Salman Rushdie loses his cheerfulness: geopolitics, terrorism and adultery.

• Author: Pitkin, Annabella
• Position: Shalimar the Clown - Book review

Shalimar the Clown Salman Rushdie (New York City: Random House, 2005), 416 pages.

In Shalimar the Clown, a novel of love, betrayal and the agonizing struggle over the contested Himalayan region of Kashmir, Salman Rushdie reveals a deep thread of pessimism--perhaps even despair--that is new to his work. This is no small thing for a writer whose comic talents run as deep as Rushdie's, and perhaps is intended to serve as a kind of a warning, a canary song about the age of jihad. I say new advisedly; even though this novel appeared in 2005, its concerns remain very much of the moment.

Rushdie's prose is usually over the top, jammed with adjectives, clauses, asides and puns, the flow sometimes serving to obscure the characters' lack of a conventional novelistic inner life. Instead of such inward gazing, many of his characters are almost like actors, perhaps reflecting Rushdie's long interest in the film culture of Bollywood and of his beloved home city of Bombay (now Mumbai). While some commend this style for its power as social commentary, there are those who can't stand it. Both may be confounded by this book.

It is true that Shalimar the Clown does have the sprawling scale, the cinematic aspects, the Bollywood-style filmi sequences and the fabulistic characters that readers have come to expect from Rushdie. Sections of the book are in fact set in Los Angeles, that other great movie-making metropolis. One protagonist, the philandering United States ambassador to India, whose extramarital affair with a beautiful Kashmiri girl sets the plot in motion, even has the name of a famous film mogul: Max Ophuls. This, in a Rushdie novel, is surely not accidental.

And yet, as one reads on, the playfulness quickly ebbs and Rushdie's long declamatory sentences lose their lightness. The writing begins to feel, in fact, like reportage, like bulletins from a front. Perhaps this is exactly what Rushdie intends.

For in a sense, the book is a sort of war bulletin, an account of the wasteful and despoiling struggle over the valley of Kashmir, combined with an impressionistic depiction of Islamist jihadi terrorism. Although there is a second plotline--a love story, a generational drama and tale of passion, adultery and revenge--woven in with the larger story of Kashmir, it seems as though that narrative is a secondary concern. Rushdie's real interest, his own passion, is reserved in this book for the descent of Kashmir into intercommunal and state-sponsored violence--a descent for which he blames the leadership and military of both India and Pakistan--although he reserves particularly blistering condemnation for the Indian government and its military policies in the valley.

The story, in brief, is twofold. On the one hand, the novel recounts the adventures of the fictional Max Ophuls, an Alsatian-Jewish hero of the French Resistance, who becomes the United States ambassador to India in the tense post-Nehru years, when the catastrophic consequences of British India's partition start to become clear for Kashmir. Ophuls meets and falls in love with a young Kashmiri dancer named Boonyi Kaul. She seizes upon him as her ticket out of the valley and into an unknown but exciting future. Their affair has unforeseen and terrible consequences, since she is already married to her childhood sweetheart, Shalimar the Clown. Her betrayal turns Shalimar into a rage-filled jihadist. He becomes consumed with hatred toward Max, Boonyi and the illegitimate daughter born of their affair, the young woman (named first India and then Kashmira) whose experiences of confusion and loss flame the beginning and end of the book.

The...