THE NEW YORK TIMES/ Book Review
Books of The Times; From Internal Exile, A Book of
Fables By Salman Rushdie
Date: November 8, 1990, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Lead:
Haroun and the Sea of Stories By Salman Rushdie 219 pages.
Granta Books/Viking. $18.95.
In Salman Rushdie's first book since "The Satanic Verses" --
the novel that enraged Muslim
fundamentalists and prompted the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
to issue a death sentence against
the author in February 1989 -- a young hero and his loyal band
of friends do battle against an evil
sorcerer who has imposed "a Cult of Dumbness or Muteness" on
an entire land.
Text:
"In the old days," Mr. Rushdie writes, "the Cultmaster,
Khattam-Shud, preached hatred only
toward stories and fancies and dreams; but now he has become
more severe, and opposes Speech
for any reason at all. In Chup City the schools and law-courts
and theaters are all closed now,
unable to operate because of the Silence Laws. And I heard it
said that some wild devotees of the
Mystery work themselves up into great frenzies and sew their
lips together with stout twine; so they
die slowly of hunger and thirst. . . ."
It's impossible for any reader aware of current events not see
parallels between these fictional
events and Mr. Rushdie's own real-life drama. As depicted by
the author, Khattam-Shud comes
across as an evil cartoon version of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a
devilish combination of Darth Vader
and the Wicked Witch of the West. The father of Mr. Rushdie's
hero -- a storyteller who has fallen
under the curse of silence -- similarly recalls the author's
own predicament. Indeed, the lines of
battle are clearly drawn in "Haroun and the Sea of Stories":
on one side are arrayed the forces of
darkness, who would padlock all books and silence all tongues;
on the other are the forces of light,
representing freedom and the liberties of the imagination.
In this respect, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" resembles Mr.
Rushdie's earlier novels "Midnight's
Children," "Shame" and, yes, "The Satanic Verses." As in those
books, the fantastical devices of
magical realism (disguised here as fairy tale pyrotechnics)
are summoned to give the reader a
heightened, metaphoric picture of a world gone mad. As in
those books, improbable characters and
melodramatic events proliferate to underscore the absurdities
of recent history.
But if "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" can be read as an
eloquent allegory on the necessity of art or
as a post-modernist parable about the making of fiction, it
also stands on its own as a fanciful folk tale, as compelling for
children who are innocent of history as for their elders. The novel may
well
count "Gulliver's Travels" among its precursors, but it was
initially conceived as a story for Mr.
Rushdie's 12-year-old son, and it also owes an obvious debt to
works like "The Wizard of Oz,"
"Star Wars," "Through the Looking Glass" and the Grimm fairy
tales.
In fact, Mr. Rushdie's story begins, as so many children's
stories do, in a distant time and far-off
land. The name of this country is Alifbay, where there is "a
sad city," "a city so ruinously sad that it
had forgotten its name." There, in an old neighborhood, lives
Rashid Khalifa -- a professional
storyteller known as "the Shah of Blah." For years, Rashid has
made a good living diverting people
with his tales of princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts and
mustachioed gangsters in yellow-check
pants.
Then one day things go terribly wrong: his beautiful wife,
Soraya, leaves him for a man who has
made fun of his storytelling, and Rashid suddenly discovers
that he has lost his powers of invention.
The next time he tries to tell a story, he opens his mouth and
finds that the only sounds that come out
are the syllables, "Ark, ark, ark."
Rashid's son, Haroun, is determined to help him out, and he
accompanies his father on a last-ditch
lecture tour. Along the way, Haroun falls asleep in a strange
peacock-shaped bed, and like Lewis
Carroll's Alice, he is abruptly transported to a brave new
world that may or may not be a figment of
his imagination.
The minute Haroun arrives in the land of Kahani, he realizes
that many of the things he assumed
were fanciful creations of his father's overheated imagination
actually exist. There really is a Sea of
Stories that keeps the world's storytellers supplied with
plots and characters. There really is a Grand
Comptroller of stories, known as the Walrus, who has the power
to restore his father's storytelling
abilities. And there really is an Arch-Enemy of Language named
Khattam-Shud, who wants to
reduce the world to silence.
In fact Haroun soon discovers that the good people of Gup, who
serve as the custodians of the Sea
of Stories, are engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the
denizens of Chup, who have fallen under
the evil influence of Khattam-Shud. Khattam-Shud has taken the
King of Gup's daughter, Princess
Batcheat, prisoner; and he has embarked on a plan to
permanently poison the Sea of Stories.
"Each and every story in the Ocean needs to be ruined in a
different way," he declares. "To ruin a
happy story, you must make it sad. To ruin an action drama,
you must make it move too slowly. To
ruin a mystery you must make the criminal's identity obvious
even to the most stupid audience. To
ruin a love story you must turn it into a tale of hate. To
ruin a tragedy you must make it capable of
inducing helpless laughter." If the evil Cultmaster suceeds
with his nefarious plot, the world will soon
be fictionless, devoid of magic, mystery and romance.
When Haroun asks Khattam-Shud why he hates stories so much,
the sorcerer replies that he wants
to control all worlds, and that "inside every single story,
inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies
a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all."
Imagination, in other words, represents a freedom
that threatens authoritarian rulers; it is regarded, by
definition, as a subversive force.
While his father goes off with the Gupian army to rescue
Princess Batcheat, Haroun sets off to save
the Sea of Stories. He is accompanied on his mission by Iff, a
blue-whiskered genie; a large
mechanical bird named Butt; a plantlike creature known as
Mali, and two talkative fish called
Goopy and Bagha. This group bears more than a passing
resemblance to Dorothy and her
companions on the Yellow Brick Road, or Luke Skywalker and his
alliance against Darth Vader;
and it proceeds to make the perilous journey from Gup into the
Old Zone of Kahani, where the
Wicked Wizard Khattam-Shud holds sway with his army of
shadows.
Like all good yarn spinners, Mr. Rushdie pelts his heroes with
a horrifying series of obstacles and
enemies -- ghost ships, twilight zones, black magic, poison
vats and invisible armies -- and he
relates his story with such manic energy and verve that we
finish the book awed by his inventiveness
and verbal powers. By the last page, of course, Haroun and his
friends have managed to triumph
over Khattam-Shud, bringing their tale round to a storybook
ending, an ending that cannot help but
remind us that Mr. Rushdie's own terrifying story remains
without a conclusion.
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