Nothing left to show

There are things to be said about Fury, Salman Rushdie's self-indulgent and embarrassing eighth novel. Most importantly, it's not very good. It is, in fact, a repeatedly tasteless weak joke gone badly wrong without an idea in sight. Rushdie parades sex and death, love abused and desire corrupted with a reckless neglect of basics such as narrative cohesion and characterisation, devices he leaves to the poor schmucks who genuinely try to create stories. As is true of all of his fact-and-fantasy fiction of extremes, there is a knowing, smug tone and clear evidence that here is a writer who has never effectively listened to real people speaking. Never before has his contempt for the reader been so obvious.

Long lists, like so many backfiring gags, litter the text; the haphazard plot is dominated by a ridiculous man surrounded by beautiful, loving, intelligent and ridiculous women, while the flashy prose is cluttered with street-talk asides and topical digressions from Hollywood's latest celebrity roll call to sprinter Marion Jones to Bill Clinton's - by now stale - sexual adventures. Whereas Rushdie made a career of ridiculing his own culture - at great cost subsequently to himself - he has now turned the damp squib of his ageing schoolboy satire on the US, and New York life in particular. This presents another problem, Martin Amis already got there more than 16 years ago with Money (1984), to far more impressive comic effect.

The fact that Fury is neither funny nor clever nor relevant appears irrelevant. Rushdie always makes sure he is having a good time, he seems to feel his reader should look after his or her self. Ultimately this is true, yet reading this chaotic mess is more like blundering into one man's private love-in.

It is a free world, people can write as they please, but why do publishers endorse such trash? One of several half-cooked subplots concerns the brutal killing of three impossibly beautiful, privileged sex sirens - all scalped by killers in Disney-character costumes.

Former academic Malik Solanka is our central character, a man with the emotional depth of a paper cup. But here is Rushdie's opening sentence, so don't expect simplicity: "Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll-maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in a golden age." Solanka, having idealistically retired from his Cambridge academic life, has secured a fortune through making dolls, the most famous of which is Little Brain. These dolls have lives and careers of their own, host TV shows, give raunchy interviews, the lot. But Solanka is not happy; he has walked out on his beautiful, loving wife and their "long-eyelashed beauty" of a small son.

The professor's reason for leaving is simple: he was about to kill his wife, motivated by this fury that haunts him. It is the theme of the book. But as a concept it never works as well as Amis's similar thematic use of fear and dread in The Information (1995).

The comparison between Rushdie and Amis is valid. Neither has anything to say. In the past Rushdie did, but it has long been said. Sentence for sentence Amis, a natural satirist, is the superior stylist.

Rushdie is a showman with, on this performance, nothing left to show. Novels such as Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame (1983) remain important; The Satanic Verses (1988) marks the drying-up of his inspiration and although The Moor's Last Sigh (1996) enjoys fine comic moments, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) suggests that here is a writer now concerned largely with his own amusement.

Fury, in ways a slighter shadow of that work, reiterates this.

There is also, of course, the fact that Rushdie, born in 1947 and having exchanged his culture for cosmopolitanism, has been left behind by the daunting quality of a younger generation of superb Indian writers who have consolidated Indian fiction in English, and owe far more to the great R.K.Narayan than they ever did to Rushdie, a writer in turn shaped not by his countrymen but by the influence of Gⁿnter Grass.

Solanka's wife phones from England to continue her campaign to lure him home. "You're not listening," she begins. "You've gone off inside your head on one of your riffs and the plain fact that your son is ill hasn't even registered. The plain fact that I have to wake up every morning and listen to him asking - unbearably asking - why his father isn't home hasn't registered. Not to mention the plainest fact of all, namely that without a shred of a reason or a scrap of credible explanation you walked out on us, you went off across an ocean and betrayed all those who need and love you most, who still do, damn you, in spite of everything." Like everything else in this book, her rhetoric fails to convince.

From here on the narrative, such as it is, develops along the lines of the beautiful women Solanka is able to attract. There is Mila, daughter of a larger-than-life-writer father. It is disturbing the way in which Rushdie casually flings in sexual abuse and incest with her relationship with her father, and then later discloses abuse as central to Solanka's with his father. Mila, whatever about her past, sets out to save Solanka - so far, so unbelievable.

There is a long discussion about oral sex versus real sex. In the midst of not very much Solly's pal, Jack Rhinehart, the war-weary war correspondent - Rushdie has a weakness for unfunny puns - is embroiled with Neela, a woman so beautiful men make fools of themselves looking at her. More opulent physical description. Neela ditches old Jack, whom she suspects of killing those beautiful sex sirens, and aims at Solanka. Once Solanka and Neela know they are in love, she becomes a revolutionary. Things would get worse if they could, but they can't.

The slangy prose is appalling. Early in the narrative, one of the dead girls' funerals is remembered - the cue for a bad joke as the society undertaker assures interested parties: "It's an open-casket situation. They've booked the best: Sally H. for the hair, Rafael for the makeup, Herb for the photographs"...

Under the weak gags, the author appears to be airing anger of his own. One of Solanka's dolls, Little Brain (remember - the one with the media career) is cruelly described as having "become the Maya Angelou of the doll world". Nothing about this chaotic, mildly pornographic, lazy novel makes sense. Why did he write it? Why was it published?

The central character's slow move back to his small son is about as cynical a way of concluding an aimless narrative as attempted by any writer. So Salman Rushdie, a writer with nothing to say, swaggers sneeringly through New York life with a band of cardboard caricatures - who cares?

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times