'Fury' by Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie stirs up a bubbling cauldron of anger and angst
Sunday, September 09, 2001
By Mark Kemp, Mark Kemp teaches in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh
In his new novel, Salman Rushdie turns away from Bombay and London to New York, world capital of money, schemes, dreams and the anger of the disappointed.
Moving to New York, "Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker and, since his recent 55th birthday, celibate and solitary by his own ... choice," has fled his wife and young son in London.
He also has abandoned his hometown, Bombay, a "back story" he frequently reminds the reader of so that we know his repressed past will eventually have to resurface.
What has driven him away from the perfect wife and child? What barely contained fury makes him rail at the pretension and artifice he sees everywhere in Manhattan? Yet why does he choose to live in luxury there and patrol the city in a colonial linen suit and Panama hat?
The mystery deepens when the bodies of beautiful young socialites start to appear, their heads smashed in by chunks of concrete, at the same time Solanka is experiencing memory blackouts. During these spells, he is later told, he rants loudly to no one in particular.
Has his rage against privilege and deception -- the "living dolls" he sees walking and talking throughout New York -- erupted into unconscious violence? Why would Solanka wish to destroy these women?
It seems that much of the professor's anger stems from his attachment to the dolls he has created. After they make him rich and famous, they become monstrous in TV, movie, book and merchandise form. Finally, the industry takes them out of his control altogether.
His most famous creation, "Little Brain," a spike-haired lass who tracks down and converses with famous philosophers, has become "his ungrateful Frankendoll," and he banishes her from his life.
Like Bombay and his childhood trauma, the doll-child is merely repressed.
Things change, however, when she comes to life in the shape of Mila Milo, the leader of a group of hip young tech-heads called Webspyder and a great fan of Solanka's doll.
She entices him into psychological sex games, but these evolve from doll-and-creator play to some sort of re-creation of her own aberrant daughter-father relationship. Solanka begins to see in Mila another incarnation of the Furies sent to torment him.
Just in time, a new plaything arrives to counteract the unhealthy effects of Mila. Neela -- rhyming name significant -- is Indian but from the small (fictional) island of Lilliput-Blefusco in the South Pacific. Perfect except for a long scar on her upper arm from a near-fatal car accident, she has a powerful effect on all males, who fall off bicycles or walk into walls in her presence.
Only here does a hint of the magical realism prevalent in Rushdie's early writing make something like a reappearance. Here also appears the weakest part of the novel and a rare example of Rushdie writing purple prose.
His novels always contain two or three tall, lithe adventuresses, all in their early 20s, who usually fall for the male protagonists, no matter how paunchily middle-aged, short, arrogant or stuffy they are.
Passionate romance ensues, and, while in Rushdie's hands these episodes are generally good fantasy and inspire great word-smithery, one occasionally groans and wishes for a bit more realism than magic.
Joyous Neela, improbable antidote to fury, inevitably succumbs to it herself when she gets involved in the revolution brewing in her island homeland. This turn of events, you'll notice, is a long way from the "concrete killer" plot.
Rushdie ambitiously (a word that could describe all of his writing) compares urban rage with ethnic resentment -- though primarily with satire in mind. He goes no easier on his Lilliputians than Swift did on his.
But what happens when the Free Indians of Lilliput-Blefusco take to wearing the science-fiction costumes of Solanka's own new creation, a Web-based fantasy world a la "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," is pure Rushdie -- particularly since the mask of the rebel leader is modeled on Solanka's own face and that of his "queen" on Neela's.
The real and the replica become interchangeable.
Although "Fury" offers no women clad in butterflies or men transformed to goats (read "The Satanic Verses" for those apparitions), it does weave together the intellectual and the irrational. Or, as Solanka observes, "We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust."
With his latest, Rushdie delivers another Molotov cocktail that mixes absurd and mundane, erudite and sentimental.
Mark Kemp teaches in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh.
"FURY"
By Salman Rushdie
Hi, Dave! Welcome.
nimh, thanks so much for posting -- I have no time just now but am glad to continue to discuss this book. There was a lot more I wanted to talk about, and you touched on several things.
Thanks alot guys!! Much appreciated!
Btw - my essay isn't due for a while, my teacher really just wants to see if we read it by making us answer a bunch of general questions... Blah. I've heard a lot of mixed opinions on this book though, so I dont know what to expect. This is also my first reading of anything by Rushdie. Hopefully it'll be good
Piffka wrote:Meanwhile, I think the Furies theme is amazing and works much better than one would think, especially considering the historical day on which this was published, which was 9/11/01, right?
The book was published in March 2001 here in the Netherlands - as that year's bookweek "bookweekbook" - the book you get free as a present everytime you buy a book during the bookweek. Must have been the most voluminous bookweekbook ever - normally it's a short novel written for the occasion by a Dutch writer. Can't imagine that Rushdie wrote the book especially for the Dutch bookweekbook, though .... but you never know. It might have explained the haste it appears to be written in
i looked it up and yes, amazingly, rushdie did write the book in assignment of the dutch bookweek organisation.
that is also why it appeared in holland as bookweekbook in march 2001, and was published only half a year later in english in britain, america, etc.
Hmmm, that's interesting and odd and may explain the rushed and incomplete feeling of the book. I felt an editor should have been more critical.
I've never heard of such a thing, that anyone in the Netherlands who buys a book during "bookweek" receives a bonus book... and 2001 it was this one? It reminds me of something... summer reading stamps at the library!
I must confess that I haven't heard of it
but then - you must remember that
a) I am no english major
b) I live in the south now, always a decade
behind the rest of the planet
c) Far too busy reading books for the FUN
of it. It's one of my major forms of
entertainment aside from music. Who
wants to watch a war on TV all day long.
Good grief.
So - I'm willing to read ANYTHING IF it is well
written, if it can hold one's interest, if it has good
character development and provided I know just
a teensy bit about the book before I get started.
Regarding FURY - if you could be so kind as to fill
me in, I may certainly want to chime in here
before you know it. Is it good? What's it about?
Did YOU enjoy reading it?
OOooops I just saw Craven's concise account of
FURY, sounds verrry interesting, so....
ignore previous post.
nimh, thanks so much for finding that info. INTERESTING! Explains a thing or two or twenty-seven. Definitely rushed. Definitely interesting as a window into Rushdie's methods, at the expense of a polished finished product.
I'm wondering about the first chapter -- it seems as though it was worked on further for several reasons, the most obvious being the polish, but also several very time-specific references, for summer 2001 in New York. I'll see if I can find them and post them. When was your copy published, nimh?
I kind of liked Fury, the only mistake I made was to read the first hundred pages (or so) as well. If you are planning to read Fury, then my advise to you is: get rid of the first hundred pages (or so). Just rip 'em out! Seriously! It's mind-numbing crap!
Without the first hundred pages (or so) the book is a fair read.
oh, so this is a BOOK! wow...thats the forum name!... i am so slow
