Fabulous happenings

Salman Rushdie has long inspired ambivalence among readers. His talent has never been seriously in question – witness the swift canonisation and enduring affection accorded his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – nor have his bona fides as a public intellectual who has stood against intolerance and cant, even under the threat of death. Yet his body of work has been marked by fictions that run the gamut from interestingly flawed to merely self-indulgent.

Now comes his thirteenth novel – published in the wake of a brutal public attack by a fanatic nursing a decades-long grievance, leaving the author blind in one eye and without the use of a hand – and it proves to be a triumph in every regard. It is as if Rushdie anticipated the threat of violence hanging over him was about to be realised and found courage and focus in that knowledge. 

Victory City is a shrewdly constructed tale, ambitious in scope, written in prose that slips between registers with acrobatic litheness. Rarely has a narrative been so unillusioned in its world view, while refusing to relinquish its idealism. Never has Rushdie so successfully married imaginative play and considered political impulse.