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.
