During my school years I was lucky enough to be taught by some brilliant English teachers, the kind who fostered a love of language and literature. There was Mr L in Year 5 who made a game out of memorising Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (“From either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye..”); Miss G. in Year 6 who would waft around the classroom like a 70’s version of …declaiming nonsense verse by Lear, Milligan and Carroll (“Twas brillig and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”). We memorised those rhymes, too. And in Year 7 there was Mrs S and her box of books. We could borrow and read any we liked, with one lesson a week set aside for reading. Not reading around the class, you understand, or reading to her, or reading to be tested on what we’d read….just reading for the sheer joy of it. (Mrs S did encourage us to write book reviews, though, so I guess in a way I owe this blog to her.)
As well as her box of books Mrs S had envelopes, some filled with photographs, some with a few lines of writing. She’d lay an image or some writing on each of our desks – no two were the same – and let us write for 30 minutes. There was no title, no proscribed word count or expected number of pages, no instructions about the format we should write in…just half an hour to let our imaginations run rip. I still remember a photograph of snow and ice that spoke to me of Scott’s doomed polar expedition and resulted in an imagined letter from Captain Scott to Titus Oates’s widow (Don’t think too harshly of me Mrs Oates. I had such dreams, such plans.)
So how about this:
“I have lost count of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribble sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails.”
Close your eyes…who is the ‘I’, how did they end up in the fortress, what happened there, what do the messages say, why nail them up, what happens next? (You have 30 minutes to imagine a world.)
And, no, that wasn’t from one of Mrs S’s envelopes, it’s the opening of The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie.
The “Moor” is Moraes Zogoiby (born 1957), last surviving member of the Da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty of spice merchants from Cochin, India, who “without any evidence save centuries of tradition claimed wrong-side-of-the-blanket descent from great Vasco da Gama himself.” The “Moor” is also Sultan Boabdil of Granada, who surrendered the Alhambra to Spanish Catholics King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in January 1492 without a fight, ending centuries of Moorish rule in Spain. Both men are synthesised in the painting “The Moors Last Sigh” painted by Moraes’s mother, the artist Aurora Zogoiby. It was the last in a series of paintings inspired by the Boabdil story. Moraes had initially modelled for Aurora but “The Moor’s Last Sigh” was painted after Moraes had been expelled from the family home and disinherited.
If Moraes’s story echoes that of the Sultan, there are other parallels between family happenings and historical events. In 1925 Moraes’s grandmother, Bella, had divided the family home between the two sides of the family with “sackfuls of spices…white lines…and demanded these demarcations be respected”, a harbinger of the partition of India twenty two years later. And Moraes, who grows and ages at twice the normal rate, “a one-man population explosion”, could be seen as a metaphor for India’s economic growth.
But The Moor’s Last Sigh isn’t a code to be cracked. Essentially the novel is an epic family tale choc-full of fantastical characters. It’s fierce, funny, fascinating and fabulous. No-one does magical realism like Rushdie. The Moor’s Last Sigh won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1995.
Rating: **** One of the best books I’ve read this year
If you like this you might also like Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.
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