Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is erudite without flaunting it, an amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love.
Rushdie has a fractal imagination: plot buds from plot, endlessly. There are at least 1,001 stories and substories, and nearly as many characters. All you need to know is that they’re mostly highly entertaining, amusing and ingenious.
The new novel quickly becomes a breathless mash-up of wormholes, mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy and theology. Behind its glittery encrustations, the plot resembles the bare outline for a movie about superheroes.
While there are flashes of brilliance, the narrative gets bogged down with repetitive ideas, dull patches and a confusing structure. Rushdie is a born storyteller with a seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of knowledge, but sometimes his postmodern antics and exuberant language are not conducive to easy, pleasurable reading.
Rushdie defends secularism without acknowledging how it has been long bound to the institutions and ideologies of capitalism and colonialism that are responsible for many of the ills of the globalized world that Rushdie diagnoses — violence, inequality, slavery, and ecological disaster.
Any sense of pleasure one might derive from Rushdie's indisputably freewheeling imagination is sabotaged by how little he appears to care for its fruits.
Rushdie can’t ever be boring, he’s too smart for that, but the clanky machinations of his polemic drag this rumination on religion and faith into the muck of mixed blessings.
The dark delights that spring from his imagination in this novel have the spellbinding energy that has marked the greatest storytellers since the days of Scheherazade.
The narrative choreography proves once again that while Rushdie is rightfully considered a world-class storyteller, the novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.
