The one fault you can't stick Dickens with is unclarity, either at the plot or moment-to-moment level: Bleak House's opening description of muddy winter London is, paradoxically, precise and pointillistic. Conversely, this book often felt to me muddy, muddled, mixed-up. It's there in the language, of course, like the opening scene, which often feels like an encrustration on the action rather than intrinsic to it. It's there in the wending turns of the plot, with characters jammed together densely. Muddy, muddy...

Is "muddiness" always bad? Not necessarily. This is a postmodern novel; it wants to stick you in the confusion, the electrical polyphony of (then-)modern London, with MTV and a racist police force as equally strong presences. There were moments where a very strange beauty did come from all this muck, especially in its bird's-eye depiction of a London immigrant community and its collective psychic life; and then the last section just about sings you in unexpectedly chastened language through a very beautiful father-son story. Some of the longueurs are not too longueurish and work as paeans to hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and living with uncertainty.

I wish Rushdie had found a way of getting to those moments more often, with less bad jokes along the way, but I appreciate him for having the aesthetic sense to search for them: for being willing to get on his hands and knees and scrape them out of the mud of human experience.