Martin, or the Problem of Evil

A pirate goes down with his stolen fortune, and Candide cheers: crime punished, justice done. Martin counts the hundred other men who drowned alongside him. That arithmetic opens the hardest question in Candide: what evil actually is, and whether it can exist at all without a devil to blame it on. Salman Rushdie follows the problem from Voltaire's sinking ship to Shakespeare's Iago, the man who ruins lives for nothing. Then Martin answers a desperate question with a hawk, and Rushdie does something unexpected with the bleakest idea in the book: he agrees with it, and refuses to leave it bleak. A red sheep swims through it all.