Haroun and The Classic Fairy Tale
Haroun and
The Classic Fairy Tale
By Samuel Philip Hardy
HUMN18448G Fantasy and Fairytale
“Haroun and the Sea of Stories” Essay
November 18th 2010
Susan Hackett
The word “Classic” is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind”. In the literary world, names such as Lewis Carroll and J.M Barrie, authors of works such as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Peter and Wendy” (respectively) come to mind. Salmon Rushdie wrote the 1990’s children’s storybook “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, and although neither the author nor the title of the book may be immediately recognizable that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be. This is a complex story of the magic of storytelling itself; a brilliant and inventively written work of fiction that should rightfully be on the bookshelves of homes the world over along with other classic novels.
The story begins with an introduction to the main character Haroun and his father Rashid Khalifa. Rashid is also known as “The Shah of Blah” or “The Ocean of Notions” for his notorious ability to produce interesting and exciting stories on the spot. However, once his wife Soraya leaves him for another man, Rashid falls into a deep depression and loses his storytelling abilities. Soon after during a trip to the town of G, and after meeting a Water Genie from one of Rashid’s stories, Haroun embarks on an epic adventure to not only help his father regain his lost “Gift of the Gab”, but also to save all story’s from a great evil.
Haroun is much like main characters in other works of fiction. He’s your normal, mild-mannered, good-natured boy and acts as the main voice of reason, and is also one of the only anchors to the real world to be found throughout the phantasmagorical story. His specific age and race isn’t explicitly stated, much like how you don’t know what age or race Alice is from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Rushdie has a way of writing in that he establishes a completely different identity for every character in the story by the way that they communicate with one another. For example the Water Genie Iff has a tendency to overstate much of what he says by retelling things in different ways (“Bull’s-eye”, said the Water Genie. “Got it in one, ten out of ten, spot on”). Haroun on the other hand talks in a much more natural manner like what you would expect from a typical boy. All of this allows the reader to easily put themselves into the shoes of Haroun and relate to him as he goes on his adventure.
Just like in any other classic fairy tale, there exists a truly great evil in the form of a character named Khattam Shud that the main character Haroun must defeat. In Hindu this name literally means ‘completely finished’ or ‘over and done with’. The goal of this antagonist is to render the world completely devoid of anything fictional, and he goes about this by polluting the Sea of Stories, which is a vast network of every story ever told (or yet to be told) found on an unknown moon that orbits Earth called Kahini. The reason he wants to do this is because he cannot control the worlds that stories allow the readers to explore, and because he wants to rule all worlds, (i.e. the universe) he begins a campaign of polluting the Sea with a horrible poison, thus ruining all stories and stopping any new stories from being invented. The scale of Khattam Shud’s reign of terror truly makes him a memorable character, much like the totalitarian that is the Queen of Hearts from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.
Like most fairy tales, magic or a generally far-fetched tale is key to its ultimate success. “Haroun…” prominently features both of these components in spades. Although some elements may not be explicitly magical, they are no less truly out of this world. In this book you’ll find telepathic mechanical birds that can fly into space, an impossibly fast mail coach driven by an equally impossibly nice and boisterous driver, Water Genies that control the flow of Story Waters through regular water taps on Earth (through a subscription service no less), shark sized angel fish with dozens of mouths all over their body that each speak with a different voice, living plants called Floating Gardeners that maintain the Sea of Stories by means of untwisting the seemingly infinite number of “Story Streams” found within its watery depths, and the list of wondrous ideas that Salmon Rushdie has put into his story just goes on and on. The novel also has a common theme of polar opposites. The people in the City of Gup absolutely love to talk and live in never ending daylight, whereas the residents of Chup City are forced by Khattam Shud to be silent and live in perpetual darkness. In Gup City and on Earth shadows behave as they normally do, but in Chup they can be as alive as the people they belong to. Even the whites of the eyes of the people in Chup are black and their irises are grey. The immense variety of the imagery found in “Haroun…” is very easily comparable to the fantastic sights and sounds that Alice finds in Wonderland when she falls down the rabbit hole. Rushdie has even cited Lewis Carroll’s book as an inspiration to his story, as well as the Lord of the Rings and Arabian Nights.
The timeless appeal of “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” has been put to the test for more than 20 years to this very month. Anyone who is unaware of the age of the story will no doubt be surprised to learn that the book is indeed this old, as the story feels unimaginably fresh and unique. Salmon Rushdie’s book will unquestionably go on to become a staple of modern fairy tales because of it’s thoughtful and ingenious writing, its clever, deep and downright laugh inducing story, and the seemingly infinite vault of ideas that the author has somehow managed to cram into 211 pages wrapped in a paperback cover. It is a story of the highest quality to be found in the genre of Fantasy, and thus, by definition, it will become a Classic.