Central Booking

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Versus came out when I was a freshman in college. I bought a copy of it in hardcover, because I was excited about the idea of a book that could get its author sentenced to death. Unfortunately I was not, it turned out, quite so excited about reading a 500 page book during my freshman year of college. As the year went on, I became more excited about meals not involving Ramen noodles, and sold the book to a used book store for $7.

All that to say I've never read The Satanic Versus. Despite this fact, my expectations for Haroun and the Sea of Stories were pretty high -- as they would be for any author who has been both knighted and targeted for assassination for his writing. Maybe unfairly high.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is not a Momentous or Important book. It's just a nice story about a kid named Haroun and his storyteller father, Rashid. When Haroun's mother leaves for another man (who has no patience for "stories that aren't even true"), Rashid loses his storytelling ability and Haroun loses the ability to concentrate on anything for longer than eleven minutes.

The story becomes more and more fantastic as it progresses, with Haroun and Rashid being swept off to Earth's secret second moon on a quest to save the Sea of Stories from being polluted to death by an army of mute shadow people. It is essentially a story about stories, and is filled with allegories, such as the army (also called a "library") of Pages, who must get their act together and work in concert to defeat the story-poisoning Chupwalas.

There are clear parallels with Rushdie's own life, and hints about the insidious nature of fundamentalist Islam. Yet in the end, everything works together to create a compelling story: even the efforts to stop storytelling paradoxically make good storytelling material.

It's an easy read and an engaging story. I suppose it's not fair to expect anything more, although it irritates me when a book jacked is covered with hyperbole and superlatives that the book can't possibly live up to. Stuff like:

"Affectionate, tender, comical and joyful... The exuberance of this book makes one laugh with relief and pleasure."

For the record, I chuckled precisely three times.

Or:

"In telling his tale, Rushdie borrows from sources as disparate as the conventions of the Bombay cinema; the films of Satyajit Ray; comic books and cartoons; Star Wars; and even the jingles on signboards along the highways of Kashmir... It is a performance that dazzles the eye as it erupts triumphantly out of the dark in a display of fireworks."

I mean, seriously? Fireworks? I don't know about all that other stuff, but I've seen Star Wars about a gajillion times and the only reference to it I could find was when one character utters a string of gobbledygook which includes the name "Obi." To me, that review sounds like an exercise in "How can I illustrate my cosmopolitan sensibility and broad liberal arts education?"

Anyway, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an enjoyable read, if not quite comparable to fireworks or capable of inspiring a fatwa.


This book was suggested by Hayden of Lyric Flight. Next up: The Truth Machine by James Halperin suggested by Neva of Central Snark and PuppyToes.