About 3-quarters through the book Rushdie writes about this story box that starts to tell a story but never completes it because midway through the story the box finds another story and this goes on - "until it seemed digression was the true purpose of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing...and the unmeaningness was the only meaning one could hold on to"

Clever, as those words are, unfortunately describe this book the best. A hodgepodge of semi-stories, semi-plots, semi-ideas and a whole lot of digression and unmeaningness.

Salman Rushdie mashes together Arabian nights, X-men and everything else he can get his hands on and makes almost 1,001 pages of rubbish.

There is just nothing that holds your attention long enough. The plot is a mess. Rushdie himself cannot seem to decide what he really is after. A Middle East allegory? Crass American capitalism? Bollywood sloppiness? Special characters? Revenge story? Meaningless subplots that go nowhere (the central gimmick of the hero's floating above ground, like that giant machine that everyone was working on that).

Guess when you make a career out of exploring extreme themes eventually you will end up on a book like this. However, it doesn't make it less disappointing because every bad book from Rushdie is a massive missed opportunity.