Victory City by Salman Rushdie review: Bravo to this funny, cynical, bewildering mix of satire and fantasy
Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Game of Thrones; The Wizard of Oz; and one of those illuminated manuscripts from India where animal headed deities mingle with beautiful princesses, and you get an idea of Salman Rushdie’s latest: Victory City.
To that mix you can also throw in The Sleeping Beauty, because there’s the same awakening scene here (except a girl does the kissing). But what unites this bewildering mix of fantasy, Hindu myth, Sanskrit saga, actual history and satire is the voice of Salman Rushdie himself: funny, cynical and idealistic.
The plot revolves around a young girl, Pampa Kampana, who is possessed by a goddess at the age of nine, who magically founds a city called Bisnaga, sees dynasties fall, and finally dies at the age of 247, blinded, but otherwise looking remarkably good for her age. And that’s the simple take on it.
The novel was written before Rushdie was stabbed and half blinded last year at a festival intended to celebrate the US as a place of asylum for persecuted writers; the attacker, said that he did not care for Rushdie because of his criticism of Islam. The sense of retrospective irony is almost overwhelming, because if there’s a moral to Victory City, it’s the merits of pluralism and tolerance, and the dreariness of fanaticism. Indeed our heroine, is herself blinded by a preposterous enemy. In Victory City, the extremists are Hindus – Rushdie plainly had an eye to contemporary Indian politics – but the moral is the same.
The conceit is that the story is a modern edition of an ancient manuscript found in a sealed clay jar in the ruins of a city, with editor’s notes thrown in. It’s also a feminist fable. The story begins when a little girl watches all the women she knows commit suttee, or immolate themselves silently on a fire, after the defeat of their menfolk in war. The last of them is her mother. She won’t let that happen again.
She is given refuge by an ascetic monk who abuses her. Fortunately, she is then possessed by a goddess, Pampa, who enables her to endow a sack of seeds with the potency to become a city plus its inhabitants. This she hands to a couple of cowherds, Hukka and Bukka, who promptly take charge of her creation. She whispers into the inhabitants’ ears their stories, and there you go: a ready made city. Hukka and Bukka ponder whether their male subjects are circumcised, then decide, “I don’t care if you don’t care”.
One problem about living 247 years is that things repeat themselves, particularly Pampa Kampana’s comely European boyfriends. Another is that there’s a lot of dynasties to get through. Our heroine is ahead of her time, and when she decides that her daughters should succeed to the throne, she is driven from the court, takes refuge in a magical forest and falls asleep for a hundred years.
All right; sometimes our author’s imagination runs riot, but it’s a good fault.
Bravo, Salman Rushdie.
