Half-made Societies
Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
Jonathan Cape, 286pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781910702031
reviewed by Michael Duffy
From the very title of Rushdie’s latest novel it is clear that he is engaged in a mission to bring the ancient into line with the modern. His transposition of One Thousand and One Nights into the Gregorian calendar is matched by his attempt to bring the text’s mythological jinn (or genies) into downtown New York and Hampstead Heath. What makes the novel feel strikingly new is the author’s attempt to bring the grotesque, magical elements of his work into the digital age. The unrelenting thunderstorms, murders, and possession of popular literary and financial figures are not hidden in secluded houses and barricaded attics but debated online, in tabloid newspapers and on the rolling 24-hour news channels. These institutions name the intrusions of the magical ‘strangenesses,’ a term taken on by Rushdie’s narrator that quickly becomes inadequate for the brutality it signifies.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days takes place over two iterations of its eponymous time frame. Our narrator tells us, from a millennium in the future, of gaps and gateways that open between the novel’s two worlds: Earth and Fairyland (or, as its roots lie in Islamic theology, ‘Peristan’). One such gap opened up between the worlds in the 12th century when Ibn Rushd, an exiled Aristotelian Islamic philosopher, was met by one of the shape shifting creatures in human form called Dunia. She slipped through the gaps, fell in love with the supremely rational being, and spent one thousand and one nights creating an enormous brood of half-human, half-jinni children. These children of the world, or Duniazát, spread across its face over the ensuing centuries before those gaps between the worlds of the once again let its inhabitants enter the mortal realm, this time bringing with them not just an infinitely fertile princess but four fiery male jinn spurred to destructive action by Rushd’s dead antagonist Ghazali – a primary antecedent of fundamentalist Islamic epistemology wholly opposed to Aristotelian reason.
While this opening chapter could be viewed as relatively self-indulgent, given its portrayal of an ageing writer living in exile due to an ongoing battle with extremist Islamic doctrine, the movement into contemporary New York and London that follows is evocative and compelling. This modernisation is a refreshing addition to a novel that encapsulates so many of the themes we expect from its illustrious author. Somewhat predictably we find ourselves privy to a clash of civilisations: of Rushd’s coherence and Ghazali’s incoherence, of rationality and reason against the savagery of religious extremism. And, as our focus shifts to the diverse lives of the Duniazát, Rushdie highlights the position of the migrant in a world at war with itself. The protagonist of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days is the Indian-born son of a firebrand Catholic priest and the ‘great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, give or take a great or two’ of Dunia and Ibn Rushd. Mr Geronimo is a well-travelled landscape gardener in New York whose strangeness is a gradual levitation. The ground that he cultivates and inhabits rejects him, forcing him higher and higher into the sky, forcing him to hide in his apartment for fear of New York’s witch-hunt against the (largely migrant) population who have been afflicted by the magic.
Magical realism as a literary technique has been gaining detractors as it survives into the 21st century. While its proponents, such as the late Gabriel García Márquez, are still venerated for their representations of life under repressive totalitarian regimes, numerous critics note not only the dilution of its radical potency with its overuse but its own totalising of third world experience, as it precludes other, less recognisable voices from the global South. Despite receiving such criticism since the nineties, Rushdie still seems to privilege the magical as the primary mode with which to represent postcolonial or repressed subjects. At times his latest narrator echoes the author’s 1989 essay on Márquez’s technique, in which he stated that ‘[e]l realismo magical […] expresses a genuinely "Third World" consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new.' In Two Years he appears to draw a modern pop-culture comparison to his own narrative style. Tabloid newspapers are trapped within another parallel rhetorical refrain in their attempt to represent one of the magical migrants:
In addition to the utility of sci-fi in mediating the incomprehensible for a mass market, Rushdie also writes warmly about graphic novels in his representation of the youngest Duniazát fighting against the invasion. The Indian-American comic-book artist’s fictional hero bursts into his bedroom from the world of the jinn to announce the arrival of the irrational into modern-day America.
