| Most intelligent readers would say that Stephen King and Salman Rushdie have nothing in common. Their books are severely segregated, with King occupying a large chunk of the bestseller shelf, and Rushdie ruling over the literary fiction section. |
| King is the maestro of horror fiction, a writer who has, according to his fans, suffered from being dumped into the "genre fiction" ghetto. Rushdie wins a shiny new literary award every three years or so, and has inspired more bad PhD literature theses than most of his contemporaries. The one thing they have in common is that they are both seen as entertainers in their respective corners of the literary kingdom. One might argue that while King's literary reputation has risen with his epic Dark Tower series, Rushdie's formidable reputation still rests on Midnight's Children, with his novels falling between the awkwardly brilliant and the clunkily intolerable since The Moor's Last Sigh. |
| I have often wondered how they would fare if, say, Rushdie was reviewed by the average pulp fiction reader, with a suitably venerable literary stalwart going through the pages of the latest King. It hasn't happened yet, but with King's Duma Key coming out at the same time as Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence, it was tempting to imagine what this sort of reviewing exercise might yield. |
| Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence Philippa Gregory meets the Arabian Nights via a noir Disney retelling of Mughal history in Salman Rushdie's bouncy new yarn. Fans of his work will wait breathlessly for the soap opera version, which could be a long-running player on TV screens worldwide. Enchantress of Florence starts with the mysterious Mogor dell' Amore "" the Mughal of Love, such a pity Heath Ledger died before he could do the movie version "" who turns out to be Niccolo Machiavelli. |
| In a surprise twist, Machiavelli is also related to the Emperor Akbar, who's got his hands full with trying to unite India through his splendidly innovative khichdi new religion. Watch out for the People's Princess "" we pick Aishwarya Rai or perhaps Keira Knightley to play her in the film "" a character who turns out to be far more interesting and sympathetic than the late Lady Di. |
| What stops Rushdie's romp from being the page-turner of the season is the encyclopaedia he swallowed while writing the book. But if you're worried the references to the Who's Who of history from Vlad the Impaler onwards will slow you down, just skip those pages and stay with the funny bits. Keep your eye on the Uzbeg warlords, Florentine courtesans and other ripe stuff: and if all else fails, wait for the anime version, no doubt coming to a bookshop near you. Jettison about 150 pages, and what you have is another ripping read from rambunctious Mr Rushdie. The burning question, of course, is will Peter Jackson be directing the movie? Stephen King, Duma Key In the last few decades, Mr King has built up an unparalleled reputation as the chronicler of small-town America; not since William Faulkner has any writer understood that the true, beating heart of America lies in its tinier, half-forgotten corners. |
| Duma Key takes us not just into the beating, if increasingly arrhythmic, heart of small town America, but into a dazzling, poignant, lyrical and ultimately dark exploration of illness. King's real subject is the phantoms in the brain, to him far more terrifying than any spectre. Edgar Freemantle, former construction maven, suffers a crippling accident that robs him "" in that order "" of his arm and his marriage. But it bestows a new talent and identity on him, as he takes up the mantle of Primitive Artist. The myth of Persephone surfacing from an underworld beyond the comprehension of human imagination limns this luminous and ultimately dark exploration of creativity and its limits. |
| Some might say that the Dark Tower series is what King "" our contemporary if alas, unsung, Homer "" might be remembered for. More attentive readers will notice a willingness to embrace the old paradigm of "characters" as central to our idea of the "novel", even as he challenges the old tropes of "story", while appearing to stay within the framework of a "conventional", dare I say it, "narrative". This is a searing, defiant, rebellious and ultimately dark yelp from the very spirit of one of our finest authors, a writer who is as much of a critic as an exponent of the genre bestseller that he lifts into new territory even as he adheres to its form. This may be King's most devastating, most terrifying and ultimately, darkest, exploration of the human mind and its barriers in his entire oeuvre. Highly recommended, especially to graduate literature students in short of a thesis. |
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