Victory City by Salman Rushdie review – a lavish fairytale

The Vijayanagara empire covered most of south India in the 15th and 16th centuries. Viewed from one angle, it was a seedbed for the globalised modern world, in that it became a haven for art and new ideas and an economic power-house that traded with China and Venice. Viewed from another, it was a thicket of intrigue, rocked by rival factions, foreign wars and palace coups. Which is to say it was everything: the noble and the vile, the progressive and regressive, the Hindu heaven of Svarga twinned with treacherous Game of Thrones’ King’s Landing. Only the most brilliant or foolhardy scholar would dream of tackling its history in a single volume.

According to Victory City, one such scholar was the demigod Pampa Kampana, the empire’s mother, midwife and general overseer, who documented the era in a narrative poem she then sealed in a pot and buried in the ground. Victory City, we are assured, is the abridged translation of Pampa’s epic Jayaparajaya (a compound word meaning victory and defeat), retold in “simpler language” and stripped back from its original 24,000 verses. And if the result, while involving and enjoyable, rarely troubles the realms of the divine, that’s probably what happens when a mortal rewrites a deity’s prose.

This lowly narrator is never named, incidentally. But for the sake of convenience – and at the risk of letting daylight in on magic – let’s assume it’s Salman Rushdie himself, disguised as a goddess and made up as a scribe, like the smallest in a set of nesting dolls, or the mercurial fabricator of a traditional frame-tale. “[I’m] the humble author,” he tells us, the old bamboozler. “Neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns.” Humble or not, Rushdie’s lavish, playful 15th novel plants him firmly back on Indian soil, cooking up an alternative Mahabharata and spinning an elaborate founding myth from the bare bones of history. He’s enjoying the enterprise and his sense of fun is infectious.

As for Pampa Kampana, she’s both mediator and participant, blessed (she thinks cursed) with an extended lifespan that roughly corresponds with that of the empire itself (1336-1565). Pampa grows a mighty city, Bisnaga, from a handful of beans and okra seeds. She breathes life into its inhabitants, handpicks a cowherd as her king, a Portuguese merchant as her lover. But, in true mythic fashion, the demigod’s authority is fitful. She’s variously powerful and weak as the story demands, frequently at the mercy of the men she’s put on the throne. Sometimes she’s worshipped, more often she’s hounded. But by dint of her sex she’s denied the chance to be monarch; the role, she admits, “I wanted most of all”.

Every futuristic science fiction tale is unavoidably concerned with the here and now. The same surely goes for historical fiction. In the course of Victory City, Rushdie sporadically frames his invented past as a window on the present. There are protests that recall China’s current “white paper revolution” plus a heroine who’s pushing for gender parity and religious tolerance, a kingdom where women “are neither veiled nor hidden”. And yet each time Pampa’s mission seems to be gaining momentum, it is dashed. Bisnaga, we soon realise, is less a grand utopian project than a beach being dragged by incoming and outgoing tides. For every action, a reaction. For every victory, defeat. The arc of Pampa’s history bends towards wreckage, despair and realignment.

If this sounds fatalistic, the tone is anything but. On the page, Rushdie’s fairytale of futility feels positively jaunty, very nearly a romp, and it covers the ground at a brisk, steady clip. Victory City folds historical figures in with fictional jokers. It frames its myriad support players in literary medium shot, never granting us a closeup, so that we know them by their actions and by their most basic traits (the clever one; the aggressive one). And as the years pile up, even these figures begin to echo and recur. Thimma the Huge sires Thimma the Almost as Huge, while Ulupi Junior fathers Ulupi the Even More Junior. The Portuguese lover keeps taking fresh forms. “I’ve had enough of your reappearances,” sighs the longsuffering Pampa, who by this point is more than 200 years old.

The goddess grows weary; happily the tale remains buoyant. Rushdie, it should be noted, finished Victory City months before last August’s onstage attack at Chautauqua Institution in New York state, so that it reaches us now like something freshly unearthed and unbottled, this tale of a world-building poet who toils to outpace her foes. Rushdie’s heroine is alive to the dangers but swept up in the story, as though believing that by spinning a tale she might yet ward off evil, or at least leave something good and lasting behind in her wake. Pampa accepts that all empires eventually collapse into dust. “Words are the only victors,” she concludes, and stories, at their best, cheat death and live on.

• Victory City is published by Jonathan Cape (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply