the good author returns with an admirable relic

Some novels land after years of anticipation; Victory Metropolis, against this, appears like a relic from a earlier age. The guide was accomplished earlier than Salman Rushdie’s stabbing four-and-a-half months in the past, and it’s success that his fifteenth novel isn’t posthumous – regardless of the essential verdict, we should always admire the sunshine of that luck. Alternatively, the guide is now fated to obtain extra scrutiny than it’ll bear.
Bisnaga, the eponymous metropolis, is basically historic. You can discover it within the Kingdom of Vijayanagara in India, which lasted from 1318–1565 – additionally the span of this novel, and of the lifetime of a lady, Pampa Kampana, granted divine longevity. Within the twenty first century, an unidentified narrator digs up a protracted poem by Kampana, in regards to the empire she created by magic, and retells it in “plainer” prose: the squabbling kings, the vicissitudes in battle and peace, and although all of it, Kampana’s endurance, topped and exiled by turns, pulling the royal strings whereas bedding some cunning Portuguese friends.
There’s a lot to admire about Victory Metropolis: swift tempo, unfussy construction, fluent and spirited prose. Rushdie hasn’t wavered in his devotion to fiction: if, within the previous Didion line, “we inform ourselves tales so as to reside”, it’s not merely to move the time, however to grasp that “life” entails pledging, and receiving, belief in different methods of viewing the world. Mutual respect grows uncommon in Bisnaga, as factions and sects seem – but, having conjured an allegory becoming to present-day India, Rushdie demurs, maintaining the novel’s philosophy obscure and psychology paper-thin. (Solely at one late second does actual life intervene. As a Hindu king receives 5 Muslim sultans, he types “a variety of disagreeable ideas about followers of that faith which it’s pointless to repeat right here”. If Rushdie wrote that as a wink on the fatwa – no must go there! – it sounds a lot much less humorous now.)
Victory Metropolis thinks it safer to stay to the mysterious smoothness of fantasy. But that model requires care as properly, lest it turn out to be cartoonery. Alas, we watch magical feats carried out with out guidelines or stakes, and repetitive set-ups resulting in tiresome one-line gags. A chapter begins with Kampana, who not too long ago fled to the woods, all of the sudden sending a follower again to Bisnaga: “I can’t depend on crows and parrots endlessly.” That is hardly Scheherazade, or a novelist with architectural plans.
The novel is, not less than, energised by its feminist stance. Kampana, per prophecy, will develop up “to combat to verify… that males get thinking about ladies in new methods”. Her failure is preordained as a tragedy – blame the boys and their combat for the toys. However that stance doesn’t run too deep: all the very best ladies are “lovely” – a fault shared by Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s 2012 memoir – in addition to sturdy, courageous and good. For masculinity, flip the coin. Even when Bisnaga’s founders play chess, “being males, [they] severely underestimated the queen” – each clunky and unconvincing, since they’ve simply watched Kampana conjure a metropolis from filth.