“So you are responsible for your son’s death as well as his mother’s. “
“What I did, I did to save their lives. “
Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House is a monumental kaleidoscope that begins with the anxiety about death and ends with the triumph of life. However, throughout the story, death stalks all, lurking in the shadows cast by the past, preparing to engulf the sinners and the innocent, the perpetrators and the consequences, its manifestations abrupt, agonising, tragic, tyrannous, and eventually, cataclysmal.
Nero Golden, the patriarch of a broken home, erases his past, takes over a new identity and moves to America to protect the fragments, and thus begins the story of his undoing. Straw by straw, the Golden House is shredded and unmade, till all that remains is a carcass and an inferno waiting to lunge and obliterate everything. Death comes to avenge the deeds of the past, and the mighty Nero, once death himself, is too frail to protect all that is treasure to him.
The story, which has been compared to the Great Gatsby, incorporates a rainbow of themes, wisely intertwined into a polychrome mesh, producing a commentary on the emerging American culture. It sweeps into its broad expanse the issues of money laundering, the nexus between business and crime, the problem with gender identity politics, the struggle with autism and so on; voiced through characters burning in the flames of envy, fear, guilt, greed, hurt and desolation.
But Rushdie’s magic is not just in the plot and the themes. The telling of the story has a melodious tune, a lyrical rhythm. Words are knit into spellbinding prose, and flow like an unbroken stream, sometimes ferocious, sometimes euphonious.
What’s difficult though, is what the author demands. Whoever picks a Rushdie should know what he has signed up for, or else, the copious references can be overwhelming. What I did was to not take these too seriously; rather, focus on the story. Of course, I missed the manna dew, but the molasses sufficed this mortal man.
roastedmoongfalis 