SHALIMAR THE CLOWN

The publication of Salman Rushdie's ninth novel, nearly a quarter of a century after his epochal Midnight's Children, offers an occasion to celebrate the astonishing voice he has brought into the world of English-language fiction, a voice whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. Shalimar the Clown again reflects the polyglot tumult of multi-ethnic India, to which are added the murderous incertitudes of the world of September 11 2001; it is topical and typical, a novel derived as much from today's headlines as from yesterday's hopes.

Max Ophuls, a former American ambassador to India and lately his country's counter-terrorism chief, is assassinated in Los Angeles as the novel begins, his elegant throat gruesomely slit on the front steps of the apartment building where India, his illegitimate daughter, lives. The killer is his chauffeur and valet, a Kashmiri known as Shalimar the Clown. Having brilliantly set the scene and introduced the principal characters - no one more compellingly than Max, an Alsatian Jew, hero of the French Resistance in the second world war, linguist, forger, philanderer and dandy, a man who deals in "the future, the only currency that mattered more than the dollar" - Rushdie then transports the reader through a succession of dazzling background stories.

Max's Strasbourg youth and wartime exploits are rendered with the tautness of an adventure novel. So, in parallel, is the courtship of Shalimar and his childhood love, Bhoomi ("Earth") or Boonyi Kaul, the Hindu dancing-girl who marries him in a defiant celebration of Kashmiri secularism, then abandons him for the entranced Ambassador Ophuls, whose child she bears. As always with Rushdie, the personal is entwined with the political: the tangled love affairs of the protagonists unfold against a backdrop of the partition of India, increasing Hindu-Muslim tension, the infiltration of Islamist jihadists into the Kashmir Valley, mounting and brutal military repression and the destruction of the peaceful, syncretic Kashmir from which Rushdie derives his own heritage. Shalimar becomes a skilled terrorist, bringing death upon the enemies of Islam across the world, from Algeria to Mindanao, but intent, above all, on exacting revenge for the betrayal he has suffered.

Shalimar is a novel of mourning, not least for the loss of the Kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness), which Rushdie so lovingly evokes in his portrait of idyllic village life in the mountains and valleys of that lush and fertile land. In the novelist's telling, Hindus and Muslims laughed and played and loved together there, performing folk-dance plays about tolerant Kashmiri kings and cooking up the great Kashmiri super-wazwaan, the "Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum". (Kashmir is where "our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes.") It is also a novel of affirmation. "To be a Kashmiri... was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided." In the climactic scene, a tense showdown occurs between India Ophuls - now renamed Kashmira, the rootless cosmopolitan child of an American ambassador and a Hindu dancing-girl - and Shalimar the Clown, the lapsed son of Kashmiri syncretism now turned into an implacable and ruthless terrorist. The reader is left in no doubt who will win.

In nine novels (of which I have only skipped the first, the reputedly impenetrable Grimus) Rushdie has developed his characteristic concerns with the great issues of our time. Themes of migration, innovation, conversion,separation and transformation suffuse his work: exploration and discovery, faith and doubt, pluralism and purity, yearning and desire infuse his fiction. A recurrent theme of Shalimar is the transformation of identities, as characters change nationalities, addresses, professions and names, reinventing themselves, remaking their lives. And as with all of Rushdie's novels, his story is also about the telling of stories, about the ways in which lives are reconstructed in memory and imagination. India - "chaos making sense", Max declares when serving there - is, as ever, not just a country but a literary device, the intersection of the many strands of Rushdie's intellectual heritage, the womb of his imagination.

There were moments in his earlier novels when the exuberance of Rushdie's style - the darting, allusive sentence fragments, the parenthetical comments and italicised asides, the untranslated Hindustani slang, the boastful jokiness, the mock-Indianisms - read like a parody of itself. But Shalimar the Clown is a manifestly mature work. The writing is more disciplined than in the earlier novels, well-paced and tightly focused, the plotting and story-line altogether clearer, with fewer Rushdiean loose ends. Some of the minor characters - such as the Indian army officer Hammirdev Kachhwaha, the bachelor soldier "married to Kashmir", who proceeds to assault and torture his bride into submission before meeting his own surrealistic end - are little more than caricatures. But they are always interesting, because in Rushdie's hands they are memorable even when they are unbelievable. (Particularly unforgettable is the malodorous Iron Mullah, the inflexible fanatic whose body is made up of assorted metal machine-parts.) There is magic realism here as in his earlier books - girls who have visions of the future, a man who tastes words and sees the colour of sounds, a woman who conjures up a plague of snakes from the grave to avenge herself. But for all the omens and portents, the magic in Shalimar is firmly at the service of the realism.

There is also a subdued tone to Shalimar which reflects the times and the theme. Rushdie aficionados will look in vain for his usual outrageous puns, especially with the names of characters, and when these embody allusions (naming the ambassador for the German documentary filmmaker Max Ophuls, for instance) their purpose is unclear. His heroine is named India but does little to embody the country; nor is her subsequent rebaptism entirely convincing. There is the occasional consolation - "We are no longer protagonists," cries a tormented Kashmiri, "only agonists" - but Rushdie finds less to joke about than in his previous novels. His passionate evocation of atrocities on both sides of the communal divide is striking. No novelist has more vividly dramatised the expulsion from the Kashmir valley of the Hindu Pandits, nor the atrocities committed by soldiers on innocent Muslim villagers in the name of territorial integrity.

Both in his life and in his writing, Rushdie has stood for intermingling and interchange, displacement and transfiguration, migration and renewal. In Shalimar he extends his range, recalling and reinventing his roots while thriving in his own uprootedness, seeking answers to the great dilemmas of our time. Shalimar the Clown is an impressive addition to an oeuvre that has already narrated a vision of the subcontinent into being, and is doing the same for the world.

Shashi Tharoor is the author of "The Great Indian Novel". His most recent book is "Bookless in Baghdad", published by Arcade.