But then Rushdie gives his wand a flourish, and the story takes wing. On the eve of their assignment when Haroun and the Shah of Blah settle down for the night in a house boat on the Dull Lake, they are fearful for the future. This is doubly serious because he has contracted with unscrupulous politicians to deliver vote-catching stories at the Valley of K (Kashmir). One day his mother elopes with the neighbour, and his father, Rashid the story-teller, the Shah of Blah, with oceans of notions, loses his gift of the gab. Haroun is a young boy who lives in a city so ruinously sad that it has forgotten its name. Haroun and the Sea of Stories can be enjoyed by adolescent and adult alike, read as it can be at several levels: as fable, fantasy, adventure, allegory, and by those obsessed by topicality as an oblique, lyrical defence of his artist's license, so rudely and terminally impounded by the Islamic gendarmes. Not that Rushdie has broken his magical mould to write a simplistic yarn aimed at the lowest common denominator he has merely, with the prestidigitator's elan, swung his abracadabra formula around to produce that enviable masterwork: a children's classic.
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