He spent most of his time discussing his forthcoming book Luka and the Fire of Life, a sequel to 1990's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Haroun was Rushdie's first book since a fatwa was issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 as punishment for his novel The Satanic Verses, which the cleric deemed to have been a work of blasphemy.
Haroun was the story of a boy's quest to, as Rushdie put it, "rescue his father's storytelling skills in a world in which stories were being poisoned." He wrote it for his elder son, Zafar, then nine years old, at a time, said Rushdie, when he had become "uncharacteristically interested in happy endings."
It was only after the book had been published, Rushdie said, that he came to think of it as a work that was "written to please a certain child" -- placing it in a tradition that includes Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, and Peter Pan.
Nearly 20 years later, Rushdie's second son, Milan, came to him and asked "'where's my book?'" Guided by the example of Lewis Carroll writing Through the Looking-Glass as a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Rushdie decided he owed his younger son a book of his own.
By the time Carroll wrote Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 6 years had passed since the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll was estranged from the Liddell family, Alice Liddell, his inspiration, was no longer a child but a young woman of 19, and the first Alice book was famous. "How scary it must have been to write a sequel," said Rushdie, who confessed that, for the first time in his career, he found himself dealing with the same pressure.
"Through the Looking-Glass is not 'Return to Wonderland,' " said Rushdie. Like Carroll, he wanted to employ the same central characters but create another imaginative world, wholly different from the original. "I didn't want to do 'Return to the Sea of Stories,' " said Rushdie.
“Through the Looking-Glass is NOT
'Return to Wonderland'. I didn't want to
do 'Return to the Sea of Stories'...”
And so, whereas the central metaphor of Haroun was water, Rushdie decided to make Luka about fire. Rushdie read aloud a short passage from the book in which a character compares the relative merits of fire and water and exclaims, "Life is not a drip. Life is a flame!" and "Life is not wet, young man -- life burns!"
Rushdie described the new novel as an exploration of "the love and the problems between fathers and sons" and as a book in which the author, now 20 years older than when he wrote Haroun, contemplates the hard facts of mortality. This time, story teller Rashid Khalifa is himself at risk -- not just his story-telling abilities. Death appears as a character in the novel, and Rushdie said that, at first, he was concerned he might have made him too disturbing a figure for children. He tried it out on young Milan (then age 12) and found it was actually the boy's favorite character in the entire book.
"I give all the credit to Darth Vader," said Rushdie. "Thanks to George Lucas, everyone now understands it's the bad guy who's the most interesting." In comparison, he said, Luke Skywalker is "a pathetic little drip."
Rushdie said he was interested in the relationship "between the world of the imaginary and the real world." "We live in an imaginary world in the real world," he said. "Mythology is the name we give to what was originally religion. Something good happens when people stop believing -- it becomes literature." However, "it's not so good for the gods -- now they're just a story," as Luka, the hero of the new book, discovers when he stumbles into a junkyard of deposed gods.
"Young readers don't need to dwell on these matters," said Rushdie, but he expressed the hope that -- as with the works of Lewis Carroll -- older readers will find layers of meaning worthy of grown-up attention.
"If I do it properly," said Rushdie, "it could demolish the boundary between adult and children's literature" -- like a movie that's not exclusively for kids or adults but "just for whoever shows up." His wish, he said, is that, "the same child can read the book again as a grown-up and get some slightly different satisfactions."
If Luka and the Fire of Life is up to Rushdie's previous standards, the satisfactions will no doubt be numerous and considerable.
During a question and answer period, Rushdie revealed himself to be a fan of audiobooks and said he was "really happy" that his second novel, Midnight's Children is finally available as an audiobook. (The book won the 1981 Man Booker Prize and was awarded "Best of the Bookers" in 1993 and 2008, celebrating it as the best novel to receive the prize in the first 25 and 40 years of Booker history).
For me, a delightful surprise came when an audience member asked Rushdie to comment on the similarities between The Satanic Verses and Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which readers of this blog may have seen me extol on more than one occasion (see my posts from 18 December 2009 and 19 May 2010).
Rushdie answered that Bulgakov's book was "the most helpful" thing he read in preparation for writing The Satanic Verses and that he was inspired by it's inter-woven narrative strands. He noted that one of Bulgakov's story lines is a retelling of the life of Jesus, just as one of Rushdie's was "a variant retelling of a different prophet." He concluded by observing that the two books had initially met similar fates -- involving banning of the text and persecution of the author.
The event was recorded in full by ALA, although it's not clear at present if the audio will be posted online for download. I'll pass that information along when it becomes available.
In the meantime, listeners interested in Rushdie's work can find three of his titles -- Midnight's Children (1981), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008) -- available on Playaway from Recorded Books.
Luka and the Fire of Life promises to be full of the same sort of wildly imaginative characters and fanciful wordplay that made Haroun and the Sea of Stories a joy to read. Rushdie tantalized his audience with sketches of the dictatorial, deference-demanding rats who constitute an autocratic government body known as "The Respectorate" and the disrespectful princess (the "Insultana") who defies them.
The new book will be published in print by Random House on 16 November 2010, along with an audiobook edition from Recorded Books. That should give everyone plenty of time to read (or re-read) the escapades of Haroun in preparation for encountering the new adventures of his younger brother.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