Although this novel is relatively short, its strength lies in the spread of its migrant heroes across not merely geographical space but social classes and generations. The Manichaean battle between the rational, secular good and irrational God-fearing evil may be reductive and expected, but his representation of deterritorialised characters struggling to belong is typically adept, and the novel is highly readable for it. For all the seriousness of its themes it is also at times funny, grotesque and thoroughly childish. As Two Years presents another attempt to mediate the migrant’s experience through recourse to the magical realist techniques of the 1970s and 80s, there is a question to be asked that I think the novel attempts to answer: how successfully does Rushdie’s magical realism break beyond the boundaries of national allegory? Like the strangenesses of this new novel, the narrator notes how such imaginative stories can cling to the world’s deterritorialised citizens. Rushdie has certainly clung to his tried and tested styles and tropes, but the novel is perhaps all the better for it.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days takes place over two iterations of its eponymous time frame. Our narrator tells us, from a millennium in the future, of gaps and gateways that open between the novel’s two worlds: Earth and Fairyland (or, as its roots lie in Islamic theology, ‘Peristan’). One such gap opened up between the worlds in the 12th century when Ibn Rushd, an exiled Aristotelian Islamic philosopher, was met by one of the shape shifting creatures in human form called Dunia. She slipped through the gaps, fell in love with the supremely rational being, and spent one thousand and one nights creating an enormous brood of half-human, half-jinni children. These children of the world, or Duniazát, spread across its face over the ensuing centuries before those gaps between the worlds of the once again let its inhabitants enter the mortal realm, this time bringing with them not just an infinitely fertile princess but four fiery male jinn spurred to destructive action by Rushd’s dead antagonist Ghazali – a primary antecedent of fundamentalist Islamic epistemology wholly opposed to Aristotelian reason.
While this opening chapter could be viewed as relatively self-indulgent, given its portrayal of an ageing writer living in exile due to an ongoing battle with extremist Islamic doctrine, the movement into contemporary New York and London that follows is evocative and compelling. This modernisation is a refreshing addition to a novel that encapsulates so many of the themes we expect from its illustrious author. Somewhat predictably we find ourselves privy to a clash of civilisations: of Rushd’s coherence and Ghazali’s incoherence, of rationality and reason against the savagery of religious extremism. And, as our focus shifts to the diverse lives of the Duniazát, Rushdie highlights the position of the migrant in a world at war with itself. The protagonist of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days is the Indian-born son of a firebrand Catholic priest and the ‘great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, give or take a great or two’ of Dunia and Ibn Rushd. Mr Geronimo is a well-travelled landscape gardener in New York whose strangeness is a gradual levitation. The ground that he cultivates and inhabits rejects him, forcing him higher and higher into the sky, forcing him to hide in his apartment for fear of New York’s witch-hunt against the (largely migrant) population who have been afflicted by the magic.
Magical realism as a literary technique has been gaining detractors as it survives into the 21st century. While its proponents, such as the late Gabriel García Márquez, are still venerated for their representations of life under repressive totalitarian regimes, numerous critics note not only the dilution of its radical potency with its overuse but its own totalising of third world experience, as it precludes other, less recognisable voices from the global South. Despite receiving such criticism since the nineties, Rushdie still seems to privilege the magical as the primary mode with which to represent postcolonial or repressed subjects. At times his latest narrator echoes the author’s 1989 essay on Márquez’s technique, in which he stated that ‘[e]l realismo magical […] expresses a genuinely "Third World" consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called "half-made" societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new.' In Two Years he appears to draw a modern pop-culture comparison to his own narrative style. Tabloid newspapers are trapped within another parallel rhetorical refrain in their attempt to represent one of the magical migrants:
One tabloid called her Madame Magneto. Another preferred a Star Wars reference: The Empress Strikes Back. Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave people a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real word’s non-CGI mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible.
In addition to the utility of sci-fi in mediating the incomprehensible for a mass market, Rushdie also writes warmly about graphic novels in his representation of the youngest Duniazát fighting against the invasion. The Indian-American comic-book artist’s fictional hero bursts into his bedroom from the world of the jinn to announce the arrival of the irrational into modern-day America.
Although this novel is relatively short, its strength lies in the spread of its migrant heroes across not merely geographical space but social classes and generations. The Manichaean battle between the rational, secular good and irrational God-fearing evil may be reductive and expected, but his representation of deterritorialised characters struggling to belong is typically adept, and the novel is highly readable for it. For all the seriousness of its themes it is also at times funny, grotesque and thoroughly childish. As Two Years presents another attempt to mediate the migrant’s experience through recourse to the magical realist techniques of the 1970s and 80s, there is a question to be asked that I think the novel attempts to answer: how successfully does Rushdie’s magical realism break beyond the boundaries of national allegory? Like the strangenesses of this new novel, the narrator notes how such imaginative stories can cling to the world’s deterritorialised citizens. Rushdie has certainly clung to his tried and tested styles and tropes, but the novel is perhaps all the better for it.