Victory City by Salman Rushdie

 

Um. Well, the book starts--more or less--with a prophecy, that it tells you will come true. Then it spends somewhere over three hundred pages unwinding how the prophecy came true. On the one hand, that's kinda a trope in Fantasy; on the other hand, it's usually weak sauce Fantasy that does it. What it does is it puts a lot of burden on how the author tells the story of the prophecy coming true, and in this case especially the decision to tell something like two hundred fifty years in just over three hundred pages makes it feel like a surface-level skim while sucking most of the narrative tension out. There are moments of charm, of beauty, of ... well, if not moments of truth, then moments where Rushdie's messages ring loud and clear; those moments are scarce and scattered, though, and subsumed in the rapid flow.