Rushdie's valley of the dolls

The women in Solanka's New York life are so many wind-up dolls, in both senses. There is Milo Mila, a business-minded Cruella who was abused (or abusing?) as a child, but then it turns out Solanka was abused too.

Eventually, the beautiful Neela (Padma the model, Rushdie's current partner, to whom he dedicates the book) unaccountably selects him: "In this tale of a drowning world he hadn't expected an earth goddess."

Where does New York feature in all this? "The Santas of Fifth Avenue rang their little bells with an odd sad delicacy, as if sprinkling salt on some brutally spoiled piece of meat." That was not Rushdie, alas, but Don DeLillo in Americana. In Fury, Rushdie writes: "While the greenback was all powerful and America bestrode the world, psychological disorders and aberrations of all sorts were having a field-day back home." DeLillo gives us fresh, sardonic, visual metaphor, Rushdie stale slabs of admonition.

Obviously, there is sharp writing and amusement to be had from pages of low-brow/highbrow knowingness; the celebs who get a mention will love it, as will Talk magazine. Yet Solanka's interracial ruminations and adventures give curiously little flavour of the multi-cultural superabundance of New York itself. Instead, there is a kind of modish aridity, in which no one is real and yet no one is truly imagined. Myth and humanity do not connect.

For those who care, a big brass key protrudes invitingly from the jacket. Eleanor comes off badly, and we must assume that "the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed sexual butterfly" signifies someone formerly close, and will bring murder to the heart of the signified, but for us, who have never had the pleasure, she is just one more doll who signifies very little.

Everything here turns on Rushdie/Solanka; if the book were any more self-involved, novel and author would fuse into a block of salt. Solanka's satanic pride and theatrical atonement climax in a bedroom scene where he is confronted with exwife and current lovers: "Professor Malik Solanka rose naked to his feet under the flaming eyes of the women he had loved. The fury that had once possessed him was now theirs." Female critics will make of this what they will. Sincerity is certainly there in Solanka's relations with his and Eleanor's child.

In self-explanation Rushdie writes: "In flight from his own life's ugly reality, he found in the fantastic - its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiralling conceits - a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home." In an obvious sense - the author's hounding - we sympathise. Yet the heart sinks when the ground moves once more beneath our feet and Neela turns out to be a native of "Lilliput-Blefuscu", and when she and Solanka become involved in some sort of cyborg revolution ... well, you have to be an addict. Reality cuts in and out, but when Rushdie the mythomaniac descends to earth he can come down with a hell of a bump, and sometimes he goes on sounding like those sci-fi creations full of speak-your-weight platitudes and portentous concerns: "Ever since Little Brain's censored remarks on Galileo Galilei, questions of knowledge and power, surrender and defiance, ends and means, had gnawed at Solanka." Had they really?

As autobiography, roman-a-clef, a piece of Americana and sci-fi fantasy all in one, Fury, a miscellany of genres, is unsatisfying at every level. Only New York fashionables and Rushdie unconditionals seem likely to applaud. To many the sight of all that talent erupting away to so little purpose will seem a terrible waste.