SOURCE: Clark, Roger Y. “When Worlds Collide.” In Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie's Other Worlds, pp. 18-29. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Clark explores Rushdie's extensive use of other worlds in his novels, commenting that “Rushdie's fiction can be especially disconcerting to those who believe (or want to believe) that the forces of the universe exist in a meaningful harmony.”

If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision a spiritual muddledom is set up for which...