In the following essay, Ben-Yishai discusses the duality in Rushdie's metanarrative approach to his subject material in Shame.

Rushdie, born in India, moved first to Pakistan and then to England. In life he is a migrant and exile, in fiction a fantasist and historian. He's a wonderful writer. Midnight's Children, published in 1981, is dense with passion, intelligence, excitement, and every vocal and literary effect conceivable. Shame, his new novel, is also brilliant and risky—not so steadily dazzling, more raw in parts, but just as daring. The rawness is there because Rushdie is always testing the tenets of hi...

[Shame has] all the welcomed virtues of Midnight's Children, and most of the vices (peculiarly hard though these are, in a work whose "logic" is partly that of the fairy tale, partly that of the nightmare, to separate from the virtues), and it possesses an extra virtue. It is considerably shorter—which, in a writer whose riches are embarrassing, can well indicate a firmer control. Shame is often exasperating, in the way of Günter Grass's best novels, but never (or s...

When Midnight's Children appeared a few years ago, Salman Rushdie was "admitted to the ranks," as critics say, of the world's great writers, and those who did the admitting wrote as if a South American writer was suddenly born in the subcontinent. Rushdie seemed condemned to be always compared to García Márquez, and more generally to that kind of inflammation of the imagination, that tropical expressionism, to which a lot of literary taste has surrendered. Magic rea...

Shame is in some small degree a roman à clef about the relationship between Pakistan's last two dictators, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia ul-Haq, but any clef is strictly secondary to Rushdie's consideration of Pakistan itself as a failed act of the imagination. The country's very name is an acronym, he writes, meant to denote the peoples and regions of its western portion—while ignoring the Bengalis who comprised the bulk of its population until the founding of Bangl...

'Shame' begins deceptively, not as a political allegory but with a miraculous birth, as if we were to have the fabulism of 'Midnight's Children' all over again, only more so. Three sisters, Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny, give birth jointly to a child of prodigious gifts called (no relation) Omar Khayyam. Locked away in the upper storeys of a mansion, Omar, who sleeps a mere 40 minutes a night, teaches himself Arabic, Persian, Latin and voyeurism. Aged 12, he descends by dumb w...

If Mr. Rushdie had followed [the logic of realistic psychology] in "Shame," he would have robbed his novel of its spectral magic, its breakdown of narrative logic that allows time to rush suddenly forward and reveal the end of things, or permits characters to be reincarnated in each other. He would have robbed his novel of its truth—not precisely the truth of parable or allegory or myth, but the truth of a narrative that describes a world apart and is a system accurate and logical only ...

Shame stands to Midnight's Children very much as Pakistan to India; a smaller book for a meaner world. To embody a nation in a book, yes; but the kind of book called forth by India, the ultimate 'loose and baggy monster', can hardly be repeated for India's angry appendage, that sad artificial afterbirth of Independence. Entering a world less known, and less loved, Rushdie discovers a wasteland. Midnight's Children may have been triggered by the shame of India's emer...

Shame has as vast and exotic a cast of characters as Midnight's Children, and it is as rich in incident, yet it is a wholly different sort of book. History here is a collective fantasy clinging to the dusty deserts and dilapidated cities of reality, not emanating from the wild imagination of a single, terribly self-conscious narrator. The laughter it provokes is consequently edged with a familiar pain and the marvels it contains are never free of palpable horror. Most appalling of these is the novel&...