4 - Shame

Summary

Published only two years after Midnight's Children, which had enjoyed such extraordinary success, Rushdie's third novel Shame brought disappointment. First to the reviewers, who were generally unenthusiastic; then to Rushdie himself, when it failed to win the Booker Prize that year. (The author's public displeasure on this occasion was the beginning of a soured relationship with the ‘literary world’ – or, at least, its gossip columnists.) Finally, it has to be said that Rushdie's critics have tended to line up against the novel, treating it as the weak twin or dark shadow of Midnight's Children. Timothy Brennan finds it ‘simply meaner, seedier, a bad joke’; Aijaz Ahmad ‘bleak and claustrophobic’, deformed by racism and sexism; Catherine Cundy ‘a model of closed construction’. Malise Ruthven suggested that ‘the whole novel recalls nothing so much as the crude drawings of Steve Bell, the British radical cartoonist’. James Harrison observes that ‘Midnight's Children is a Hindu novel and Shame a Muslim one’, stressing the continuity but also the essential difference between them; an implicit judgement which is spelt out by Keith Booker, reflecting on ‘why Islam so often surfaces in Rushdie's fiction as a symbol of monologic thought. Time and again, Rushdie emphasizes the fact that Islam is the religion of one God, a monotheism that forms a particularly striking symbol in the context of heteroglossic, polytheistic India.’ Rushdie has protested that this is a misreading (‘it's …wrong to see Midnight's Children as the India book and Shame as the Pakistan book’), but the conclusion is hard to resist – especially when in the same interview quoted here he refers to the two novels in comparative terms: Shame is, he concedes, ‘nastier than Midnight's Children, or at least the nastiness goes on in a more sustained way… it's not written so affectionately … it's a harder and darker book.

As has been suggested in Chapter 1, one of the recurrent problems in Shame is the instability of its fictional discourse, which in turn has something to do with the instability of Pakistan itself and Rushdie's own ambivalent feelings towards it. What kind of book is this, about what kind of place, and inhabited by what kind of characters?