The fabulous imprecision of history

Salman Rushdie's style of retelling history as fable is evident in his latest novel, Victory City, as he creates a narrative that mixes fact and myth to create a captivating story

Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City, is framed and animated by something ephemeral. Whispered histories. Histories that are fiction, and vice versa. Contorted histories, posing as grand mythologies. Troubled histories. Histories that spawn new histories; histories that multiply and mutate and change the course of a narrative.

This is the story of the Bisnaga Empire, its history retold by an anonymous narrator who is “neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns…” The self-deprecatory narrator is part of a group (a tantalising “we” appears in the beginning of the novel) that has unearthed a clay pot