I’ve just finished Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown — and what an engrossing novel it is. The prose is luxuriant but the pace is deft; there is never any wading through verbiage. As before, Rushdie’s lexicon employs thousands of words unfamiliar to the tongue — this time it’s Kashmiri names, customs, tools and flora. The effect is that of a literary Wall of Sound, wholly immersive.

And yet I notice some misses. Small ones, mind you, unimportant ones, were it not for the fact that the novel fixates on a precisely documented timeline meant to graft its fictional events onto modern history. Avoiding anachronisms becomes Rushdie’s own high-wire act, but on two occasions I’ve found him to slip:

But even her closest intimates didn’t feel real to her anymore, […] not even her friend who left his wife for a man of the same name, not even her geek friend who was losing his dot-com fortune, not even her broke friends who were always broke, […]

What’s wrong with that fragment? If it takes place in 1992? Life before the World Wide Web is indeed impossible to imagine, but surely not literally?

Elsewhere, our latter-day heroine is driven into Kashmir in an “olive-green Toyota Qualis”, a make of all-terrain vehicle that comes to replace the generic term “car” on several pages. This fictional event takes place around 1993, when I too happened to travel through Kashmir for a few weeks, except that I don’t remember any Toyota Qualises. Toyota Land Cruisers, yes, Mitsubishi Pajeros aplenty, but Qualises?

That would be because the Qualis was introduced in 2000 as a locally produced Toyota make, and was discontinued in 2005, a quick google shows. I can certainly appreciate that in 1993 Rushdie was not in any position to travel to Kashmir himself to check out the cars, but that’s what the internet is for in 2003.

Maybe I’m being overly nitpicky, maybe Rushdie knows all this but decided the sonorous qualities of “Qualis” outstrip the penalty of an anachronism. Maybe a novel as good as Shalimar the Clown needs some flaws.Felix Reviews Shalimar the Clown on MemeFirst, also loves it, yet suspects a plot hole. But these are items I would have edited out.