Volume 48, Number 15 · October 4, 2001
Puppet Show
By John Leonard
Fury
by Salman Rushdie
Random House, 259 pp., $24.95
From Salman Rushdie we expect messy, but not slapdash. A Rushdie mess is momentum's residue. The novelist whose great themes are migration, mutation, and metamorphosis, whose habitats are time machines and transit zones, can't sit still. Even before the fatwa, he was easily distracted, compulsively digressive, and always in a hurry. This fast-forward of what he called his 'mongrel self' left behind a lot of larvae. 'Who am I?' asked the Satanic Versifier in 1988. 'Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?' For such insouciance, Rushdie would be punished by the mullahs. As one of his characters, a photographer, discovered in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, there are parts of the world 'where you can be murdered for carrying a tune.' Exile, outcast, refugee, fugitive, Flying Dutchman, moving target—since 1989, we have been reading his books through the bonfires of their burning.
Review, 3834 words
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