Shalimar the Clown

Not many writers would be brave enough to start a book with elegance and beauty before transforming it into a tense thriller, but Rushdie successfully constructs an epic world in Shalimar the Clown.

Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar, the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States ambassador to India, and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal.

Flipping between past and present, we discover the origins of Shalimar the Clown and the woman who links him to the dead ambassador and his daughter, we learn about the Kashmir that started this all off, a village once proud and beautiful and innocent and then consumed by war and tragedy and now deadened by years of conflict. We watch as Shalimar, Max and India tear themselves apart following the repercussions of eternal love tainted by shallow political affairs. Rushdie is at his most intelligent and accessible here. The impenetrable descriptions of the beautiful village and their feasts, the flipping back and forth of histories and stories and tragedies and the murder at the centre of it all, and the mysterious figure known as Shalimar the Clown, a metaphor for the ruined paradise of Kashmir itself.