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The Moor's Last Sigh
By Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, London 1995
437 pp. $29.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Peter Boyle Salman Rushdie's previous major novel, The Satanic Verses, earned him a fatwa (religious order) from the late Ayatollah Khomenei, sentencing him to death. After seven years in hiding, under the protection of the British Special Branch, he's produced a rambling, raving but engrossing yarn that was promptly banned in Bombay by Bal Thackeray the leader of Shiv Sena, the Maharashta state's ruling Hindu chauvinist party. His "sin", in The Moor's Last Sigh, was to caricature Thackeray in his novel as one Raman Fielding alias "Mainduck", a Hindu-populist gang leader. But Fielding is not one of the major characters in the novel, nor the nastiest. The central character is this book is Moraes Zogoiby ("Moor"), a part-Indian, part-Jewish, part-Arab, part-Portuguese fellow with a serious physical deformity and chronic premature ageing disorder. He is Mr Misfit himself, with mega-chips on his shoulders and the perfect mouth for capital "I" Irreverence. Moor's biggest beef is with his bohemian artist mother, Aurora and arguably the book is mainly about a twisted mother-son relationship. But this theme, like every other taken up in this novel, constantly spills into wider territory, as this aside from Moor shows: "Motherness — excuse me if I underline the point — is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I'm talking major mother country ..." His next beef is with Abraham Zogoiby, his quiet but rich, powerful and shady father who moves to Bombay to build up and diversify the family's traditional Cochin spice business with the help of "talcum powder, crookery, murder". Some of Abe's international shipments of Baby Softo talcum powder contain a much more valuable but illicit white powder. His crookery far exceeds that of the colourful Raman Fielding. Has Rushdie even-handedly set out to offend Hindus after offending Muslims in Satanic Verses? While all the major religions come in for mockery in The Moor's Last Sigh, the bohemian Aurora demonstrates her disdain for religion by dancing irreverently above an annual Hindu ceremony: "Once a year, the gods came to Chowpatty Beach to bathe in the filthy sea: fat-bellied idols by the thousand, papier-mache effigies of the elephant-headed deity Ganesha or Ganpati Nappa, swarming towards the water astride papier-mache rats — for Indian rats, as we know, carry gods as well as plagues ... There were, in addition, many Dancing Ganeshas, and it was these wiggle-hipped Ganpatis, love-handled and plump of gut, against whom Aurora competed, setting her profane gyrations against the jolly jiving of the much-replicated god." Some Indian critics have accused Rushdie of having a superior Western perspective on India. But if Rushdie's main comment on India in The Moor's Last Sigh, it goes against Western caricatures of modern Indian history as a battle between tradition and democratic modernisation. For sure there is a battle, but the modernisers are exposed to be far from democratic, as we hear through the twisted tongue of an inebriated artist at a party on the night of India's independence: "Let me give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand up against those gods and it isn't blankety blank sockular specialism. It isn't blankety blank Pandit Nehru and his blankety blank protection of minorities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. Corruption. You get me? Bribery, and." Rushdie's earlier award-winning novels, Midnight's Children, and Shame offered critical insights on the Indian subcontinent through stories told in the style of magical realism. But in The Moor's Last Sigh Rushdie's imagination seems to have gone into overdrive. Is this magical realism gone feral? The Moor's Last Sigh might be better described as "epic fabulism", a term used by one of its characters to describe an epic story that is gradually overcome by its fabulous retelling. But there is something else that's new — a certain wildness and venting-of-spleenness in the way Rushdie wields his flights of fabulism in The Moor's Last Sigh. A more pessimistic and cynical view of the world, and a manic escapism seems to be in command.