Grimus

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At Grimus Ski Centre we have a state of the art Wintersteiger Mercury LSDP tuning machine (in short, a robot! I must admit that what kept me going was pure intrigue for the many questions presented at the beginning. Significantly, the topography of the novel – “a series of ‘concentric circles’” (83) – is reminiscent of Dante’s description of Hell in The Divine Comedy.

The symbol of the mirror is therefore subverted, since it does not stand for osmosis but sheds light on the proliferation of doubles. This contention echoes the very last lines of A Very Easy Death: “All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation” (106).

With its adolescent conceits and punning, its loss of narrative control and its uninvolving characters, it is very much a test-run for the successful novels of the 1980s” (12). In Attar’s allegory, a large flock of birds, symbolizing human souls, have set their hearts on attending the mysterious court of the Simurg, the king of birds embodying God or Reality, and embracing all plurality.

Much of the critical failure of Grimus was blamed on Rushdie’s perceived inability to make a cohesive whole out of a mixture of genre and style (which might explain his publisher’s reticence about Grimus’ place within the SF genre). While the reference to Attar is allusive in Shame, it is structural in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a tale in which the motif of the mystical quest is transparent (just as in The Conference of the Birds, all the characters muster strong under the banner of their leader, the hoopoe). Thus, Flapping Eagle’s conformity is hidden under a surface of non-conformity as he travels the course that Grimus has set for him, the course of a continually alienated outsider who is always trying to fit in to whatever society he happens to be in at the time.

Having read a couple of Rushdie's most acclaimed books before this one I expected "the usual" Rushdie style. An imaginative fantasy, adventure, magical realism novel that follows the journey of Flapping Eagle to find Grimus on Calf Island. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops to the rigidly enforced positronic brain patterns of Asimov’s robots to the Storm-troopers of Star Wars and the Borg of Star Trek, the need to escape the confines of conformity is ubiquitous. This is a fundamental aspect of Sufism, and Rushdie’s use of it prefigures his exploration of the relation of religion to reality in The Satanic Verses, Shame, East West and a number of his non-fiction works.