SOURCE: "Absolutely Fabulist," in National Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 25, December 31, 1995, pp. 46-7.

In the following mixed review, Bowman asserts that The Moor's Last Sigh reads as if the author wrote it simply to prove that he could, and predicts that the book will offend Hindus as The Satanic Verses offended Muslims.

Salman Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses reveals once again that he is a writer with an astounding fertility of imagination. But it is hard not to come away with the sense that all this story-telling and linguistic invention is only for showing off and that Rushdie has written the book in order to demonstrate that he can write it. His subject, in the end, is his own cleverness, and the one illusion he has no interest in creating is the illusion of reality. Back in the Middle Ages, a fabulist like him would have gone...