Aged nine, Pampa Kampana watches her mother, and all the women of the tiny province where she was born, build a huge bonfire and walk ‘unflinchingly’ into the flames.
Aged nine, Pampa Kampana watches her mother, and all the women of the tiny province where she was born, build a huge bonfire and walk ‘unflinchingly’ into the flames.
The reason is ostensibly a humiliating military defeat in a battle not significant enough to have a name. Afterwards, the young girl is possessed by the spirit of the goddess Pampa, the local name of Parvati, lover of Shiva. That is: Pampa’s words start coming out of her mouth; the child herself is detached from them, but she becomes a prophet and a miracle-worker, and later a poet.
This book purports to be the rediscovered manuscript of the 24,000 verses she wrote about the founding of the city of Bisnaga, towards the end of her 250-year-long life.
Towards the end of the novel, she is blinded by the returning king; in his absence (more wars), Pampa had made the city wonderful. The king accuses her of plotting to overthrow him and rule in his place, permanently. Pampa, who learned immediately after her mother’s death there was nothing that men could do that women couldn’t do too, including rule, replies, ‘I will say only that it is a kind of derangement in the world where a mere accusation, supported by nothing, feels like a guilty verdict. That way, madness lies for us all.’
The figure of the beleaguered story-teller has featured large in Rushdie’s work ever since the fatwa, under whose malign shadow he has now worked for by far the larger part of his creative life. He has reacted to this barbaric edict not only with unbelievable courage but with a fierce determination not to be silenced.
In August last year, Rushdie was very nearly killed by a fanatic, unborn at the time the book that engendered the fatwa, The Satanic Verses, was published; it was reported that he could lose an eye.
Whether he has or not I do not know; neither do I know whether he wrote the passage about Pampa’s blinding before or after the incident. Knowing how long it takes for a book to reach print, and suspecting that one might feel disinclined to work after such a horrific assault, I would suspect that it came before.
In which case, we are very much in the realm of life imitating art; or, to put it another way, of the word having power over the world.
It is the kind of thing one could expect to happen in … well, a Salman Rushdie story.
Rushdie has always placed the story as the whole point of narrative. The first book he wrote after the fatwa, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, goes in the guise of a children’s story about the poet Rashid, who loses the ability to tell them. ‘Rashid’ is a cognate of ‘Rushdie’. It’s not the only time he’s given a story-teller a similar name to his own.
There is a great moment in Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, where Amis starts mocking Rushdie for his love of Samuel Beckett; and Rushdie ends up offering to fight Amis outside.
I am wholly with Rushdie on this, but I remember at the time thinking: what on earth does Rushdie, the flamboyant, outrageously inclusive, cramming-everything-in stylist have in common with Beckett, who strips everything to the bone? And then I remembered his hero Malone, who on his deathbed passes the time by telling himself stories.
Other Beckett characters do the same. Malone is somewhat disparaging of his own efforts (‘what tedium’), but the impulse is similar.
Victory City is both one story and also lots of stories. They are written in a way that will not come as a surprise to the reader of Rushdie although, unlike much of his work, this book is entirely set firmly in the past.
A character says in The Satanic Verses that ‘information got abolished sometime in the 20th century … since then, we’ve been living in a fairy story’, and the fairy-story element has been a constant throughout Rushdie’s writing life. If you are immersed in the tradition of the Mahābhārata, then it will be much more familiar and less of a struggle – but maybe less of a wonder, too – to get through.
At one point towards the end, Pampa says, ‘Let’s go to the roof of the Elephant Stable,’ and her companion thinks, exasperatedly, ‘More elephants.’
And I kind of know how this companion felt.
Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury
