Fury by Salman Rushdie

How fast, how foolishly, the media juggernaut rolls to crush its chosen victims. Already, with the faces of the Booker Prize jury set against it, Fury looks doomed to contempt. The steaming kitchen of reach-me-down opinion has pronounced it a turkey, trussed it in sneers, and served it up for our derision with side-orders of prurience and Schadenfreude.

"The speed of contemporary life... outstripped the heart's ability to respond," laments the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's eighth novel, Malik Solanka. It's a trend that the novel explores, but also endures. A mad flood of news and views now cascades down every channel of the culture to swamp both feeling and judgment. In Rushdie's previous novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, one bravura passage mimics the way in which the blessings and curses of the information age flip-flop from one second to the next: "You're a sex god! You're a sex pest! She's to die for! She's a slut!... That good man in Nigeria is a murderer! That murderer is Algeria is a good man!" We might add, "That brilliant Bombay-born novelist is a postmodern paragon and a martyr of free speech! No, that unreadable, élitist snob is an arrogant and ungrateful love-rat!"

So we urgently need some of that "slowness" cherished by Milan Kundera. Time to calm down, look hard, think straight. Fury is a short, intense novel of New York, and of the frantic globalised culture for which that city stands as symbol and sponsor. It aims high, at great speed, and often misses (or misfires). It also grapples with profound questions about the fate of old-fashioned emotions, and old-fashioned stories, in "this age of simulacra and counterfeits" – questions that many of Rushdie's detractors scarcely know exist, let alone can answer. Fury falls short; but I would rather read one page of flawed Rushdie than 1000 of the soporific pap that often passes for "literary fiction" in Britain today.

The novel extends his long westward trek through the great metropolitan Babels. This journey began in the Bombay of Midnight's Children, when Saleem plunged into the "annihilating whirlpool of the multitude". Yet that delirious fantasia of hope and change in India was followed by Shame. There, in Pakistan, the dream of modernity dwindled into a paranoid quest for purity.

Fury, I think, bears the same sort of relation to The Ground Beneath Her Feet as Shame did to its cornucopian predecessor. In 1999, Rushdie's lavish rock-and-roll epic found joy in planetary pop culture, and its gigantic stars. Fury takes the same forces, but shows their shadow-side: excess, hysteria, and the vast rage of an era when "the whole world is burning on a shorter fuse". Orpheus and Dionysus ruled The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Here, the savage "kindly ones" set the mood in street and heart: "As bonds of family weakened, so the Furies began to intervene in all of human life".

Professor Solanka has done more than most to clear a path for them. Raised in Bombay, trained in Cambridge as a political thinker, he has forsaken the academy to make a fortune out of a doll, "Little Brain". This iconic adult plaything, Barbie-cum-Bridget Jones, is a classic Rushdie conceit, implausible but suggestive. Its global success ushers in the Gothic theme of the creation that devours its creator. Solanka's doll-making also represents fiction itself: the unreal reality that leaks out into the world to bring love – and grief.

Solanka grows rich, weds the Shakespearean scholar Eleanor, and sires little Asmaan. Yet acclaim wrecks his idea of himself. He succumbs to the fury of fame. One night, utterly pissed (in both the US and UK sense), he finds himself standing over his sleeping wife and child with a kitchen-knife in his unsteady hand. Terrified, he flees across the ocean, hoping that the larger frenzy of millennial Manhattan will swallow his own: "Eat me, America, and give me peace".

Where The Ground Beneath Her Feet nudged real history a little out of true, Fury fossicks in the trash-cans of the here-and-now. The stuff it digs up might, in a few years, guide the researchers of I Love 2000. Buffy and Puffy; Jennifer Lopez and Elian Gonzalez; Tony Soprano and Tiger Woods; Alan Greenspan and Lara Croft: the icons that clutter its pages mix the actual and the fictive. So does Solanka, in a novel that often resembles "a fight to the death between the counterfeit and the real".

His buddy Jack, a tough black journalist gone soft and affluent, showcases one type of social fakery. Now the hanger-on of a repulsive brat-pack of wealthy playboys, he flatters their boorishness (and worse) with an ignoble Sammy Davis Jnr act. This sub-plot whisks Rushdie into Bret Easton Ellis territory. He doesn't really thrive among the all-American psychos.

Closer to the core of Fury lie the two women who become Solanka's Manhattan muses. Mila Milo, a Serbian post-punk computer-witch, leads a gaggle of super-geeks. Damaged Mila stirs up the professor's dormant sexual demons, but also his slumbering talents. With the geeks' technical back-up, Solanka devises an imaginary Web-based world of "Puppet Kings". This science-fiction excursion to the planet "Galileo-1" lets Rushdie explore the mood of a hi-tech culture in love with digital imitations of life. Meanwhile, the cult website design, with "its formal preference for lateral leaps and its relative uninterest in linear progression", recalls the style of Fury. On Galileo-1 – a planet of apeing – puppet and master, mask and face, angrily clash. On Planet Manhattan, much the same confusion occurs.

Neela Mahendra, the novel's third muse (and third Fury), seems to offer an escape-hatch from this suffocating rage. Gorgeous and witty, a diasporic Indian TV producer with "an eight-inch long herringbone-pattern scar", Neela drags Solanka up from the depths of himself. We hope that "the goddess of wrath has departed", despite a farcical scene in which the three women converge in Solanka's New York bedroom: Don Giovanni collides with Brian Rix.

The redemption proves too good to be true. Neela returns to fight in the ethnic wars of her South Pacific homeland – a divided backwater clearly based on Fiji. There, Solanka's own-brand Puppet Kings inspire the masks and moves of a rebel army. The novel climaxes in a bloodstained hall of mirrors, as the children of the doll-maker's imagination once again "move out into the world and grow monstrous": as monstrous as a coup, a pogrom – or a fatwah?

Too much happens here, too fast. Modelling the stylistic jolts and smashes of a New York street or multi-channel TV, Fury achieves an almost MP3 level of compression. Its material – some misbegotten, but some magnificent – can scarcely breathe. Neither, for all their rampant gabbiness, can the characters.

In the universe of Fury, sensory overload itself can spark murderous rage. Speed kills. Meanwhile, "the language of the heart was being lost". Rushdie performs this process, often with a coruscating virtuosity. Yet he never really transcends it. The medium strangles the message.

In a coda on Hampstead Heath, Solanka tries to attract the attention of his estranged son by jumping on a bouncy castle. "Grand and high was his bouncing," for all his "lack of a golden hat". The reference is to Fitzgerald's poetic epigraph in The Great Gatsby, which enjoins a hopeful suitor to strut and preen "Till she cry, 'Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you'." It's an ecstatic valedictory image, but hardly a comforting one. Even after the madness of Manhattan, we begin again at the outset of a lethal American myth in which high-bouncing men will compete for love and glory. It seems that the fury, and the Furies, have not been laid to rest.