This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunderbolt, who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world, after a long absence, to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality; and of the time of crisis, the time-out-of-joint which we call the time of the strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. And yes, we have lived another thousand years since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time. Whether for better or for worse, that is for our future to decide.
So there it is, the title of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is just another way of writing “One Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights”, and like Scheherazade before him, Sir Salman Rushdie understands what it is to live under a death order; to spin out stories that might prolong or end one's life. And because Rushdie wrote this novel immediately after finishing Joseph Anton (a quite bitter recounting of his time in hiding while living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa), I can't quite fault him for implying here that religion is the root of all evil, but I would have liked this book better if it had been better. For a fantastical account filled with all-powerful genies, feuding-beyond-the-grave philosophers, and an apocalyptic war between two usually unconnected worlds, I found this narrative a bit dull – not to mention repetitive, cartoonish, and pushy. Still: I didn't hate this – I think that Rushdie has a rare gift for words – but this wasn't my favourite Rushdie by a long shot.
This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.For some reason, this story is being told a thousand years in our future by an idealised hi-tech race of humans who are living in a post-faith, post-gender, post-racial world. And they begin this story with an incident a thousand years in our own past: In Andalusian Spain, the great rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd (the secular thinker after whom Salman Rushdie's father changed their own family name) is visited by a beautiful jinnia in the form of a nonpractising (because outlawed) Jew, and because she is so attracted to his mind, this “Dunia” seduces the old man and magically has several dozen of his babies before he walks out on her to resume his public debates about the nature of God with the pious Muslim thinker, Ghazali. A thousand years later, in our own near future, some of the descendants of this union begin to display magical abilities – levitation, love spells, throwing lightning bolts – at the same time that the Earth is experiencing unprecedented storms, and the seams between our own reality and the “fairy world”, Peristan, are opened enough to bring forth god-like destroyers. Cue the War of the Worlds, with Dunia and her descendants fighting against four Grand Ifrits and their minions for the right to occupy Earth. This should have been exciting but the narrative switches too often to Scheherazadean stories-within-stories-without-resolution and then goes up in so much genie smoke.
Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.I guess there's some interesting irony in the fact that we have a group of people, a thousand years in our future, telling a story about imaginary beings coming to Earth and ushering in the age of reason; marking this magic-filled time as the moment in which we humans collectively stop believing in God. (Although with our smart phones and videos and social media logged eyewitness accounts, I don't know how in a hi-tech future a thousand years hence the experiences of our present can ever be reduced to “myth”.) But in trying to make his pro-rationalist point, Rushdie needlessly overcomplicates things – just like with this book's clunky title, which is in no way an improvement over the elegantly simple “One Thousand and One Nights", Rushdie kept losing me on this one.
