Salman Rushdie, Luka & the Fire of Life

Seventeen years ago, the book club read Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and some of us loved it. A few of us, in fact, used some lines from the book as catchphrases for a few years, so it cast a shadow; I'd read the novel several times by then, and since that time my daughter finally let me read it to her, and it hit just as well as I hoped that it would.

And so I have no idea whatsoever how I managed not to realize that the 1990 Haroun had a sequel, namely the 2010 Luka and the Fire of Life.

My expectations were too high, and that's on me. The first novel was lightning in a bottle, a remarkable fable written for the author's child but also a complicated hyper-parable growing out of the fatwa Rushdie was facing at the time, and even for an author of Rushdie's talent and work-rate, that's a lot to match in a later effort. This sequel was written for another child, this one a fan of video games rather than books, so its plot blends elements of video game with a tapestry of myth even denser than it was in Haroun.

As much as I appreciated the narrative energy and the characters, for me Luka just doesn't carry the same urgency that Haroun does. More than that, it doesn't have the same lightness of touch, the same unpredictability. Reviewers mostly loved the book when it came out, but it didn't impress everyone.

Everyone should read Haroun and the Sea of Stories; I don't feel the same way about Luka and the Fire of Life, but it makes complete sense to me that Rushdie would've written something like it. I just wish that it had come out a little differently.