Luka and the Fire of Life

Luka and the Fire of Life
By Salman Rushdie

This book is a unique blend of Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz. Staring Luka
[akin to Dorothy], Nobodaddy [akin to jabberwakkie], and Dog the bear and Bear the dog [akin to Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion]. The adventure is not a Yellow Brick Road, or a Rabbit Hole, but rather a metaphor of a computer game where each of Luka’s challenges represents an actual real life experience where Luka has yet to master either.

Rushdie uses metaphor and rhyme in both painting the back drop and the telling of his story. For example he describes the ninth level scene as follows: “In the Heart of the Heart, which is to say inside the Circular Sea, where the Lake of Wisdom is bathed in the Eternal Dawn, things are different.” In placing the characters in each scene, the following is an example is how the reader should interpret him: “after all, you yourself are a little drip from the ocean of notion, a short blurt from the aha of blah. You, of all boys should know that man is a story telling animal, and that stories are his identity, his meaning, his life blood.” [I could add his spirit] The author is speaking directly to the reader in his dialogue between Nobodady and Luka.

The thread line of the story is wound around Luka's father, Rashiad. Rashiad has taken ill and is on his deathbed. Luka must undertake a quest in a surreal world to obtain the fire of life to save his father’s life. There is a blend of the movie Back To The Future where Luka’s guide, Noboddy a surreal incarnation of his dieing father, is a hazy image at first but becomes more real as death draws near. Luka’s surreal guide greats him and together they cross in to the surreal game world, but like his real life father, Nobodaddy only provides sage allegoric advice and leaves Luka to figure things out on his own.

The first lesson producing challenge of the quest for the fire of life found Luka facing a riddle master where Luka's winning riddle found an answer that in real life Rashid didn't know. Luka had the answer. There are actually ten levels in the computer game that correlates to ten lessons in life. Oddly enough in one of the lessons the reader learns about is the coincidental mystical power of ten.

As Luka achieves his third level of this storybook fable on a modern video game setting, he penetrates the Mists of Time. The narrative interpreted by me a one time airplane pilot now reader of the book drew the same emotions of transcending a cloud deck, where breaking through to the sun light was an epiphany on eternity. Eternity, where there is a coincidental confluence on the notion of the trinity of the past, present, and future. I tie this to the father and son being equated to body and soul where soul is spirit, the spirit of man. It is in these moments one can suddenly find a vernacular and a story where a religious oriented person can speak to a tech science oriented person and find common ground and transcend space and time.

Upon reaching the Grandmaster of Flame in the world of magic, Luka finds a direct correlation to his real life nemesis, the Circus Ring Master. Rushdie accomplishes this by first setting the real life episode at the beginning of the book where Luka condemns the Ring Master of the circus that had come to town for treating his subjects poorly. Later in the book Luka meets his nemesis again only this time in the fantasy of a video game world. Here he is to find its life’s lesson. The author lures the reader into a reflective state of mind. In my lesson, I drew from my own memory banks, now realized as elements of the illusion of time, upon Richard Bach's book Illusions. It was a book I read twenty-five years ago. All of a sudden the thin veil between mystical and real becomes dramatically porous; where man finds him self simultaneously the scientist and subject in the world of illusion with its practitioners Space and Time, becoming paramount.

The book is a metaphoric journey down the river of time and questions fate; it's worth. Rushdie captures our inner and outer worlds with Rhyme & Story for in spirit we are our stories. Or it could be said in our stories lay our spirits? Rushdie suggests there exists the dynamic in the trinity of time; where the past, present, and future is in constant forward motion in the real world. Transcendence comes to this readers mind. Can time be a vertical phenomena rather than a horizontal illusion? Both words, one of science and the other of mystery, depict the “surreal”. Both require faith to find an answer. If science has one believing that the death is our end, he may find solace that our stories survive and live on. So for the American Indian who has a motto to leave no trace behind, he is speaking to the material world, leaving legend to a life on its own.

This book suggests that only in spirit can one transcend time; live forever. Allegorically only in our story do the deeds of our body live forever. Metaphysically your story only lives on in the lives of those willing to accept your story and retell it. For example do you accept Christ, coincidentally also a partner to a trinity? Or do you enjoy Bach who experienced his death at the completion of his famous fugue finally finding perfect symmetry in patterns of music? This is where Luka “learns”, code for “accepts” all that already is, the truth in the stories his father told him through the years. Hence the morale of this story being: making your story real in truth stands the best chance to live on in minds of future man.



Poetry inspired by the book

Truth
by Paul Murphy

Truth is what it is
What is is
All that is
Not yet recognized

A rose simply is
Until man observes it
While it is still s rose
Man in truth makes it beautiful

If not for man
If not for his truth
Would a rose surrender
Its' beauty for what merely is