Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

I'm twenty, and I think I've lost the hang of reading fantasy children's literature. I plodded through Abarat last year and I'm stuck in the middle of its sequel. I read every Harry Potter book that comes out the moment our family gets a copy. But all the same, something just tells me that I'm not enjoying the novel the way I should. I feel like I'm reading something watered down, and my brain feels like it's moving through mush, slowly and not too surely. I chalked it up to age, and the fact that the experience of reading a novel changes drastically with adolescence and subsequent adulthood.

The moment I started Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie, however, I knew it was going to be different. It took a lot of time to get into it, but after a couple of pages I realized I was reading this book the same way I used to read books when I was younger — as fast as I could, gobbling up each and every word because I was so excited with the plot and much too in love with the characters. Rather than taking my time to carefully read all the lines (and sometimes in between them), I found myself running instead of treading carefully, and occasionally tripping. I'd go back and reread parts that I had accidentally skipped over in my excitement.

The plot of this novel effects this kind of quick, excited feeling in the reader. The story is that of a young boy named Haroun, the son of a storyteller named Rashid who suddenly loses all will and motivation to come up with new stories for the crowds. At a politician's campaign, he suddenly loses his tongue and ends up croaking in front of thousands of people. Haroun wants to help his father, who is in danger of death at the hands of an angry politician. His quest takes him to the earth's second moon, to a land where half of the world is submerged in light and the rest in darkness, where he encounters mechanical birds, strange gardeners, water genies, and many more.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an incredibly fast read. The plot travels at a lightning pace, with cliffhangers at the end of every chapter and exposition occuring at the mere snap of a finger. I finished this book within a couple of hours, and ended it just a few minutes before writing this review. On the one hand, while the plot realy is rather elaborate and quite "magical," the characters seem nothing more than strange and often irritating creatures. One is instantly reminded of the almost caricatural supporting characters found in Rushdie's other novels.

Yet while it is true that Rushdie may have sacrificed depth thanks to the length of his book, it's still something more than a meaningless fairytale. The slight but not too subtle political jabs could very well lead one to read the novel as being primarily about freedom of speech, or fact vs. fiction (ala The Life of Pi). All the same, doing so quickly erases the kind of breathless and enchanted feeling that can only be experienced when reading a fantasy novel as a child. And really, that's the most enjoyable kind of reading one can do.