Brilliant, erudite, but kinda empty? Salman Rushdie’s “Fury”
(A review that may contain ‘spoilers’)

“It was a perfect April day at the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. The government was simultaneously ahead in the polls and unpopular, and the prime minister, Tony Ozymandius, seemed shocked at the paradox: what, you don’t like us? But it’s us folks, we’re the good guys! People, people: it’s me!”

“Fury” feels brilliantly contemporary and topical, and is written with a wonderful eye for modern mores, and an ear for current conversations. The prose often dazzles with the unexpected. However, these may be the sum total of its virtues. Otherwise it feels like a rather ordinary outing from a truly brilliant writer.

I enjoyed “Fury” more than “Gould’s Book of Fish”: not that that would be hard. It is, however, yet another novel where it’s hard to tell what the story is finally about.

Ostensibly it’s the story of a man gripped by a rage so boundless that he attributes it to the Furies (the Graeco-Roman triple goddess of revenge, familiar to all Neil Gaiman readers). Traditionally, the Furies hounded murderers (particularly those who killed close relatives) into madness or suicide. Paradoxically, Professor Malik Solanka feels that it is this divine fury that almost drove him to kill his wife and child. Having found himself standing over them with a knife, he flees to New York.

One suspects parallels between Rushdie and Solanka.

Solanka is an Indian-born former Cambridge academic, who turned to making dolls and puppets. Eventually he created a cult TV series based around a time-travelling doll called Little Brain who meets history’s great thinkers. His creation becomes a success beyond his control, and its ensuing commercial debasement also fuels his rage.

On abandoning his family he moves to that calmest, least populated, most likely place to hide from one’s anger at humanity - New York - where he decides to live a celibate recluse. This doesn’t last long.

The novel is in three books: in the first Solanka is celibate (so it is mostly about his relationship with his wife Eleanor); in the second he takes as a lover a dangerously intense fan, Mila, the daughter of a Yugoslav poet with the unfortunate surname Milosovich (an absent father, killed at the airport on returning to his war-ravaged country to oppose the other Milosovich); and the third book in which his lover is Neela, a woman so beautiful she stops traffic. (Neela too has a war to fight, in the awkwardly-named nation of Lilliput-Blefuscu.) Three books, three women, three Furies. Ultimately, these women heal him: he begins to make dolls once more, and to acknowledge the family whose memory he has “killed” - his Indian parents and past.

It starts off full of observational wit, peopled with improbable characters; yet a violence hangs over it all. It is neither tragedy or black comedy: as Solenka reflects towards the end, it is full of “slightly tragic but mostly farcical events”.

Perhaps its greatest achievements is how current it feels: the contemporary events of the last US election year are captured brilliantly - Monica Lewinsky, Hilary Clinton’s ambition, “Toy Story”, digs at high-profile academics and numerous other references ricochet through the prose.

(We discussed this trend in novels at the Book Club of Intestinal Fortitude: life now moves so fast novelists seem obliged to set ‘present day’ stories in a specific year, almost apologising for their inevitably being dated on arrival in a reader’s hands.)

Dolls, fiction becoming life, the triple-goddess, murder, racial hatred, war, father-figures entering wars, America as a place where you can re-invent yourself (or at least sell your Old World story). These are the novel’s recurrent themes, and they’re manipulated skilfully - even if you can see the wires.

Those who dislike novels populated solely by gorgeous women who sleep with average-looking older men will find a good bit to criticise in “Fury”. The women are beautiful and basically serve as healers to an emotionally damaged, rather infantile, and not terribly sympathetic character by allowing him to regress into his denied past, thus becoming more childish still. Yes, they are smart, intelligent, and passionate - but Solanka does not view them as equals, or even mortals. Their youth and beauty make them Divinities; Solenka even re-invents Neela as Nike, Goddess of Victory.

The “effect” of Neela’s beauty (men falling down stairs, traffic accidents, falling window cleaners) is cartoonish, reducing her to a stereotype. There is a passing reference to her finding her own beauty an alien shell, a mask she stares out through - but this doesn’t square off with her physical ease and comfort with nudity.

There will be those who think this an anti-American novel, but at worst it is perhaps anti-New York. (And not even that, really, at least no more than Carey’s “The Tax Inspector” was anti-Sydney.) Really it is about a generation gap - a sense that Solenka is not truly in touch with the passionate free-market capitalism or global politics of the twenty-somethings around him. Solenka admits he has lost touch with pop culture, that he can no longer cast imaginary movies because he doesn’t know the contemporary stars.

New York disturbs him not because it is American (as a multi-ethnic melting pot he makes the point that New York belongs to everywhere, not the US) but because it is the apotheosis of naked capitalism and the antithesis of British reserve. As I quoted in a previous blog, Rushdie points out that Anti-Americanism is just Americanism in disguise: conceding, as it does, that the United States is the only game in town.

The novel’s real failing though is the lack of credible plot resolution. It degenerates into a bedroom comedy, then political farce. Like Chip in Franzen’s “The Corrections”, Solenka must enter a civil-war zone in the role of internet mogul, and then confront his doppelganger. In “The Corrections” there is a sufficient air of realism to pull this off. Chip goes to Lithuania - a country that exists and which is described in plausible detail; Solenka goes to Lilliput-Blefuscu, a fantastically named place where, surreally, rebels adopt the identity of his puppets. It doesn’t ring true, it is rushed - and hard to see what it adds to the character’s development as opposed to the novel’s symbolism.

Ultimately, this is not a wide-ranging social novel, it describes one man’s journey - a rather bewildering retreat into childhood, seemingly needed to reconnect with his four-year-old son.

I was left unsatisfied.

If this is a redemption novel, I wanted to feel more sympathetic to Solenka at the end, not as indifferent as when I started. The whole story is too arch, too detached. It is littered with gems of prose and observation, as someone said of Chandler, “a kind of lightning strikes on every page”. Ultimately, it feels like an enjoyably discursive biographical essay, but about people who are perhaps neither knowable, or even particularly likeable.

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