Of fire and fish

If you hear a voice sadly intoning "Magic is fading from the universe," can you guess what universe you are inhabiting? Middle Earth? Narnia? The slightly skewed version of England featured in Douglas Adams's The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul?

These days you could encounter that nostalgia for fading magic just about anywhere, so it's not surprising when it turns up on page 132 of Salman Rushdie's new novel, Luka and the Fire of Life. I've gone on record (here) proclaiming my devotion to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the 1991 novel that introduced the setting and many of the characters that reappear in Luka, so I'm sorry to report that much of the magic that so charmed me in Haroun is lacking from Luka.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories functioned admirably on two levels: as a child's adventure story and as a cautionary tale about the dangers of censorship. Published just two years after The Satanic Verses provoked the fatwa that sent Rushdie into hiding, Haroun engages readers in a crusade to protect the endangered Sea of Stories, and while the dangers feel real and urgent, the novel never loses its spirit of playfulness and joy.

Luka and the Fire of Life takes readers to another quadrant of the magical world created in Haroun and sets another child hero on a quest to save his father, his family, and his magical storytelling ability. As in Haroun, Rushdie sometimes exults in the sheer joy of language, such as in his description of the Sea of Wisdom:

Shining schools of little cannyfish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly colored smartipans, and the duller, deepwater shrewds. Flying low over the water's surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths...

Young Luka, though, drinks no great thirsty draughts from the Lake of Wisdom because he's already wise enough without it. He's far too knowing for a child, far too quick to uncover the secrets of this unknown world, and while he relies on some entertaining friends, they lack the depth of development and charm of the helper characters in Haroun.

For an inexperienced child, Luka makes an awful lot of smarty-pants speeches. For instance, facing the massed forces of all the forgotten fairies and demons and deities that ever appeared in myth or legend, he delivers a stem-winder:

Listen to me: it's only through Stories that you can get out into the Real World and have some sort of power again. When your story is well told, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshiping way, but in the way people believe in stories--happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn't end. You want Immortality? It's only my father, and people like him, who can give it to you now...

He goes on like this for half a page of uninspired prose, and remarkably, it works. I guess Magic hasn't entirely faded from the universe!

What Luka doesn't mention in this speech is that his father's storytelling ability isn't the only source of Luka's power. He has learned the topography of the World of Magic by listening to his father's stories, but navigating that world and surviving its dangers requires a different sort of skill, the kind that can only be developed by spending hours on end playing Super Mario Brothers. Yes: Luka is a gamer, and his long hours with a joystick in his hand have uniquely equipped him to save the day. I won't explain how the World of Magic and the World of Mario overlap because it's just too silly, but every time Luka piles up a few spare lives or hits the "save" button, I'm reminded that the dangers here are far less urgent and believable than those in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

Luka and the Fire of Life has its charming moments, but I don't feel the fire that sparked in the earlier novel or see the life that swirled in that Sea of Stories. If Magic is fading from the universe, I doubt that Super Mario Brothers is going to help.