Shame – Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape 1983)

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

---

As its title implies, this book is filled with disgrace. It is also an angry book, and you cannot help feeling that the third-person narrator’s anger is really Rushdie’s. If his portrayal of the characters’ motivations and morality is true in essence (and there is much that cannot literally be true in this novel) then ‘not quite Pakistan’s’ ruling class has much to be ashamed of – but I know very little about that.

At the book’s centre is a male rivalry that is political as well as personal. It is between a playboy and a soldier, who likely represent the real competitors for the Pakistani presidency of the 1970s. As the narrator says of his story and its setting, they ‘exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality.’ And the novel’s ‘hero’ – himself a result of ‘the public shame of unwedlocked conception’ – becomes entangled in the rivals’ power struggle, just as it draws in generations of other characters. The injustice of the patriarchy’s corrupting influence is underlined by the fates of the many female characters, at least one of whom is driven to an extreme and entertaining revenge.

The literary hallmarks of Rushdie’s work are present and used to good effect. His narrator (now living in England) occasionally gets carried away by his story and has to interrupt himself – but not until he’s revealed enough to ratchet up the suspense. Thus, near the beginning he describes how the protagonist ‘by the end, by the time his wife went up in smoke – but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings’; and, in a later mention of a future scandal, he includes a bracketed aside which admits ‘the future cannot be restrained, and insists on seeping back into the past’.

The narrator is also prone to asides on his characters, as well as his craft. Of Omar Khayyam Shakil, his putative protagonist (who is nonetheless absent for much of the book and describes himself as ‘a peripheral man’), he asks ‘what manner of hero is this?’ The reader is inclined to wonder the same. And it is the men in the story – obsessed as they are with honour and its correlative, shame – who cause disaster after disaster, driving their womenfolk to despair.

But the elements of magical realism which punctuate this book have an inventiveness which carries the novel along, even when it accentuates the bitter tone. The hero spends his childhood incarcerated in ‘Nishapur’, the vast, labyrinthine and crumbling house of his three mothers (you’ll see), access to which is only possible using a brilliantly bizarre dumb waiter. There is a huge brothel-like family dormitory, a dervish-like avenger, and an impossibly isolated border post where all manner of mountainous goings-on occur.

It is a rollercoaster of a story, parts of which infuriate or don’t seem to make sense, and parts of which are very funny. But beneath the fun parts remains Rushdie’s rage at a country ‘that builds nuclear reactors but cannot develop a refrigerator’. Shame indeed.