Review: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somewhere, someone is spilling poison into the sea of stories, threatening to ruin the way we narrate a full sense of ourselves. That’s a paraphrase of this sometimes magical book, but it’s also – necessarily – a reference to our own historical moment. I am reading this alongside Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth and Kay Ryan’s Erratic Facts collection of poetry, very different works that all invite us to think about what it means to be shaped by the stories around us.

This is not a story of Trump’s America. On the surface, it’s an inventive children’s adventure, one full of terrific notions like the idea that all stories have their source in a bottomless sea, that it’s possible to have a sword fight with one’s shadow, or that there can be laminate-like jackets that keep you warm while weighing next to nothing.

As a children’s adventure it’s fun but slight. For all that we’re told that happy endings are rare in life and story, the apparent convention of the story argues that we’ll end up happy. There are hoops to jump through, but the bottom line is that this is for children and there is no way Rushdie would let them down.

Of course, as I well recall, this was the first thing Rushdie wrote after the staggering controversy of The Satanic Verses, the international best-seller that won him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini. That was a terrifying and inspiring time, and Rushdie became a symbol of the power of narrative in the West as a device for fighting the intolerance and fundamentalism of the East (and maybe within our own society too).

So I know – and I consulted a quick reader’s guide to reassure myself – that this is also a kind of allegory. Haroun and his father Rashid are more or less innocents who find themselves awash in story as various adversaries try to undermine them. It’s easy – maybe too easy – to see the worst of these villains as a kind of Khomeini figure, a smaller-in-person character intent on poisoning all stories at their root.

For all that temptation, though, for all the similar temptation to see this as something presaging the moment of Trump, I can’t make this story work for me as allegory overall. I simply don’t know the situation of early 1990s international Islam well enough, and I don’t know enough of the references. I spot the occasional 1001 Nights nod, but there are too many things that come to me as esoterica. (Rushdie acknowledges that when he gives a quick afterword on where his names come from.)

So, while I enjoyed the play of language and many of the particular inventions here, I couldn’t make it work as political allegory and I ultimately found it only satisfying as a tale of magic and adventure. I might have enjoyed this more in an annotated edition (or without a narrator who, excellent most of the time, brought in a variety of over-the-top Hannah-Barbara voices for some of the characters) but, bringing to it what I have, I found it only modestly satisfying.


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