The frontispiece of Salman Rushdie’s twelfth and latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (adding up to the 1,001 nights over which Scheherazade beguiled her husband and would-be executioner with stories), is an etching from Francisco de Goya’s 80-part series excoriating the vanities, superstitions and malevolent caprice of late-18th century Spanish society. “Fantasy abandoned by reason,” the caption reads, “produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” The etching shows the artist asleep at his desk, while above him swirl fearful bats and owls, creatures from a nightmare. “We are such stuff,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest , in a passage also referred to in Two Years... , “[a]s dreams are made on.” Rushdie has always written in the interstices between reason and fantasy, between dreaming and waking. His novels have always brought our monsters to life. And so once more he summons his troops to battle, this time arraying the forces of reason against those of irrationality in an eschatological war.

Here, reason is represented by the descendants of Ibn Rushd, rationalist, champion of Aristotle and wavering believer in a liberal but distant God. The opposition comprises those who follow Ghazali, standard-bearer of faith. Ibn Rushd and Ghazali are historical figures, medieval philosophers (the latter died about 15 years before the birth of the former) of lasting if markedly different influence. In Rushdie’s version, which is the popular if debatable reading, Ghazali’s doctrinaire Islam held sway, resulting in centuries of scientific regression and of hostility towards those who would ask questions of God.

It is no secret which side Rushdie is on; his family name was chosen by his father to pay homage to Ibn Rushd and Rushdie has written about the parallels in their lives, not least their disagreements with Iranian clerics. Two Years... begins with Ibn Rushd “formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain.”

Exiled, Ibn Rushd, the “philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and his books burned,” finds solace in the company of an orphaned, sylph-like 16-year-old girl named Dunia. Turned on by Ibn Rushd’s stories, Dunia describes him as the anti-Scheherazade, a man whose stories didn’t defy death so much as brought him closer to it. The two make dozens of babies together until, 1,001 days and nights after he was sent into exile, Ibn Rushd finds himself back in favour at the court and flees Dunia and domestic responsibility. What Ibn Rushd doesn’t know, and cannot imagine because of his rational nature, is that Dunia is a jinn, a grand princess of the jiniri, as female jinns are collectively known. Made of “fireless smoke”, the jiniri, like their male counterparts, appear to have powers only so as to wreak havoc with them on mortal men.

Dunia, unlike any other jinn, is sincere in her love for human beings, for Ibn Rushd. So sincere, indeed, that 800 years after she gives birth to his children she still feels a maternal connection to her descendants. In present-day New York, she has occasion to meet these descendants, marked by their lack of earlobes, as she tries to prepare them for a war with Ghazali’s dark jinns, led by the Grand Ifrit Zumurrud Shah. The slits that connect Peristan, the fairyland of the jinns, to our world, sealed for centuries, have become porous again, like the Mexico-USA border, a character observes. The reasons why the slits have opened up again are vague, something to do with this being a “time of great upheaval” but the upshot is that there is to be a war of the worlds.

This being a novel by Rushdie, plot summary is for the foolhardy. Dunia and Ibn Rushd’s descendants, the Duniazat, are a motley crew of misfits brought together by the accident of birth to save the world: there’s a levitating gardener; a graphic novelist/accountant whose comic creation Natraj Hero comes to life, all windmilling hands, heads, and third eye “looking straight into your piddling soul”; a baby in whose presence the corrupt and dishonest break out into flesh-melting sores; a spurned mistress who kills her financier lover by flashing lightning from her fingertips. There’s more, of course. Much, much more.

Two Years... is told from further into the future, when the war of the worlds has been resolved and humans have been able to put away such childish things as faith in God. The price of peace, prosperity and reasonableness is the loss of imagination. Art, as Goya and Rushdie know, needs both the rational and the irrational. But Rushdie’s interest in the irrational does not extend beyond the special effect, the levitating and the lightning bolts. What does it all amount to, Rushdie’s linguistic exuberance, his insatiable appetite for puns and allusions both high and puerile, his plots teeming with people and incident? In Two Years... the answer is, sadly, nothing very much. It’s as if the lesson Rushdie learned from Scheherazade is that storytelling is a form of prestidigitation, of perpetual distraction. How seriously then can the reader take the battle between the forces of reason and faith?

Ghazali’s jinns, the giant Zumurrud Shah and his cronies Ra’im Blood Drinker and Shining Ruby (borrowed from the Hamzanama ), choose the land of A as their base. It’s run by a “murderous gang of ignoramuses who called themselves the Swots, as if the mere word would earn them the status of true scholars”. As usual, Rushdie is clever but who needs to be told that the Taliban are ignoramuses? What about the danger posed by the arrogance of self-appointed guardians of reason? What about murder and brutality that is sanctioned and supported by reason? Rushdie has too little to say about this, perhaps because it requires a subtlety of which he is no longer capable.

( Shougat Dasgupta is a Delhi-based writer)

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