modern man's intolerance and violence, Rushdie's novel is frequently compelling:

"What was true of him, [Solanka] found himself thinking once again, might also be true to some degree of everyone. The whole world was burning on a shorter fuse. There was a knife twisting in every gut, a scourge for every back. We were all grievously provoked. Explosions were heard on every side. Human life was now lived in the moment before the fury, when the anger grew, or the moment during - the fury's hour, the time of the beast set free - or in the ruined aftermath of a great violence, when the fury ebbed and chaos abated, until the tide began, once again, to turn. Craters - in cities, in deserts, in nations, in the heart - had become commonplace. People snarled and cowered in the rubble of their own misdeeds."

But at the same time it is a vividly-drawn portrait of pre-9/11 New York as a buzzing, seething metropolis and, in broader terms, an attempt not only to take the pulse of America but to offer a perceptive cultural critique:

"Americans were always labelling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn't seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America's need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist."

Passages like this, pithy and intelligent as they are, are rather unsatisfactorily shoehorned into the narrative as thoughts attributed to the central character (remove the words "thought Solanka" above, and what have you got?), when what Rushdie evidently feels a burning need to say would be better suited to a non-fiction essay or series of essays dissecting America in sociological and sociocultural terms. Similarly, the fact that Solanka is a dollmaker allows Rushdie to speculate on themes of control and power, particularly with respect to the nature of fiction (the character Little Brain escapes from the control of her creator, much to his chagrin, while it is revealed that Solanka and his associates all have "back-stories", just like those he creates for his dolls). As it is, all this material, while intriguing in itself, tends to impede the narrative in a way that damages the overall effectiveness of the novel. While Solanka himself is a fascinating character, he's essentially just a vehicle for Rushdie to expound and explore his ideas, and the other characters (Eleanor and the two women who come to occupy central places in his life, Mila Milo and Neela Mahendra) are for the reader almost incidental, as are the relationships between the characters.

Add to this the fact that the ending is strangely rushed, and that Rushdie's fondness for cultural references becomes rather overwhelming (as does the rather smug and self-conscious epigrammatic cleverness of some of his phrases), and I have to conclude that 'Fury' wasn't the masterpiece I was hoping for. If it doesn't quite work as a novel, it's because there's just too much going on at once - that said, though, much of it is still well worth reading and on the whole very well written. I'd always rather come up against too many ideas than too few.

*Following a recommendation from Loaf, I'm now reading 'Money' by Martin Amis. Never let it be said that I don't listen to my public!