Review: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've read Rushdie twice before: Midnight's Children, for an AP Language or Literature course, and The Enchantress of Florence, because I loved Midnight's Children so much. The Enchantress of Florence didn't quite live up to Midnight's Children for me, but I can't quite remember why. I think it was its comparative lack of weight and substance. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights - which equals a thousand and one nights, by the way - was also somewhat disappointing. There's magic, here, but little else. Overall, the story reminds me in tone of Tom Robbins - lots of quirky characters in larger-than-life situations and distinctively odd physical features -

This book is the story of a war over the earth, fought by jinn and jinnia and part-jinn humans, but beginning with a conflict of two philosophers. One believed that reason was one of the greatest ways to express love for God, because God created a reasonable, rational universe. The other believed that to believe in reason was to disgrace the name of God and that reason should eventually fall to irrationality and chaos. A novel with such big themes and such a big author seems like it should be brilliant. And to be sure, there are some beautiful moments and lovely prose, but for me the novel never cashed in on those themes. Rushdie dips back into the themes every once in a while, and plays with the whimsical world and premise, but neither are explored deeply or meaningfully. The hooks of the story - jinn are real, and the narrator is from an almost science fictional future in a world where jinn are real - almost come across as gimmicks. Sure, the jinn and jinnia are most of the main characters of the story, and they're certainly supposed to caricature the turmoil and capriciousness found in man's own heart, and their battles are supposed to mirror the ones fought between men today, but it is a surface level caricature that never digs deep enough into its material to get to the meaty parts.

For me, the critical failure is the lack of story. It's a quirky setting and solid frame. The characters are interesting, or at least put into interesting situations. The book itself is sprinkled with references to pop culture high culture alike, as well as to other (usually future) moments in the book, which adds texture and substance to what would otherwise be a trifle. A pleasant trifle for sure, but nothing that provides savory satisfaction. Those forward-references, though, spoil what little plot there is. Despite all the positives, I found myself struggling to get from page to page because so little happens. We are introduced to those interesting characters in media res, on the cusp of their critical moments of growth, then we jump back and are meanderingly re-introduced to their pasts, and then back to their present to move a few steps forward (sometimes, the latter two steps are reversed). The jumps in time and the timeline in general also detract from the reading experience; in a book that is supposed to take place over such a precise amount of time (a thousand and one nights) it's almost impossible to tell when something is taking place. One character will be doing something that appears to take a day or two at most, and then "meanwhile," other characters battle or win an election or found a city. It's unclear how long anything takes or is supposed to take, so the reader has no idea where in the story - where in the thousand and one nights, where in the battle for the world - we are supposed to be.

In the end, all of the plot threads are resolved in exactly the expected and previously-stated ways, failing to build toward anything beyond "reason is good; incoherence is bad." Nothing happens, or at least nothing that pulls the disparate ideological threads together in a coherent, compelling way.

There is one other point with which I take umbrage. Rushdie tries to make a lot of solid points about the state of social inequality in the world, often in modern ways using modern parlance. He directly addresses the state of women in both the human world and Fairyland. But somehow, it's hard to believe he actually thinks women and men are equal. Aside from the princess, all the jinnia are uninterested in anything but sex - granted, the male jinn are also sex-obsessed, but all the male jinn we see actually act on the plot in ways that don't involve sex, while literally the most important act of any jinnia is to have sex or not have sex. The princess has sex with a human and becomes mother to a race of part-jinn humans, who she spends the rest of the story defending, and that motherhood and her desire to take care of her children is her defining trait (although, to be fair, she has other traits like "lover of a bunch of men," and "daughter of king"). Even as the daughter of the king, the jinnia princess is discriminated against because she is a woman and not the son he wanted. Every other female jinnia is just present to take part in a sex strike, and only one is named. Every male jinn desires power and acts primarily to fulfill that desire. Why, in a magical world where both jinn and jinnia have the same access to near-unlimited power and childbirth is rarely a thing and everyone has promiscuous sex, would power dynamics that favor one sex over the other even exist? Most likely because they exist in the mind of the author. The human women fare better than the jinnia, kind of: most human women are presented primarily as sexual partners to one of the main characters; one human woman whose part-jinn powers are expressed takes on the moniker "Mother," for reasons I don't understand; a female mayor gets to be pretty layered and interesting (adopting a child on top of being a mayor) but is possibly the smallest named character in the story. The male characters have variety, are never expressed primarily as someone's lover or potential lover or father. Sure, there are a lot of moments where women kick ass, and that's great, but there was still a curious asymmetry between the roles that men and women get to play.

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