They are not like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1959), in which the novelists having greater personal experience of their milieus show more confidence in the political spaces they invent. But the memories being faint, he has relied on historical research to fill out his novels with events. Rushdie is from Kashmir and lived in Bombay in his childhood and India (especially Bombay) features strongly in his writing. Whatever ‘magic’ is in evidence is decidedly authorial conceit. Rushdie has continued in this quasi-fantastic, magical-satirical vein but his new novel Quichotte is a development in that it is not positioned as magical realism but explicitly as satire. When Sundari (in Midnight’s Children) born to beggars in Delhi in the first hour of independent India has such dazzling beauty that her mother is struck blind at her birth and her father (who gets only a partial glimpse) has his eyesight so badly impaired that he cannot thereafter distinguish between Indian and foreign tourists! Both anecdotes (from Marquez and Rushdie) provoke laughter but one detects a stronger satirical impulse in Rushdie’s writing. In laying out marvellous happenings they debunk the possibility of the miraculous.

Rushdie’s novels were described as magical realism but the magic in them is not backed by faith and they emerge more as satire. Its miracles do not affirm, and an instance would be a Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‘fairy tale’ about a ragged angel that lands in a farm its miraculous powers do not restore a blind man’s eyesight but give him three new teeth, as consolation. Magical realism uses fantastic elements but where earlier forms incorporating the fantastic affirmed a moral order with divinity in command, magical realism is an exploration (like realism) of a godless universe.

Rushdie himself wrote ‘magical realism’ in Midnight’s Children (1981), his most important novel, a literary form perhaps also not tenable today.

In an interview related to his new novel Quichotte Salman Rushdie insightfully announces the end of realism as a form of literary fiction since it depends on a compact between the writer and his/her readers on the meaning of the world and that is no longer possible with disruptive elements like the social media and fake news emerging. This is your guide to the Booker contenders. Editor's note: Up to 14 October, when the Man Booker Prize 2019 winner will be announced, Firstpost will be reviewing the five books on the shortlist.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie