Fury by Salman Rushdie Reviewed by Steve Rudd

I must live until I die. Perhaps best known for his hugely controversial book The Satanic Verses, Indian writer Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous writers in the world, which is understandable when his writing is so utterly extraordinary in timbre. Mysteries drive us all. We only glimpse their veiled faces, but their power pushes us onward, towards darkness. Or into the light.

Fury follows a man named Malik Solanka who deals with something of a mid-life crisis he is experiencing by running away from his wife and child, heading for New York on his own, his mind needing to be put at rest. Solanka is a complex and naturally interesting character who the reader comes to know intimately, and while he is in New York he meets a couple of women who come to have a profound effect on the course of his life, while a number of murders are simultaneously occurring in the city that never sleeps (and thus never dreams?). Feeling lost in the modern world, Malik even fears that he might somehow be responsible for such murders, as though he's gone insane but just doesn't know it yet. Scan me, digitize me, beam me up. If the past is the sick old Earth, then, America, be my flying saucer. Fly me to the rim of space. The moon's not far enough.

Nobody can deny that Rushdie is an exceptionally intelligent man. He likes his readers to know this as his story often veers off at mind-boggling tangents to the main thread. He can seemingly write passionately about any topic and is fond of name-dropping a great many other fantastic writers who he admires into his own work so that perhaps his readers seek them out too in due course. Fury is an engrossing, raw emotion-propelled drama of genuinely sensitive proportions that is relentlessly intense in style. The man at the centre of the story in Solanka just needs a little time alone to re-assess the direction in which he wants his life to be shunted, and come the end his destiny still seems no clearer.

Still, the ride of Fury that the reader experiences is certainly a unique and bizarrely thrilling one, joyously packed with philosophical revelations and smarting pinches of heartbreaking humanity let loose into the world. Sure, Fury is dark and moody in nature, and it does - to extents - reflect the tone of JG Ballard's sombre High Rise and Herman Hesse's disturbing Steppenwolf masterpiece. To get to Heaven one has to make a break through Hell, constantly reminding our sorry selves that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Through Fury can be found a certain sense of peace and goodwill... and these things, surely, remain everybody's ultimate quarries. ISBN 0-099-42186-0 (first published in 2001 by Jonathan Cape)

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