Two Years, Eight Months and TwentyEight

Nights by Salman Rushdie review a modern

Arabian Nights
There are clear parallels with Rushdies own experience in this ever-unfolding
fairytale that, through magic and myth, meditates brilliantly on storytelling,
fanaticism and lifes agonies and choices
Ursula K Le Guin
Friday 4 September 2015 06.30BST

A colossal fragmentation of reality occurred in the 20th century,

Salman Rushdie has said, and his novels enact and display that
fragmentation with terror andglee. His new book assures us that
reality has lately been crumbling more colossally than ever, and
isabout to come completely unglued. The climate destabilisation we
are experiencing is only a foretaste of advancing chaos, which the
author describes with considerable relish. Eschatological lightning
strikes, oracular infants and local failures of gravity will become the
norm, as the Dark Ifrits, the mischievous forces of disorder, begin to
take advantage of the weakening of the fabric of the everyday.
The cumbrous title transcribes a certain number of days into years and
months, but not the four weeks that would naturally complete it,
because the word Nights is needed to suggest the original Thousand
and One. Rushdie isour Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story
within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible
delight that it comes as ashock to remember that, like her, hehas lived
the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. Scheherazade told her1,001
talesto put off a stupid, cruel threat ofdeath; Rushdie found himself
under similar threat for telling an unwelcome tale. So far, like her,
hehas succeeded in escaping. May he continue to do so.
At the idea of trying to summarise the plot, I shriek and fall back

fainting on my seraglio couch.Rushdie has afractal imagination: plot

buds from plot, endlessly.There are at least 1,001 stories and
substories, and nearly as many characters. Allyou need to know is that
theyre mostly highly entertaining, amusing and ingenious. Agood
many of the characters are in fact genies. The jinn live in their own
world, Peristan. But the dilapidation of reality in our world,
intensifying since the second millennium, has affected the wall
between us and Peristan, leaving slots and slits through which they
can slip.
Their existence in Peristan is one of almost ceaseless sexual
intercourse insurroundings of total luxury. Still, some of them find
this as boring as some of us might, and like to sneak over here to
entertain themselves by meddling with our little mortal lives. The
male jinn are creatures of flame, the female jinnia of smoke. They have
great powers of magic, not so great powers of intellect. Wilful,
impulsive and unwise, one of them gets trapped over here every now
and then, imprisoned byaspell in a bottle or a lamp.
We havent seen any jinn for a while because their passages into our
world were sealed up about a thousand years ago, not long after the
greatest jinnia princess, Dunia, had a love affair in Andalucia with the
philosopher IbnRushd (also known as the great Aristotelian
philosopher Averroes). The outcome of this affair was a
slewofdescendants distinguished bytheir lobeless ears and trace of
fairy blood. For thats what Peristan is in English Fairyland.
The main plot the outermost Chinese box is constructed around
aphilosophical feud between the rationalist Ibn Rushd and the pious
theologian Ghazali of Iran (known and honoured as Renewer of the
Faith and Proof of Islam), who placed the power of God above all
earthly causes and effects. Ibn Rushd tried to reconcile reason and
humane morality with God and faith, positing a kindly God and an
unfanatic faith.He challenged Ghazali. His reward was disgrace and
exile.
I met Rushdie many years ago, long before the fatwa, but I cant
remember if he has lobes to his ears. In any case, certain parallels are
clear. This book isa fantasy, a fairytale and a brilliant reflection of
and serious meditation onthe choices and agonies of our life in this

world.
The choices are presented simplistically, comic-book style, as absolute
Good and Evil. The agonies are presented, disaster-movie style, as
catastrophes so awful that readers who dont want to think about them
can shrug them off. Rushdie is a generous, good-natured writer whod
rather woo and seduce his readers than reduce the truth to gall and
brimstone and make them swallow it. All the same, the frontispiece of
the book is the Goya engraving that stands at the very entrance of the
modern age: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The monsters here
engendered, however playfully imagined, are not imaginary.
The strongest male figure among themany in this book is Mr
Geronimo, a gardener. He is a physically and emotionally vivid
character, likable for his strength and modesty and his homesickness
for the city of his childhood, Bombay (which to him will never be
Mumbai). There are strong women inthe book, too a Mayor, a Lady
Philosopher but they are pretty muchcartoons. The novels
protagonist, Dunia, is female, andI wish Ididnt havea problem
withher. Its not that she isnt human; you cant ask a fairy princess to
be anything other than what she is. But you can ask her not tothink
like a man.
Bearing children by the litter, seven to 19 at a time, is certainly a
practical-engineering approach to leaving a large number of offspring,
but not one many women would choose. We dont see Dunia nursing
her babies (it would be interesting to know how she did it), nor
anything of her certainly busy motherhood. When she returns to Earth
after athousand years, it is to defend her children but this means
her remote descendants, a scattered group of earlobeless people whom
shecalls the Duniyat, asserting her authorship of a lineage.
The usual name for this authorship is paternity, and its importance
to men among the Mediterranean and Arabic peoples is very great.
More generally, while women are likely to value their actual children
and their status as mother over any abstract ideaof lineage, men may
consider theirchildren, particularly sons, most valuable as maintaining
the paternal bloodline. This gender difference may reflect biological
imperatives, male mammals being motivated to reproduce their genes,
females to nurture the gene-bearers. Dunia is a mammal all right, but

her loving heart and her numerous litters cant keep me from
suspecting that like so many other kick-ass, weapon-wielding warrior
women shes a man in drag.
Towards the end of the book, we findthat our descendants of the next
millennium have abandoned conflict as a way of life. They peacefully
cultivate their gardens rather than their bigotries and hatreds, having
found that in the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified,
destroys the enraged. ButOf course there has tobe a but.
Contemporary sophistication declares that peace is boring, moderation
is blah, happy is sappy. Defying sophistry, Rushdie imagines a
contented people, but only by depriving them of dreams. No visions,
no nightmares. Their sleep is empty darkness. The implication is that
our human gift ofimagining cant exist without the hatred, anger and
aggressiveness that lead to such human behaviours as warfare,
conscious cruelty and deliberate destruction. To imply that only our
dark jinn inside can give us dreams and visions may be one way of
admitting the essential balance between the creative and the
destructive within us.
But its also, I think, a capitulation tothe idea, so powerful in 20thcentury literature, that the slow processes of creation are less
interesting, less real, than the cataclysmic dramas of destruction. And
this leaves us right back where we are now. If cultivating our garden
stultifies our minds, if using reason prevents our seeing visions, if
compassion enfeebles us what then? Back to conflict as our default
solution? Cultivate hatred, anger, violence, reinstate the priests,
politicians and warmakers, andfinish destroying theEarth?
I wish we could abandon this false opposition, which neglects the
possibility of more imaginative uses ofboth the light and the darkness
inus. But Ilike to think how many readers are going to admire the
courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness,
humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delightin its generosity of
spirit.
Ursula K Le Guins selected stories, The Unreal and the Real, are
published by Gollancz. To order a copy of Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights for 15.19 (RRP 18.99) go to

bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over

10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of 1.99.
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Topics
Fiction
Salman Rushdie

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