‘Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy…’

Over the course of his whole back catalog of mostly excellent work, Fury is considered by most critics and readers to be one of Salman Rushdie’s lesser acclaimed works. Written around the turn of the millennium as an angry and emotional riposte to his turmoil and emotional upheavals at the time (the protagonist is even around the same age as he was at the time), including his dissatisfaction with both Britain and the USA, it is also seen as something of an outcry against the casual arrogance of Americans to the primacy of their country in world affairs.  But, more than twenty years on, this novel has come to acquire some disturbing prescience of things which came in the aftermath.

It was in the year of its publication that the distressingly unfortunate attacks on the WTC happened and the city of New York, where the book is set in, and the world in general experienced upheaval on a grimly remarkable scale and perhaps has never been the same again. A post 9/11 world is one which can never be complacent in its innocence or in its impregnability from dark forces. It is one where religious rhetoric and the modern divide between those who fall on either side of it has been raised to alarming levels, and it is also one where sections of disturbing right wingers as well as the increasingly ridiculous ‘woke’ leftists have found sway in the public discourse. A sensible middle ground which both tries to secure safety for the majority of hard-working decent folks of all denominations while ensuring the macabre elements of the religious nuts are filtered out still appears far off.

There is also the more direct and equally distressing fury related to Rushd himself. After years of defying the scarcely believable fatwa imposed on him by the draconian Iranian regime, it was finally thought the danger was in the past. The Ayatollah who had passed the edict himself was by now in the ground while Rushdie mostly thrived. A gauntlet thrown by the medieval minded nuts had been thrown back at them by a brave (and true, considering many of the faux ones abounding these days) champion of free speech and the British government which supported him. And yet. In the all too recent past, as is well known by now, Rushdie was attacked while appearing on stage at an event and suffered grievous bodily harm, some of it irredeemable. The tentacles of hate reach out over time and leave their traces in unknowable corners, waiting to unleash when one least suspects it. And if a celebrated figure like Rushdie is not safe, what hope for us mere mortals? There is undoubted fury here, mixed with an unhealthy dose of fear.

The story of the book itself can be regarded as unexceptional, even if embellished with Rushdie’s brilliant language. Malik Solanka, 55, has just upped and left his life in London, including his wife and kid, to move to New York and can provide no credible reason to anyone who asks. All he can figure out is that there is an unexplained fury within him, one which causes him to blank out at times and may cause him to do harm to himself and others. His wife and son keep entreating him over the transatlantic phone line to come back or at least provide a reason for them. But he has nothing for them anymore, it appears. But of course, there are always beautiful women to uplift the funk the middle-aged intellectual finds himself in, starting with the quintessentially unbelievable manic-pixie girl woman, in this case a Serbian one with daddy issues, Mila Milo. Not only is she some sort of internet entrepreneurial genius, but she is also obviously beautiful and for some reason totally involved in trying to get Malik some solace. Malik, born in Bombay, is a retired academic who then made his fortune in the doll-making industry, particularly with a weirdly popular creation called Little Brain. It is as this Little Brain that Mila creepily dresses herself up as to entertain and soothe him.

But then there will be even more beautiful women to help the old guy through his crisis, of course. In this case, an expatriate of Indian origins from a South Pacific Island called Lilliput-Blefuscu, Neela Mahendra. She is of the drop-dead gorgeous variety, the kind that literally causes traffic to stop and people to inadvertently lose control of themselves. So, it is goodbye to Mila, though not before she helps him relaunch his career as a writer and doll maker. But there is evil afoot as well in the city streets at night. There is a murderer, or murderers, going around, various beautiful young women his target. The fury of these crimes creates dread in Malik’s heart. For one, he isn’t even sure if he himself is behind these crimes or not, considering his periodic bouts of blacking out. Secondly, considering the number of beautiful young things he already knows in his time in the city, is it a wonder he isn’t worried for their safety too?

It all adds up to a chaotic, but always interesting, second half of the book which ultimately leads up to Malik having a date with destiny in more ways than one. Will he manage to resolve the rift with his wife and son and will he be able to reconcile his relationship with the one person who maybe able to soothe the waves of fury within him?

Despite all claims to the contrary, this really appears to have been the author’s midlife crisis book. The aging protagonist who leaves his family one fine day and the sheer fantasy of the ‘ascetic’ life in Manhattan where beautiful young things, without apparently a care for his money, are eager to right his life for him is a trope which is commonly found in many a literary author’s works. Though the fascination with beautiful and strong-willed women rings true and again perhaps finds echo in real life. A lot of the plot I found hard to take seriously, but the saving grace as always is his riotous quality of prose. There is the usual a boundless energy in his writing, which always keeps the willing reader engrossed. The problem I have had with a lot of Rushdie’s best work, and my favorites of his, like Midnights Children and The Moors Last Sigh, is that while I immensely enjoy them while reading, the denseness of plot and character mean that afterwards I find it hard to recall much from these books. And this work, thought smaller in size and scope still has that same richness of style.

But the genius of Rushdie’s prose means that no book of his is a wasted effort. And his keen observations on both the nature of humans and of the cities he inhabits them in always enlighten. In this case, it is a saddening thought that the fury is still so current and raw in its aftermath. The decades may roll on but the righteous fury of Rushdie’s luminous writing will far outlive the hateful furies of his and New York’s assailants.