Such is the state of our contemporary world that the premise that events are being driven by a battle between jinns transferring their attentions from the spirit world to our own seems as good an explanation as any. It is, of course, a flippant response but it is characteristic of the tone of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, which is like a chocolate with a nut centre, beguilingly sweet on the outside but with a hard core.
The title derives from the Thousand and One Nights and Rushdie, who has always espoused the view that stories are a quintessential element of human nature, follows the Arabian Nights exemplar to spin tale upon tale, covering long expanses of time and a multitude of settings in a rich epic.
It is pointless to attempt a precis but the reader can expect to encounter a female jinn who has an affair with Ibn Rashid, the 12th century Andalusian rational polymath, and produces a huge line of descendants. Modern New York features after undergoing a freak electrical storm, the results of which include a gardener finding himself perpetually floating just above the ground. He, too, has an affair with a jinna. There is an aspirant graphic novelist of Indian descent, a composer of intellectually severe modern music, Sister C.C. Albee, a formidable landlady, and many, many more. There are love stories and worm holes in space. There are some excellent jokes and parodies mingled with philosophical excursions and the whole is wrapped in the currently fashionable fantasy genre with magicians and spirits and sex.
Rushdie's imagination seems inexhaustibly fertile and in a display of formidable technique his diction is similarly varied and adjusted to fit the setting. The cultural references are, as one expects from him, encyclopaedic, ranging from The Terminator movies to Ionesco, from Bob Dylan to Samuel Beckett, from Venetian food to vampire legends.
It can all become something of a literary overload with too many fireworks going off at once but it is never boring and beneath the razzle dazzle the heart of the book is Rushdie's deadly serious - literally deadly in his case - pursuit of the age-old conflict between religion and reason, personified by the continuing encounters between Ibn Rashid and his descendants and the forces of faith.
The state of this clash is referenced by his description of a "murderous gang of ignoramuses" who forbid a list including "sculpture, music, theatre, film, journalism ... women's faces, women's bodies, women's education, womens sports, women's rights".
Given his history, it is obvious where Rushdie's sympathies lie and in one of several passages where he moves from metaphor and allegory to direct speech he says: "It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny and even barbarism ... led in the end to the terminal disillusion with the idea of faith."
But at the same time Rushdie acknowledges that craziness waits within every human heart. And that "sometimes we long for nightmares".
This is a complex novel from a heavyweight performer but for all the entertainment, cleverness and thought-provoking profundity it somehow fails to engage the emotions. You are dazzled but not moved. It will undoubtedly please those fans who this year voted his breakthrough second novel
Midnight's Children
as the most popular of the 41 books that have won the Booker Prize but I suspect this latest work will not supplant the 1981 effort in those enthusiasts' affections.
Two years eight months and twenty eight nights
by Salman Rushdie
(Jonathan Cape $37)