Chapter 12 - Revisiting the City in Rushdie’s Fiction

Summary

Rushdie’s work is intertwined with a range of urban landscapes and needs to be contextualized in relation to urban planning, infrastructures, and the complex way his characters navigate these. Bombay/Mumbai remains a central focal point for his writing, from Midnight’s Children to The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Satanic Verses is closely wedded to an exploration of 1980s London, but increasingly his focus is on New York, which provides the setting for Fury, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House. The chapter explores the wider context of the cityscapes with which Rushdie engages and how the urban environment shapes and structures his narratives, and reveals the darker undersides of crime and corruption with which these cities have become associated. It suggests that Rushdie’s formal techniques and linguistic innovativeness cannot be adequately understood without reference to the cities that have always played such an important role in his writing. Almost all of his main concerns as a writer emerge naturally, and can be examined most productively, in the space of the metropolis.