Haroun and the Sea Stories

"What's the use of stories that aren't even true?"Taken from Salman Rushdie's award winning novel, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" is a rollicking rollercoaster of a journey through magical lands. It is fun jaunt in the company of some of the strangest characters which we could never hope to meet in our real life.Rushdie, as usual has put the ocean of his knowledge in the novel-Haroun and the Sea of Stories. No wonder it gives the impression of a magical, fancy story at the same time goes deep down to human psychology and relations. As a corollary ,it follows the celebration of imagination which is very common to Rushdie’s works. The kind of subject, theme, style, narrative technique he has wielded is just axiomatic.The novel simply enumerates Haroun, the young boy and his multifarious exciting ventures. His encounter with sudden uproar in family, unexpected poignant attack on his father, sudden exciting meeting with Butt and Iff, and landing on the wonderful city GUP where there is always light and the terrible land of CHUP where darkness prevails amazingly elevates the adventurous soul of the novel.In the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name lived Rushid , the so-called Shah of Blah with his son Haroun . Shah of Blah with oceans of notion and the Gift of Gab whenever was asked for a story, it was always a new one. Not only one however but a non-stop series of fresh, beautiful and luscious stories, all of them juggled at once, complete with bits of sorcery and bits of love, princesses, wicked uncles and fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants and half a dozen catchy tunes.But one day everything go devastatingly wrong as Rashid and Haroun is left by Soraya, Rashid’s wife. It proved to be a curse to Rashid as whenever he opens his mouth to tell a story, no story comes out but only a horrible barking sound “Ark Ark Ark...”.So, something bad happened to him. The Shah of Blah has lost his Gift of Gab and so with the well spring of all stories which has been contaminated horribly by Khattam-shud-the Prince of Silence. Moreover, the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech has set out to pollute the Sea of stories abstrusely. Here begins the real drama. Haroun determines to bring back his father’s gift when he really meets to a water genie-IFF, who in literal terms helped Haroun in his exciting ventures . The process of rescuing Rashid and at the same time the Sea of stories proves to be most interesting segments not excluding to understand P2C2E-Process Too Complicated To Explain.There is a strong resemblance with the characters found in 1001 Arabian Nights, from where Rushdie has drawn, and then he spins a yarn which also has contemporary technological elements from Western sources such as computers and scientific machinery which can control the movements of the moon, Kahani. In the common genre of stories, there is a Princess, a bad guy, and a good guy who rescues the Princess and lots of fighting with bad people along with mind woven planning in order to protect the Princess and country (which is, as usual, very obvious) .Here too we have the princess who is rescued, Good conquers Evil, light overcomes dark, and the obligatory happy ending is inevitable. The real fun is how the author takes us there- to the magical land, and there are numerous literary allusions that delight us intellectually.There is a sense of repressed intention or message lying deep beneath the happy ending of the novel. Also, Rushdie uses the literary element of allegory to create a world of fantasy that allows him to work out his conflicts with the world for his own real conflicts with the system.