Glass, Brass, Gold
& Granite: Salman Rushdie's The Golden House. Published in New Ceylon
Writing, Issue #7, 2018.
In many ways,
writing and architectural construction are similar. The elements used in the
construction of a work determine its beauty, its usefulness and its lasting
value. Reading Salman Rushdie's latest work, I think of glass, brass, gold and
granite as the constituent elements. And understructures of white marble, as in
the hotels which are not named, so often not named that their identities come
to mind.
GLASS because so
many aspects of it are transparent. The fake news and faux Facebook profiles
and identity theft culture in which we live provides him with the perfect
camouflage. The writing appears to drop names and clearly shows its characters
to co-exist with real players on the world stage. He operates in strategic,
glassed wall interstices. The green haired Joker in this surreal gothic Gotham
is wild. The family evokes that of the Corleones in The Godfather. The female
figures (always less finely drawn in Rushdie's stories) are partially erased
before they utter a word, and thus are virtually stereotypes. Rushdie's real
life alleged misogyny is displayed in the interviews given by some of his
ex-wives, and in the digital world we live in these opinions exist side by side
with the fictional portraits of women and men in his writing. He is a celebrity
superstar, an actual inhabitant of the golden houses his fame and infamy have
built. The universes for him are parallel, the cities and realms fuse and
intersperse.
Rushdie's writing is
like Swift's: satiric, sardonic, both bitter and benign. And it is like Donne's
poetry: full of verbal conceits, a display of learning, a bringing together of
images from dispersed semantic fields. He is in his glory when the dichotomies
and dualities of human life and contemporary post colonial and comic book
infotainment culture scrape against each other and catch fire in his prose.
BRASS because
Rushdie's forceful brazenness has always been an aspect of his writing which
appealed to me. There is tension, and anger, and passion and fury inspiring his
intellect. The need to be the smartest arse in any room, hugely noticeable in
Rushdie's earlier work, is subsumed into a greater purpose in his best writing.
Needing to have the last word in any dispute must surely have been a problem
for him all his life, and it is a relief to see and feel him more at ease, in
this book. 'Fury', written in 2001, has a similar cover - a towering American
monolith, scraping the sky - but do not judge it equal, or judge it a prequel
to this sequel. In a sense, 'The Golden House' is more kin to 'Shame', in its
targeted take-down of a dominant culture, infiltrated by its own corrupt
progeny. The Golden House is not just reminiscent of The White House and King
Midas, and its characters evocative of the truism that all that glitters is not
gold, but of Darth Vader, and The Death
Star and its destruction in George Lucas's Star Wars franchise. Rushdie's
familiarity with popular culture and his zesty appreciation of it is a big
'value added' to his panoramic portrayals of late 20thC/ early 21stC life.
GOLD because it is soft, malleable, ductile - and valuable.
The ancient symbol for gold was a perfect circle with a dot in its centre. The
structure of this book evokes that perfect formation, and draws us into its
alluring, beckoning core. Not to The Heart of Darkness, human degradation in a
primeval steamy jungle, but of The Heart of civilized Madness, in chill marbled
Cities. The madness of commercialism, of otherisation and objectification, have
become internalized, and normalized, and Rushdie is no longer angry, but
resigned. He has gone from boil to simmer, and it brings out the flavor. This
is not detached superciliousness. This is what happens when all hope in any
redemptive force is gone, and all that is left is the ability to write about
it: the ability to weld, and weave, and wield, the creative, world-creating
word.
Criticism can be
made that Rushdie is just a highly educated heckler, who believes in nothing,
and that his writing does not inspire hope or change anything for the better.
It deconstructs cultural myths rather than affirms them. He is emphatically not
a supporter of the reactionary fundamentalisms, slogans and received
sociocultural wisdom he sees as impairing our potential to become more free, in
this era. I think his fictional critiques create an alternate version of
reality which provides us with the vital tools of scepticism, cynicism and
logic. His vision of humanity is never wholly nihilistic, because it does not
sneer or lose sight of the potential for betterment, or the aspiration for
emergence and evolution, in all human beings.
'Here is Nero
Golden, lifting his ban on the media, showing a photographer from a glossy free
magazine around his beautiful home... He speaks of his wife as his inspiration,
as his lodestar, as the source of his "renewal"... A woman like Mrs.
Golden, she is the elixir of life... Look at her! Can you doubt me? Did you see
her Playboy photos? Of course not ashamed, why would one be ashamed? ... She's
the jackpot, no doubt'.
