Salman Rushdie - The Golden House

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Impressive, insightful and readable

I thought this was a very fine novel.  Narrated by René, an aspiring filmmaker, this is an account of the arrival in New York in secretive circumstances of a super-rich family from India and the subsequent, often cataclysmic events surrounding them, in which René plays a part.  The slow emergence of a dark history of corruption and evil is paralleled by Rushdie's perception of the rise of ignorance, untruth, bigotry and hatred, and of "The Joker" (i.e. Trump, although he is never named).  I found it a slow but gripping story which  Rushdie also uses as a vehicle for portrayal and discussion of the times from 2008 to 2016 – the Obama presidency – including penetrating analyses of many of the issues of our time.

The writing is brilliant.  It is discursive, sometimes addresses the reader directly, even sometimes adopts the form of a screenplay and has a wonderful voice of its own.  It is full of cultural allusion of all kinds, especially to film, so that even a neat, passing phrase like "in the age of the search engine, all knowledge is just a motion away," made me suspect that the echo of Paul Simon was deliberate.  References to literature abound  - including, I was rather shocked to note, a misquotation of Kipling :o).  - and a friend who is a classical scholar assures me that it is also crammed with references to Greek and Roman literature and myth, only a small portion of which I noticed, I suspect.  No doubt there is more which I failed to spot entirely.

This could be dreadful: apparently self-referential writing full of cultural references almost shouts of an arrogant, conceited author showing off for all he's worth, something I can't stand in writers like Tom McCarthy, for example.  But it isn’t like that at all; it's readable, engaging and enjoyably insightful and intelligent.  Most of the time it really works and I loved it.

It's not flawless.  I found the denouement a little slick, for example, (in spite of the "if this were a movie" disclaimers) and the postmodern blurring between supposedly objective narrative and things René has "made up" for his screenplay did get a bit much occasionally, especially in a book which excoriates the Trump-inspired replacement of truth with untruth.  It could be argued that this is simply mirroring and illustrating what Rushdie is criticizing, but it felt to me a little too much like trying to have his cake and eating it.

Nonetheless, I thought The Golden House was excellent.  I confess that I've not read a Rushdie novel since giving up on Midnight's Children 35 years ago, so I was slightly dreading this, but I was very impressed by its intelligence, its insight, its superb writing and – slightly surprisingly - its readability.  In short, I think this is an important, insightful book which is also a very good read.  Warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)