Reading The Golden House

Salman Rushdie has often said, and it is wonderful that he gets to say so many things after years spent in hiding, that if he knew the direction Indian politics would take Midnight’s Children would have been a darker novel. I was worried his first truly American novel will be darker for those experiences. Wonderfully, it is not. Trump/Joker is a villain he clearly enjoyed writing up, but he is never even half as frightening as Indira/Widow. In fact, this novel isn’t Rushdie taking on Trump. It isn’t the Joker who is the villain, it is America that left “its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism”. While denouncing America, it also celebrates Americans who can get up on their two legs and walk forward after the heartbreak they have suffered.

Though, unsurprisingly, the best-written part of the novel is when he is writing about Haji/Sultan and Dawood/Zamzama. The lay of land here is familiar to the author, as much as it would be to most of his Indian readers — and still, he manages to tuck in some surprises, and trademark turn of phrases.

Rushdie, a long time ago, invented a version of English that captured the rich flavours his Indian characters — who obviously were not talking in English — filled in their dialogues. That delightful language is absent from most of The Golden House. Instead, he finds it pressing to tell us — or perhaps the new readers his editor thinks will be reading him now — that “briberyandcorruption” was spoken “like one word, like electromagnetism”. Hasn’t he already done this a few times?

There are just far too many explanations. And far too much of what he has already said, over and over, in the many talks/interviews/lectures — with little added to let it earn its place in a novel. The shah of blah has been tamed, but not enough — he takes over with an alarming frequency. Still, worth a read for the good parts — all his favourite themes are here, magic-realist passages are a delight to read — they always work better in a realistic setting, rather than in the fantastic setting of his last novel.

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Edit: Rereading parts of the novel thanks to a friend who is reading it now, and found a character telling narrator — who is making a film called The Golden House — that “this has become a movie about you, and all these Golden boys are aspects of your own nature”.

So yeah, that is one of the problems with this novel — all characters talk in a single voice. Now, I don’t always have an issue with that — after all, I am a Chuck Palahniuk fan — but expectations from a master like Rushdie is different. On top of they are often paraphrasing what Rushdie, the speaker, has already said in his interviews etc.

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