He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He concentrated on his day's appointments, trying not to let the card shake.
This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. The ambassador's drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. "The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedulecard for the day, and gave in his notice. Spanning the globe and darting through history, Rushdie's narrative captures the heart of the reader and the spirit of a troubled age. The story of anywhere is also the story of everywhere else. Lives are uprooted, names keep changing - nothing is permanent. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.Įverything is unsettled. Along the way there is kindness, and magic capable of producing miracles there is also war - ugly, unavoidable and seemingly interminable. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, from Nazi-occupied Europe to the world of modern terrorism. This is the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and his daughter - and of a fourth character, the woman who links them, whose story finally explains them all. The murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal. The dead man is a charismatic World War Two Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability, a former US ambassador to India and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is murdered in broad daylight on his illegitimate daughter India's doorstep, slaughtered by a knife wielded by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown.
From one of the leading literary figures of our time, a gripping international tale of love and revenge, and the ancient and modern conflicts from which they spring.
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