(Salman Rushdie, The Golden House, 2017, Penguin Random House, India,
page 141)
Just last
week, Hugh Hefner died, saying that he had prepared for his passing by
purchasing the plot in the cemetery next to the remains of Marilyn Monroe, who
was the first centrefold in the first Playboy magazine ever printed. His death
came too late for Rushdie to write about it, but Rushdie's satiric vision is so
on point that his portraits are predictive. Rushdie would have pointed out that
Hef was allegedly so cheap that he made Monroe buy her own copy of that
inaugural magazine issue, even though she was a major contributor to it.
GRANITE because
Rushdie's mastery of his chosen art form is enduring. He has been able over his
career of 35 years to take the volatile, ephemeral issues of the day and
distill their meaning into something dangerous and beautiful. His most specific
political attacks ('Shame', 'Satanic Verses') have done him personally more
harm than good, but his universal riffs, his verbal pyromania, his vibrant joy
in his own power of language to convey unambiguous meaning in uncertain times,
is compelling and life affirming. He tells us children's stories with adult
themes, in sly, sleek, sinuous and fabulous language.
'The Ground Beneath
Her Feet' was filled with deep feeling, the words resonant with the sound and
rhythms of music, and the paradoxical, acrid tenderness of being alive in the
serried, sequentially interaligned, globalised contemporary world. The Golden
House is similar in scope, and ablaze with synergy. But the romantic love
stories here go awry. Something more interesting and illuminating displaces
them. Look at the 'Monologue of D Golden Regarding [His] Own Sexuality &
Its Examination By The Professional'. A transcript between a Professional
(Psychiatrist) and her patient/client, about why his/her romantic life is not
working. It encompasses a critique of Feminism, an exploration of Postmodern
Post binary gender awareness, and the concept of Free Will, made to fit for our
times:
'What if we're a
federation of different states of being and we need to respect those states'
rights as well as the union. I'm losing my mind trying to work all this out and
I don't even know the words, I'm using the words I know but they feel like the
wrong words all the time, what if I'm trying to live in a dangerous country whose
language I haven't learned. What then.'
(
Salman Rushdie, The Golden House, 2017, Penguin Random House, India, page 254)
Fictionalised
transcripts of interviews between the writer and his shrink? Pure gold.
Rushdie's latest
book looks at the structures of power, the spaces created by greed, narcissism
and vain glory, at the heart of commercial and economic empires in the early
21st Century, an era where no one in the whole world is safe. 'Give Me What I
Want, And No One Gets Hurt' sings the lead singer of U2, Rushdie's friend, in
the brilliant song 'Vertigo'. Government here is brazenly not of, by or for the
people. The disconnects between people who should be allied hum and buzz, like
electric fences in Jurassic Park. Celebrities and white noise and
superficiality and Mammon all cohere in a frieze which is a snapshot of a new
'Horror', against which the characters move to enact their kismet.
The pain here cannot
be kept out of the beautiful spaces human beings create as monuments to their
own capacity for self love. People die, immolated in bonfires of their own
vanities. It is epic, in every sense, allusive and idiosyncratic. There are
wide spaces in this book of marble vistas of words, stone screens of syntax
with peek-a-boo coyness and voyeurism on demand, there are improbable natural
objects apparently growing organically in a cultivated verbal iconography which
is reminiscent of Spenser's 'Faerie Queen' with its stylised stateliness and
subtle inlaid bejewelled motifs.
Any minute now, the
rented space of this fabulous place could be shattered, like 'the hotel that
cannot be named', into a billion glittering pieces. This book is attention
demanded, and rewarded, by a grown up provocateur. It is a work of both
generosity and extortion. Read it through again, when you get to the end, and
see how the apparently disparate fragments shine, in your mind's eye. That last
paragraph, where the heirs to this afflicted lineage are seen through the lens
of the virtual CCTV camera:
'Now there are
the three of us,... in an unspecified room,... The camera begins to turn
faster, then faster still. Our faces blur into one another and then the camera
is spinning so fast that all the faces disappear and there is only the blur,
the speed lines, the motion. The people - the man, the woman, the child - are
secondary. There is only the whirling movement of life.'
(Salman
Rushdie, The Golden House, 2017, Penguin Random House, India, page 370.)
Told you Rushdie
always wants to have the last word! And it is life affirming. It affirms life
as it is, in its chaos, cruelty, confusion, nonclarity and dross - not as we
may wish it to be.
No one gets out
alive, he says. Everyone gets hurt, even after you give the extortionists what
they want.
But life is the
last word.
