Yet he doesn't quite come alive so finally it's the narrative embellishment and curlicue we are likely to remember

Yet he doesn't quite come alive; so finally it's the narrative embellishment and curlicue we are likely to remember. It remains a wonderful adventure with new pop material, just as Rushdie remains one of our very best writers. He pursues Vina by way of a 10-year public celibacy; he is then drawn into the world of death by her loss. He is double-visioned, capable with one eye of seeing into the other world, losing the frontier between real and imaginary.Since Vina is essentially a mythic embodiment, he is potentially the more interesting character.

The Bombay boy chasing his muse becomes, in Britain, the victim of an accident that sends him into seclusion. After this he has to be imprisoned onstage in a plastic bubble, to protect his damaged hearing. Rushdie draws attention to the phrase in order to allow Rai to insist that his story isn't false but true, just as double-visioned Ormus always knows fact and fancy are one.Ormus becomes a strange figure. Some of the shades, delicacies, ironies, touches of subtle observation vanish, and the mythic energy fades into the Pynchon world of too much."Give me a copper and I'll tell you a golden story" - so, as Rushdie (or Rai) reminds us, Pliny explained the promise of the great tale-tellers of myth, magic and metamorphosis, tales "adorned with every kind of extravagant embellishment and curlicue, flamboyant, filled with the love of pyrotechnics and display". Perhaps it's that the mode changes: writing of a predominantly American world, Rushdie's style, ever avaricious, assimilates some of that self- celebrating vanity that marks the one-note writing of Jack Kerouac, and adds the redundancy and over-encrypted quality of the big books of Thomas Pynchon.As the words multiply, the inter-textualities grow, the jokes and allusions fly, the characters grow more Pynchonesque (names like Mull Standish, Yul Singh; even a scene in San Narcisco). It seems possible that this has to do with a process of transition from a comic social hyperbole to visionary euphoria; our narrator convinces himself that matters of the highest cosmic importance, grand transcendental wisdoms about love, death and the cosmos are in his grasp. There are glorious set pieces: the great goat-scam near the beginning, the touring performance scenes at the end.Yet somewhere midway signs of tiredness appear.

The devices, the multiplicity of intelligent references, the bravura set pieces do now have a certain familiarity; we know what to expect. Still, much of the early part of the book - the scene of the Mexican earthquake, the Bombay episodes of childhood and grand reminiscence - is splendid, full of Rushdie's fluency as a storyteller, his formidable energy as a generator of good prose. As usual his stock of mythic, literary and cultural reference is vast, his kitty of stories endless, his stock of characters enormous. Critics will have great time doing coded readings: all these references to Longfellow, Dickens, Nabokov, Melville, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Pynchon.For much of the time Rushdie keeps it going wonderfully. East meets West, gender confronts gender, even the tectonic plates of the Earth are grinding and shattering into each other and upsetting history.Rushdie is again dealing with the wild novelty of global popular culture, the magical multiplying of images and identities, the crossovers and mixtures, the frantic extravagances and hyper-realities, the debris of the soul. It sees a world where truths are no longer whole but partial and fantastic, an age in cosmic upheaval.