Matt Quann's Reviews > Victory City

Rushdie, in my experience, is where challenge meets reward for the seasoned reader. His prose is vibrant, versatile, and quite often playful. His style is buoyed by narration that can be digressive but, in my experience, helps to add a sense of an oral tradition in storytelling. His novels are wreathed in meaning, history and mythology. In short, there's no author quite like him. Here then in his latest novel, Victory City, Rushdie takes on the challenge of describing the rise and fall of the magical empire of Bisnaga through the eyes of Pampa Kampana, a girl who becomes the vessel of a goddess.

I've largely seen this novel represented in its context to Rushdie's recovery following a brutal knife attack late last year. It's a relationship that makes the stabbing, temporally, difficult to extricate from the novel itself. By chance--Victory City was written before the attack--the novel has a great deal to say about the staying power of stories in contrast to the deeds of men. Thematically, it makes entire sense to couch the novel's release and press around this reflection of Rushdie's complicated history post-fatwa with Pampa's struggles against orthodox religion, despots, and war mongers.

All the same, I think the novel's lasting legacy will be one that celebrates Rushdie's talents as a writer. Victory City encompasses more than 250 years of time as we witness the rise and fall of multiple lines of leadership of the fictional city of Bisnaga. The turning over of leadership, the death of enemies, the failed plots of splinter factions can take place over chapters and pages, but may just as easily begin and end in a paragraph. Fortunately, the thread isn't hard to follow because Rushdie uses this space with great economy of language: that is, an impression is made on the reader with both the brief and longer histories.

As the novel frequently dives into the fantastical, I found myself thinking most often of Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King. With both novels, though James's work is undoubtedly weirder, the western tradition of fantasy is upended and replaced by something entirely curious and compelling. Though I do find that this novel treads more towards issues of state and society, it is well positioned in the world of new fantasy.

This is a novel I'm glad to have read around the time of its release. Though it didn't do as much for me as Quichotte did a few years ago, I did thoroughly enjoy Victory City. I'm a fast reader, but Rushdie demands a slower pace to savour the language across these pages. It's nice to be slowed down and shown words and worlds you hadn't known existed before cracking the spine.