Fury

Professor Malik Solanka, a 55-year-old retired historian of ideas and creator of dolls, has abandoned his wife and three-year-old son in London and fled to New York City without explanation. It is the summer of 2000, and Manhattan overflows with wealth, new technology, and cultural spectacle. Solanka has taken a sublet on the Upper West Side, where he walks the streets alone, haunted by surges of uncontrollable rage. A spiky-haired, green-eyed young woman named Mila Milo, who lounges on a neighboring stoop with her boyfriend Eddie Ford, breaks big-city etiquette by interrogating Solanka about his solitary habits. He reacts with disproportionate fury, startling everyone.

Phone calls from his wife, Eleanor Masters Solanka, a former Shakespeare scholar, reveal the depth of the rupture. Eleanor pleads with him about their son Asmaan, whose name means "sky" in Urdu, and reproaches him for walking out without a word. Solanka recalls their 15-year history and concludes Eleanor is essentially faultless. The source of the family's wealth is a female doll called Little Brain, which Solanka created and which became wildly popular worldwide.

Solanka's past unfolds in layers. At King's College, Cambridge, he befriended Krysztof "Dubdub" Waterford-Wajda, a jovial, half-English, half-Polish fellow student whose Stoical philosophy influenced Solanka's first book about the relationship between the state and the individual. In Amsterdam, Solanka had been entranced by the Rijksmuseum's miniature dollhouses, which inspired him to begin making dolls of philosophers in dramatic tableaux. Years later, Dubdub experienced a profound existential crisis, feeling disconnected from his own life, and attempted suicide multiple times before dying of heart disease after refusing surgery. Solanka's first marriage, to the sharp-tongued Sara Lear, also ended bitterly when Sara accused him of being capable of loving only his dolls. A pattern established itself: Women fell deeply in love with Solanka's apparent intensity of commitment, only to be blindsided when he abruptly left.

The hidden reason for Solanka's flight is gradually revealed. Little Brain began as a sharp, intellectually daring doll who starred in a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) philosophy series, interviewing great thinkers across history. Television executives forced a dumbing-down, and Solanka walked off the program but kept his merchandising income. Over the following decade, Little Brain mutated into a life-size cultural phenomenon, endorsing products, publishing bestselling memoirs, and recording music. Contractually unable to attack the property, Solanka watched in fury as his creation became the embodiment of tawdry celebrity. When Eleanor organized the removal of all Little Brain materials from their London home, the absence felt like the death of a child. That night, after a devastating quarrel, Solanka drank three bottles of wine, stabbed the one remaining Little Brain doll with a carving knife, then carried the knife upstairs and stood over his sleeping wife and son. He did not harm them, but the act of holding the blade convicted him in his own eyes. He fled to New York the next morning, believing he had to put an ocean between himself and what he had almost done.

In New York, Solanka's rage intensifies. He experiences blackouts, waking fully dressed with no memory of the night. Meanwhile, three wealthy young society women are murdered by blows to the head with lumps of concrete. Witnesses report a man in a Panama hat lurking near the victims, and Solanka, who habitually wears such a hat, is terrified by the coincidence. His blackouts align with the killings, deepening his fear that he may be responsible.

His friendship with Jack Rhinehart, an African American poet turned celebrity journalist, provides both companionship and a troubling mirror. Rhinehart writes lucrative profiles of the ultra-wealthy, seduced by the very world he satirizes. At Rhinehart's apartment, Solanka meets Neela Mahendra, a television producer of Indian descent from the fictional South Pacific nation of Lilliput-Blefuscu. Neela speaks passionately about deteriorating ethnic relations in her homeland, where the Indian-descended Indo-Lilliputian community and the indigenous Elbees are locked in conflict over land and civil rights.

Relief comes when police focus on the three victims' boyfriends. Mila then approaches Solanka carrying a Little Brain doll, revealing herself as a devoted follower of his early, intellectual creation. He confesses the story of the knife, and she dismisses his despair, insisting they are "just dolls" (109). Mila begins renovating Solanka's daily life while revealing her own backstory: Her father was a gifted Serbian poet who returned to Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars and was killed by a bomb. Her stoop companions turn out to be brilliant tech workers running a web-design company called Webspyder.net.

The relationship between Mila and Solanka deepens into an erotically charged ritual in which she dresses as Little Brain and sits on his lap while he plays the role of various philosophers. When Mila lets slip the word "Papi," Solanka grasps that she is driven by a compulsion to re-create a forbidden relationship with her father. He cannot refuse her despite recognizing the danger.

Neela re-enters Solanka's life, revealing she has left Rhinehart because he has been trying to join the S&M (Single & Male) Club, a secret society of wealthy young men connected to the murdered women. She discloses that the victims were scalped and that she found costumes in Rhinehart's closet matching witness descriptions from the crime scenes. A powerful mutual attraction overtakes Neela and Solanka. Inspired by Mila's urging to channel his fury into art, Solanka creates the Puppet Kings, an elaborate science-fiction world centered on Akasz Kronos, a cyberneticist who builds autonomous cyborgs on a drowning planet and relocates to the primitive nation of Baburia. The character of Zameen, Kronos's lost lover who searches for him, is modeled on Neela, marking the end of Little Brain's hold on Solanka's imagination.

Solanka and Neela begin a love affair as his relationship with Mila collapses into a purely business arrangement: The webspyders will build the Puppet Kings website. Meanwhile, Rhinehart is found dead in a construction site with a misspelled suicide note confessing to the murders. The investigation quickly exposes the death as a murder staged by the three boyfriends, who confess to killing the women and luring Rhinehart to his death.

The Puppet Kings project launches as a commercial phenomenon, with record-breaking web traffic and merchandise partnerships with Mattel, Sony, and other companies. But personal catastrophe strikes in a single night. Eddie breaks into Solanka's apartment with a knife, and Mila demands Solanka explain their afternoons to Neela. Then Eleanor and Morgen Franz, Solanka's former friend and now Eleanor's partner, arrive unannounced from London; Asmaan had innocently revealed their relationship during an earlier phone call. Confronted by three furious women, Solanka sees them as incarnations of the Furies, the avenging goddesses of Greek myth. Morgen punches him unconscious, and Neela departs for Lilliput-Blefuscu without a word.

In Lilliput-Blefuscu, a coup by the ethnic Elbee nationalist Skyresh Bolgolam is overthrown by Indo-Lilliputian revolutionaries wearing Puppet Kings costumes. Their leader Babur, now calling himself "Commander Akasz," wears a mask modeled on Solanka's face and demands total executive authority. Solanka flies there in pursuit of Neela. Detained and held in a cell, he finds Babur transformed into an authoritarian strongman who forces Neela to parrot absurdities as demonstrations of his power. Neela visits Solanka alone, reveals that many fighters have lost confidence in Babur, admits she still loves Solanka, and organizes an escape plan. When the Lilliputian army assaults the compound, Neela stays behind to distract Babur, enabling the rescue of hostages and Solanka's extraction on a British military evacuation flight. Helicopter gunships destroy the Parliament building. Both Babur and Neela are presumed dead. A cameraman hands Solanka a note from Neela: "The earth moves. The earth goes round the sun" (255).

Months later, in London, Solanka has withdrawn from the world, living in a hotel suite. His divorce from Eleanor is nearly final. One spring day, he follows Asmaan, Eleanor, and Morgen through Hampstead Heath at a distance. When Eleanor spots him and silently mouths "no," Solanka instead climbs onto a bouncy castle at a nearby fairground and begins jumping and shouting with all his might, echoing his son's own words: "Look at me, Asmaan! I'm bouncing very well! I'm bouncing higher and higher!" (257).