Luka and the Fire of Life Reviews

Having been distinctly unimpressed by Salman Rushdie’s latest, Luka and the Fire of Life, I wanted to see what others made of the book. As expected, the book has garnered plenty of praise, but none of it has explained to me why this book is more than mediocre.

Alex Clark in The Guardian tries to make it into a parable about fathers and sons:

And although one would be amazed at the prodigious child who could follow to the letter its snaky progress, it captures brilliantly that moment when adults enrapture children by behaving like children themselves.

But its emotional resonance comes from a more restrained sense of a father communicating the limits of his own power and, by extension, the encroachments of mortality. As Luka sets out on his journey, he is impelled by the certainty that “he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that.” By its end, with the crisis, in proper fairytale fashion, well and truly averted, he is no readier to accept his father’s death, but he has experienced some intimation of the transference of power to come, “as if something more powerful than his own nature had taken control of him, some will stronger than his own that was refusing to accept the worst”. Like the best children’s stories, in other words, it has returned its protagonist to childhood – for the time being.

Clark never quite makes it clear if he’s reviewing this book exclusively as a children’s book or not, but, regardless, Fathers and Sons this ain’t. I suppose there’s some tiny bit of truth to what Clark is trying to claim for this book, but if Rushdie’s name wasn’t attached, I have a hard time imagining that Clark would rhapsodize over the book’s “emotional resonance.”

Still, I will give Clark points for at least trying to articulate why he finds this book worthy. That is not something that Jon Fasman attempts in the LA Times. The closest thing we get to concrete evidence to back his praise comes in the review’s last sentence, which reads:

The who, what, where and when of this story are best left to the reader — recounting it would be as dull as, well, recounting progress in a video game. The story is in the why and the how, and it is well worth reading.

By far, the most concretely evaluative review I read was Frank Cottrell Boyce’s in the Independent. In dismissing this book, he writes:

A story that works like a game is a great idea. It certainly works in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. It doesn’t work here. Rushdie doesn’t embrace any of the real pleasures of computer games – the frustration of being sent back to the beginning, the moment of revelation when you reach a new level. Nor does he address any of the dangers – the fact that the main character is essentially passive and that, because he has lots of spare lives, there is no real jeopardy. Some people have praised this book for its “brilliant wordplay” and wit. The only honest thing I can do is share a few examples so you can decide for yourself. Discussing how rat communities govern themselves, Luka asks “Who choses the Over-Rat?” He chooses himself. “It’s known as being Over-Rat-ed.” Luka’s Mother’s dislike of games consoles makes her “in-console-able”. Maybe this is brilliant wordplay; maybe it’s like being pelted with Haribo. . . .

Haroun was a brilliant defence of the freedom to imagine. Luka is a story about storytelling. This is an infallible sign that the writer knows that something isn’t working, and in fairness to Rushdie, someone should have told him so. If a chef plonked a bunch of raw leeks and a stock cube on your table and tried to pass it off as a “soup about soup making” would you say, “Hmmm, post-modern, yummy yummy” or would you say, “No, those are ingredients, please go and cook them.”

Mark Athitakis’s review in the New York Times (he’s explicitly considering it as a children’s book) provides the most precise and evocative description of the book of all the reviews I read. For instance:

Gods of Egyptian, Norse, Aztec and Chinese extraction, among others, converge in the final chapters, to stress the diversity of a mythical world eroded by onscreen interfaces. Rushdie isn’t against video games, exactly: Luka’s father cheerily defends them in the novel’s early pages. But the story suggests they are a mythmaker’s chief competition, and Rushdie seems determined to make his book busier than any game, a “supercolossal ultra-­exploit.”

But when he tries to make the book into anything more than a “supercolossal ultra-exploit,” I feel he is not persuasive:

For all the whizzing and zooming going on, Luka’s battles are ultimately moral ones, and some of the novel’s best moments come as he ponders how his actions will change others’ lives, why getting his way requires dispensing agony to his enemies and whether he’s demanding too much of his friends. “I am exploiting their love and loyalty,” he thinks. “It seems there is no such thing as a purely good deed, a completely right action.” And like a lot of adolescent magical heroes, Luka recognizes that the tough part about being a kid is that the job of being the adult largely falls to him.

I suppose that’s a decent lesson for a prepubescent reader. But if you’re past tween-age, I’d recommend something else.

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