Shalimar the Clown
By Salman Rushdie
Random House. 398 pp. $25.95
Salman Rushdie began his career by writing advertisements, but his life has been a deadly test of the old adage that "All publicity is good publicity." A half-dozen international bestsellers, a Booker Prize and serious attention from every important literary journal in the world may never eclipse the most infamous negative review of the 20th century: the death sentence issued to him by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
With a $5 million bounty on his head, the author of The Satanic Verses entered the age of terror before the rest of us -- having to worry about being murdered in his home, gunned down on the street, blown up on the subway. Sixteen years ago, it seemed bizarre that a man should have to live under the threat of Islamist terrorists on the other side of the globe, but now we all live that way, and Rushdie greets us with a dazzling new novel about the roots of extremism, the fragile beauty of religious harmony and the twisted strands of personal and political motives. Unlike his previous novel -- the acerbic Fury, which, in an eerie coincidence, was released on Sept. 11, 2001 -- Shalimar the Clown seems to have allowed Rushdie the time and space to sublimate his terrors into a story of deep humanity and unsettling insight.
Speaking at the Paraty Literary Festival in Brazil this summer, he told the Christian Science Monitor that the events of Sept. 11 "showed me that the stories of the world are hopelessly entwined with each other." Shalimar the Clown exemplifies that entanglement with its vast geographical scope, moving from Kashmir to France to America, and from present to ancient days. A subtler expression of the world's integrated condition, though, is Rushdie's literary dexterity, his ability to cast sections of this novel as different genres. Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy, wartime adventure, political satire, village legend -- they're all blended here magnificently.
The story opens with the gruesome murder of an elderly, international celebrity named Maximilian Ophuls, a man who combines the political gravitas of Henry Kissinger with the sex appeal of Ricardo Montalban. He's standing outside his daughter's L.A. apartment when his chauffeur, Shalimar, slits Max's throat and runs away. Investigators initially conclude that it's a political hit: Just the day before, Max, a retired U.S. ambassador to India, had emerged from a long public silence to deliver a diatribe on the destruction of Kashmir. Shalimar, it's soon revealed, is an international terrorist, born and trained in Kashmir. But Max's daughter discovers that the motive behind her father's murder is far more personal and frightening than it first appears.
At this point, the novel shifts back to the little Kashmiri village of Pachigam, where the 14-year-old Shalimar fell deeply in love with Boonyi, a Hindu girl. They were both born in 1947, the same year Pakistan and India were carved from the British raj, and Kashmir -- "a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant's teeth"-- began its tragic decline from what Rushdie paints as an ecumenical paradise to a sectarian hell. Shalimar's family manages a group of traveling performers, and Boonyi is one of the most beautiful dancers. "The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story," Shalimar thinks in love-struck reverie. "In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred. This was how things had to be. This was Kashm
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