destroy....This is what we are, what we civilize
ourselves to disguise--the terrifying human animal in us, the
exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of
creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear
each other limb from fucking limb.
Malik Solanka, the fifty-five-year-old former
Cambridge professor and improbably successful dollmaker at the
center of Fury, understands the dangers of slipping into
the dark, destructive side of fury. As his wife and small son
lay asleep in their London home, he'd stood over her with a knife
"for a terrible, dumb minute" feeling, as Rushdie puts
it, "murder on the brain." The experience--of which
Solanka's wife remains ignorant--is frightening enough to propel
Solanka out of the family, and he flees to New York. Now, as
Fury opens, Solanka lives alone in a richly appointed
Manhattan apartment (where, Rushdie tells us, parts of Woody
Allen's Husbands and Wives were filmed), and he wanders
the streets, raging silently over the superficialities and falsehoods
contemporary society offers up as a reason to work, a reason
to deny the truth.
Solanka has come to America--the land of self-creation--to
'erase' his previous self (marriage, parenthood and all), and
the computer metaphor implicit in the erasure image is central
to Rushdie's anti-digital themes. The computer age is corrupted,
and its code needs to be 'de-bugged,' just as Solanka's self-code
must be. "If he could cleanse the whole machine," Rushdie
tells us, "then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the
trash." But an obvious contradiction seems to lie at the
heart of Solanka's flight to New York. The forest dweller--traditionally,
a Hindu who has given up his family and possessions in pursuit
of enlightenment--moves by definition away from society, not
into its very heart. Solanka's own attempt at being a forest-dweller
(for surely in some sense that it was his flight represents)
is greatly complicated by his immersion not into the society-free
forest but instead into New York's self-absorbed, fury-driven
wrong-headedness.
Inevitably, the problems Solanka sees in himself
also appear around him in Manhattan, and while the parallels
may seem a little too easy, it does set up a surprising plot
twist. After he drinks himself into a series of blackouts and
awakens to read that a man matching his description has killed
yet another New York City woman, Solanka (and we readers) must
ask: has Solanka's fury reached a new level of destructiveness?
Fury is not
a fast-paced serial-killer thriller. Rushdie is probably incapable
of writing such a thing. In fact, Fury is a bit slow,
overall, at least when it comes to plot. Too much of the action
offered in the first half of the novel takes place in the past
(thereby robbing it of dramatic urgency and immediacy), and the
narrative in the present is too often a matter of Solanka's dramatically
static if angry observations about contemporary society. Indeed,
Rushdie's creative energies here are largely directed into playfully
pun-driven rhetorical rantings. Admittedly, some of it is impressive
in its rhythms and scope:
O Dream-America, was civilization's quest
to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood,
in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show
greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional
booth of Ricki [sic] and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered
each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber
comedies designed for young people who sat in the darkness howling
their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable
tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of
the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation?
Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row
of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where
everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could
come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking
lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush?
Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children
were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads,
ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of
the Table Round?
But Solanka has to carry more than his relatively
uninteresting character can handle. He's too passive--often,
he's simply a keen observer with a backstory--and it weakens
the novel's narrative thrust considerably. At one point, Rushdie
writes, "This about New York Solanka liked a lot--this sense
of being crowded out by other people's stories, of walking like
a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which
didn't need him as a character." The reader can't help thinking
that Solanka himself often seems crowded out of his own novel.
Fury never achieves the beautiful speed of The Satanic
Verses' opening section or the rich complexities Rushdie
offered in the storyline of Midnight's Children. Rushdie
certainly remains a top-tier writer to follow, but this time
out, it's the themes behind the story that will hold readers.
And for a writer associated with fantastical, magical realist-driven
storylines, that's strange, indeed.
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