Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Titular Haroun is a boy whose father, Rashid, is a renowned storyteller whom all the local politicos want telling stories for their side, thus assuring their election by his happy audience. In fact, Snooty Buttoo from the Valley of K enlists his aid for just such purpose, but prior to Rashid and Haroun’s arrival, wife and mother to each splits with neighbor, Mr. Sengupta, who posed the chillingly important question.

As a result of her departure, Rashid finds himself bereft of all storytelling powers and Haroun finds himself unable to concentrate on anything beyond eleven minutes, eleven being the hour of said wife and mother’s departure.

Thus anticipating a bad time of it during the next day’s political rally, Rashid and Haroun retire glumly to separate rooms on houseboat floating upon the lake of K, but a switcheroo of beds and rooms lead Haroun to discover the source of pop’s gift of gab, and that it can be recovered, and that he’ll have to go to the moon -- Earth’s second moon, that is -- to do it.

The bulk of the story then takes place on Kahani, the aforementioned and very watery moon, where Haoroun hopes to meet the Walrus to petition for restoration of his father’s gift of gab. While there, he also meets the Eggheads (creators of many things known as P2C2Es, or, “Processes Too Complicated To Explain”), a water Genie named Iff, a mechanical mind-reading Hoopoe bird, a royal page named Blabbermouth, and eventually his own father, Rashid. Together they all become embroiled in a plot to save the precious story waters of the moon which are being poisoned by the Cultmaster Khattam-Shud, a being who has split his shadow from his self and who rules the shadow-side of Kahani and who bears a striking resemblance to someone back home in the real world.

There are other obvious analogues between Haroun’s waking world and its various personages and those on Kahani. The analogues stretch most obviously to the political struggle of which Rashid is a part in the...