THE SPINNER OF YARNS

In his new novel Victory City, Salman Rushdie offers a crowd-pleasing variation on his greatest hits

- Shougat Dasgupta

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, opens with a set piece of barely conceivable horror, as the preternaturally composed widows of a defeated army stride into the hissing flames of a giant bonfire. “Gravely, without making any complaint, they said farewell to one another and walked forward without flinching,” recounts the narrator. “Nor were there any screams when their flesh caught fire and the stink of death filled the air.”

It is—rendered in Rushdie’s famously technicolour prose—the literary equivalent of a scene from a blockbuster like Padmaavat. For all the accolades bestowed on Rushdie, for all that he is one of the literary titans of our age, he remains at heart a mass entertainer, a writer with a distinctively filmi sensibility.

Rushdie, to borrow from the unnamed narrator of Victory City, is “a spinner of yarns...for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers, the old and the young, the educated and the not so educated, those in search of wisdom and those amused by folly, northerners and southerners, followers of different gods and of no gods, the broad-minded and the narrow-minded, men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between, scions of the nobility and rank commoners, good people and rogues, charlatans and foreigners, humble sages, and egotistical fools.” It is a thrilling, stirring sentiment. And even if you’ve heard it all before, even if a part of you knows it’s Rushdie being Rushdie to the point of self-parody, a larger part of you can’t resist standing up to applaud, to emit a wolf whistle or two, or maybe break into a dance in the aisles.