Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie's latest novel bears the fingerprint of its author: like his previous works, it is an expertly implemented, well paced story that swings dexterously between different times, places, and people, and yet maintains a continuity. I read the book quite rapidly, in a few long sessions. The novel certainly grips the reader.

Like always, Rushdie has done his homework well: the book is full of minute detail and paints a vivid and life-like picture of its multiple scenes. Yet, after completing the book I was dissatisfied. Why is that?

At surface, the book is a story of a triangle of people: a man, his daughter, and the mother's deceived and furious husband, Shalimar the Clown. A bit deeper it is a story of India and Kashmir, a lost paradise utterly devastated by both external and internal actors.

The man is one of the forces: while acting as the USA ambassador to India, he meets a Kashmir dancer and falls in love with her; thus, the daughter is born. Of cosmopolitan middle-European origin, the ambassador is painted a man of many admirable qualities: he is a hero of French resistance during WWII, he is an accomplished economist connected with creating the post-war western world from ashes, he is a star diplomat, he is a spy-master par excellence. Yet he also is an amoral womaniser whose love to the Kashmiri woman rapidly causes her ruin.

The subtext of the ambassador as a representative of the entire Western world is easy to read: his compassion and love to India and Kashmir, even if genuine, is shallow and ultimately empty. What puzzles me, nevertheless, is why the author chooses to call him Max Ophuls. I know who the real Max Ophüls was, and I know some of his work. I expect that those readers who are not movie freaks will not know the late 40's-early 50's movies of the German-French director, semi-obscure if influential as he was. So why this name? Is Rushdie under-estimating, or over-estimating the reader? I cannot see his point here, unless it is to create confusion in some readers.

The deceived husband, Shalimar, is the bête noir of the story. The actor-acrobat turns to an international terrorist who kills his targets with skill and vengeance. He is pictured as the mirror image of the ambassador, his eventual victim. He is fanatical, skilful, strong and dangerous. In his single-minded devotion, he is more like the Terminator character than a real human being. All in all, Rushdie makes little attempt to explain or understand Shallimar. Perhaps this would have been too much to expect from an author who was himself for years a living target of religious fanatics.

In my reading, the daughter, India Ophüls. also becomes more an amalgam of ideas than a real novel character. Cast in Los Angeles, the city with no center or sense of proportion, she is depicted as rootless and uncertain of what she is. Only after she reaches out to her hidden past, to her mother and Kashmir, does the find the strength to face Shalimar in the eventual and predictable showdown. To underline this, Rushdie makes her adopt the name her mother had whispered in her ear after birth, Kashmira.

Indeed it may be that Kashmir itself is the only genuine character of the novel: her nature and landscapes; her trees, flowers, and animals; her villages and customs; and her suffering people. Only here Rushdie is expressing real compassion and warmth towards his creation.

Perhaps there are more sophisticated ways to read Shalimar the Clown; I don't know. For me, nevertheless, the shallowness of its characters left a unpleasant feeling. They did not stand for themselves; instead, they stood for something else. I felt manipulated, and I do not like that feeling, irrespective of the direction I'm manipulated to.

I could not help comparing this reading experience to the recent novel of another popular and skilled author, the Until I Find You by John Irving. Like Rushdie, Irving too is a story-teller who likes to spread his novels over wide distances in time and space. However, Irving's characters, even if fantastic, are more complex and less easy to explain. More than that, I sense more warmth and compassion in his work. He likes his characters, and wants the reader to like them too.