subplotkudzu 's review for:

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

2.0

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Every once in a while I read LITERATURE writers who decide to grace genre fiction with their presence. The results are almost always disappointing. Two Years... contained the germ of a good genre fiction book - djinn reappear on earth and the conflict between them and their mostly human descendants (whose powers have been re-awakened by the djinn's presence) mirror the tropes of today's ubiquitous super-hero tales AND to explain the events of the past few years - and then runs from it by claiming it's a history from 1000 years in the future to excuse gaps in the narrative and avoiding the actual super-hero tropes. The narrator is deliberately ambiguous but not unreliable, and hits the same thematic points over and over and over, each clumsily done and with little poetry. The tying of the War of the Worlds against the often invisible, usually destructive and manipulative Djinn to real world events could work, but is too often too cute by half, throwing me out of the narrative every time he winks at you with his 'oh so clever' ideas. The big ideas in the book - that reason is stronger than religion, that love can be better than hate - are not exactly stunningly complicated, but he hammers them repeatedly.

I was reminded at many points of Greg Cox's The_Eugenics_Wars, where he re-frames the conflicts of the 80's and 90's as the titular wars of from Star Trek history. Cox isn't as technically skilled a writer as Rushdie, but unlike Rushdie, Cox doesn't think he's better than the genre he's dabbling in.