Victory City

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Victory City

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Sid Sagar

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

She will breathe a new empire into life – but all worlds can escape their creator…

In the wake of an unimportant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for a goddess, who tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga, ‘victory city’.

Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s as she attempts to make good on the task that the goddess set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception.

‘Full of adventure… A celebration of the power of storytelling’ GUARDIAN

‘Mesmerising’ ELIF SHAFAK, author of The Island of Missing Trees

‘A total pleasure to read’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘One of the planet’s greatest writers’ EVENING STANDARD

‘A triumph… Enthralling’ I

Fantasy

Magic

Magical Realism

South Asian Creators

World Literature

Tear-jerking

Royalty

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I found this fairytale-style epic to be enjoyable in parts, and rather bewildering in others. It is the story of Pampa Kampana, a girl who is inhabited by the spirit of a goddess and magically founds a city (Bisnaga) and its people from a handful of seeds and whispered spells. Pampa Kampana has a magically extended life, living hundreds of years, though she remains youthful. The conceit of the story is that it is a simplified retelling of her own epic poem telling the history of Bisnaga.

Despite her powers, Pampa Kampana suffers many setbacks, and is a flawed character. She is never ultimate ruler of the city - and at times is outcast from it; a creator whose creations turn on her. Her striving for gender equality never quite meets its aim, and she is an unreliable lover and a frankly terrible mother. And like many long-lived or immortal characters in fantasy, she finds that she must constantly relive the sorrow of seeing those she loves die. Physical outrages also occur - readers should be aware this book contains several graphic descriptions of violence and death. At the beginning of the book Pampa is sexually abused; at the end she is cruelly blinded.

As a Western reader I find the sumptuous, magical settings and wide cast of characters very exotic, although - particularly on Audible, where I can't see the names written down and you can't easily flick back - I did get rather confused over names, particularly the ones that are deliberately similar. I can't comment on how much of it comes from existing Hindu myths or from Indian/Pakistani storytelling in general, though there is clearly an influence, and how much from Rushdie's head. Sometimes the story seems rambling and incoherent, though the Audible telling, like an oral storyteller, seems to fit this style maybe better than reading pages would. I did however lose interest in several places (which is why it took so long to finish listening), and I never found Pampa to be a compelling or likeable heroine. By the end I was not particularly interested in what was going to happen!

While I was not very invested in any of the love stories in the book, what did shine through was the importance for Pampa of female friendship and companionship. Her most significant relationships are with her daughters, her many-times-great grandaughter, and lastly with a lonely princess who 'adopts' Pampa as her mother, as being preferable to her real one. These women matter far more to Pampa than cast-off lovers or unsatisfactory sons, which may be why a lot of the male characters in the book seem rather two-dimensional.