It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable. But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable-its form as well as its significance. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!'' elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses, Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise.
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