Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

Vintage, 2011, 220 p.

This is a companion piece to Rushdie’s earlier book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his son, but also as a defence of the art of story-telling. Like that novel this one could be described as a children’s book but there is plenty to delight the adult reader.

The hero this time is not Haroun but his younger brother Luka. Their father, Rashid Khalifa, is renowned for his storytelling abilities and known as The Shah of Blah from his ability to draw inspiration from what he calls the Ocean of Notions.

But Rashid has fallen ill and to save him Luka must seek out and bring back The Fire of Life that burns at the top of the Mountain of Knowledge. In his quest he is accompanied by Dog the bear and Bear the dog and a spirit presence calling himself Nobodaddy who is Rashid’s double and whose appearance becomes more transparent the more Rashid’s life wanes.

He it is who tells Luka, “Man is the story-telling animal.” In stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. By way of emphasis Nobodaddy asks, “‘Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise?’” This is typical of Rushdie’s style here of free association, word play and allusion. In a riff on time-travel stories there are mentions of the clock-bearing rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, intimations of Doctor Who, Time Bandits, Back to the Future, and A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.

Luka’s journey through the Magic Land up the River of Time takes him to the land of Oh-Tee-Tee (Ott,) where everything is done to excess, and whose Queen is referred to as the Insultana. All sorts of weird and wonderful things happen by way of P2C2E, Processes Too Complicated To Explain. Luka picks up other companions along the way, among them Elephant Birds (fearful of losing their memories in the Mists of Time they pass through,) and the great Native American mythological character Coyote. We also encounter an arid expanse of land called The Waste of Time.

Whether you can be doing with all this punnery depends upon your toleration of exuberant word play. Myself, I found it delightful.

The Magic Land of Luka’s journey is Rashid’s creation and Luka reminds its inhabitants that if they prevent him from restoring the fire of life to his father they will disappear along with him.

On returning home (Spoiler: this is a children’s tale after all, of course Luka returns home) Rashid admits to Luka he stole the idea of the few particular children who can defy Time’s power just by being born , and make us all young again, from his wife, Luka’s ma. “‘If you’re going to be a thief,’” he says, “‘steal the good stuff.’”

Well, you could say Rushdie has.

Pedant’s corner:- Pythagoras’ Theorem (Pythagoras’s,) “the stink of sulphur dioxide” (this is supposedly the result of rotting eggs. However the gas they give off is hydrogen sulphide, H2S; not SO2,) “reached a terrible crescendo” (No: the crescendo is the climb, not its end,)

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