Many thanks to Charles Cave [charles@jolt.mpx.com.au] for coverting this review to HTML. Grateful acknowledgement to the Sydney Morning Herald and Andrew Riemer for permission to publish this review electronically.
The Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, 434pp $A35
ISBN 0 224 03184 1
Sydney Morning Herald, October 1995
Review by Andrew Riemer
Back in the '60s, when the English Department at Sydney University was run for a while by some very serious types from Melbourne, it was fashionable to inflict on students a strange parlour-game called Dating. They were given a poem or piece of prose, without a title or author's name, and asked to guess who might have written it or when it was written.
When as a junior lecturer I had to supervise those games in tutorials, it struck me as a curiously pointless exercise to remove literature from its context in that way. Now, when trying to deal dispassionately with Salman Rushdie's first major novel since the despicable fatwa of 1989, I am beginning to realise that something might be said, after all, in favour of the practice. Perhaps if Rushdie's publishers had sent out review copies of the books without a title or the author's name, it might have been possible to judge The Moor's Last Sigh as it deserves to be judged; solely on its merits as a work of fiction.
In the circumstance of what Rushdie has had to endure in the past six years or so, such detachments is clearly impossible. As several enthusiastic British reviews that came my way have revealed, inevitably anyone with even a scrap of goodwill would wish to see Rushdie triumph over adversity, showing the world that malice and the cowardice of others could not rob him of his resilience and sparkle.
There will be many among his well-wishers who will not be disappointed. From its first sentence:
I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under the cover of darkness and a left a message nailed to the door.
The Moor's Last Sigh bounces with the energy we would expect from the author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. And also the intricacy: by the end of the first page Rushdie has hurled at least four characters at us, besides references to Luther, allusions to Dante, a reminder of the Cold War and of the Crucifixion as well. Moreover, the vitality never flags throughout the book's 400 dense pages. This is, in many ways, vintage Rushdie: extravagant, elaborate, at times wayward.
As always, trying to give a lucid account of what he manages to cram into a novel is daunting. The Moor's Last Sigh spans four generations of an Indian family from the last decades of the 19th century until the present. At its centre stands narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, "the Moor", a misshapen creature afflicted with a body which ages twice as fast as a normal human being's. He inherits the mixture of races and creeds that is India. His mother Aurora, a celebrated painter, bears traces of India's Portuguese invaders in her veins, as well as their Catholicism. His father, Abraham, is one of the last Jews of Cochin and a descendant, what is more, of Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Spain.
The deformed, in many ways grotesque Moraes is of course an emblem of India, in the same way that Gunter Grass's Oskar in The Tin Drum or Peter Carey's Tristan Smith stand in their deformity for the paradoxes and confusions of post-war Germany and contemporary Australia. As in those novels, too - and also in Rushdie's Midnight's Children - the central character's adventures consistently tend towards allegory, most often with a sharp satiric bite.
So in The Moor's Last Sigh Rushdie treats his readers not merely to a lively account of the corruption and chicanery in a contemporary Bombay filled with conmen, political bullies, the spoilt rich, aesthetes, movie stars and sporting idols, but also to an idiosyncratic history of India in the last years of the Raj, when the Moor's family of spice merchants played out the treacheries of their private lives on an equally treacherous public stage.
The vividness of detail in The Moor's Last Sigh is beyond question. Page after page throws up marvellously eccentric, unforgettable characters and situations. Rushdie's virtuosity with language enhances the impression of breathless speed as he pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his hat; Aurora, the renowned painter; Miss Nadia Wadia, the famous beauty queen; Aires da Gama who likes nothing better than to crawl into his wife's clothes, even on his wedding day; "Mainduck" Fielding , the cartoonist turned political thug; and Vasco Miranda, the painter of the airport murals who becomes Morae's sadistic captor in the novel's last, luridly coloured section.
Particularly with the wonderful Indian English he invents for his characters, Rushdie breathes life into what are often no more than caricatures. Here, for instance, is Vasco Miranda, beside himself with frenzy when teased by the cruel Aurora, the greater artist who scorns his clumsy attempts to seduce her:
"Useless, fucking art-johnny clever-dicks," he leered, leaning sideways at a dangerous angle.
"Circular sexualist India my foot. No. Bleddy tongue-twister came out wrong, Secular-socialist. That's it. Bleddy bunk. Panditji sold you that stuff like a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn't work. Bleddy Congress Party full of bleddy Rolex salesmen..."
Yet Vasco, as so much else in this extravagant, prodigal book, is no more than a caricature: sharply etched, vivid but two-dimensional.
After a while I began to grow weary of Rushdie's tireless invention and brilliance. Of course I would be the first to admit that the finer details of much of his invective escaped me, just as they must escape anyone not thoroughly familiar with the arcane political and social disputes of contemporary India. No doubt those who recognise the Bombay politician Bal Thackeray in "Mainduck" Fielding will catch the full frisson of Fielding's gory death at Morae's hand. For the majority of Rushdie's readers, though, Fielding must remain just another grotesque in a scintillating but enervating gallery of grotesques.
Such qualities have always distinguished Rushdie's writing. Yet in The Moor's Last Sigh they seem to me more pronounced and often more worrying than elsewhere. There is something heartless in the succession of betrayals, murders, assassinations and outrages paraded here with cheerful cynicism from beginning to end. Rushdie's fondness for often childish pubs (a Bombay financial institution called Coshondeliveri; the nicknames of Moraes and his three sisters Ina, Minnie, Mynah , Moor) are indicative, it seems to me, of a curious cast of mind, of a personality so intent, perhaps, on not giving in, or enduring in the face of appalling tribulations, that everything is concentrated into a narrow band of brilliance and virtuosity, from which emotional resonances have been rigorously excluded.
In the final section of The Moor's Last Sigh, Moraes is imprisoned in a tower by the insane, senile Vasco Miranda, who suddenly appears, wearing Moorish fancy dress, "... in his baggy pantaloons and embroidered waistcoat worn open over a ballooning collarless "shirt" to mock his captive and to subject him to taunting indignities. Is this an image of the Islamic world's fury against the author of The Satanic Verses?
In the light of Rushdie's recent predicament it is impossible not to catch that implication, no matter what Rushdie himself might have wanted to convey. Similarly, you cannot read The Moor's Last Sigh divorced from the context, without an awareness of the courage and determination that prompted Rushdie to persist, continue writing and to create this glittering world. By the same token, though, it would be less than honest not to admit that the fatwa seems to have taken its toll, driving this wonderful writer into what is at times close to a parody of a novel by Salman Rushdie.