The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Question everything’
Salman Rushdie ignores his own advice – these essays suggest he hasn’t changed his mind about anything since the Nineties
LANGUAGES OF TRUTH by Salman Rushdie
368pp, Jonathan Cape,
T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Salman Rushdie wrote, in Midnight’s Children (1981), one of the great novels of our time: dark, funny, political and ambitious. Since then, Rushdie has had the misfortune of becoming a cause célèbre, then a celebrity. His tribulations occupied the op-ed pages through the 1990s during the dark years he spent as a marked man, a (near) martyr to the cause of free speech. In the 2000s, no longer under immediate threat of assassination, he became a creature of the gossip pages, better known for his marriages and famous friends than for his books.
But the books continued to come, a big one every three or four years. Their size suggested a stillambitious writer refusing to rest on his (extensive) laurels. But the style that had once seemed refreshingly uninhibited began to seem – or revealed itself always to have been – simply undisciplined. The big ideas felt like a desperate pitch to Hollywood: the One Thousand and One Nights set in New York! Don Quixote retold as an American road movie! The style that had spawned a thousand imitators (and launched a thousand doctoral dissertations) descended fully into self-parody.
This latest book is a collection of his journalism and occasional writings since 2003. Little in it has the energy or originality of the best pieces in his first collection, Imaginary Homelands (1992). The rhetorical heroics of his second collection – Step Across this Line (2002) – were already beginning to grate, but one felt he had earned the right to a little liberal grandstanding. It is hard to be so indulgent when one finds him, two decades later, playing the old hits with diminishing brio.
A reader of this volume would be surprised to learn that Rushdie was for a time judged to be a postcolonial intellectual of the calibre of Edward Said, a literary writer worthy of being named in the same breath as VS Naipaul or Nadine Gordimer. It must have helped to sustain that impression that his grand reflections on history and politics appeared always in the mouths of his fictional narrators. The cascade of learned yet trendy allusions could have been mistaken for the work of a genuinely erudite man. Speaking in his own voice, without the convenient ironic distancing that fiction makes possible, he sounds distinctly middlebrow.
In essay after weary essay, Rushdie trots out the same allusions he has been bandying since the 1980s: the eating habits of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Churchill on democracy, Whitman on containing “multitudes”. He reproduces Pooterish weekend supplement pieces about his family’s Christmas. Sometimes, he rehashes remarks from his own essays and novels (“This is how I described it in The Satanic Verses, ‘As Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby wrote of his mother’”), as if composing a new sentence were beyond him.
The obituaries of famous friends (Carrie Fisher, Philip Roth, Christopher Hitchens) are too full of selfflattering anecdotes to be the moving testaments they’re meant to be. And when Rushdie returns to his favourite themes – the importance of irreverence, humour, freedom, etc – the tone reverts to the vacuous sonority of that very American genre, the commencement address. “Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Argue with all received ideas.”
Rushdie doesn’t really take his own advice. There is little evidence here that he has changed his mind about anything since the 1990s. The few attempts at self-criticism are tokenistic. “It has to be admitted that the influence of these tales is not always positive,” he says, after several pages condemning as sad, “philistine losers” those who are suspicious of fictions. After many years rejecting the ideals of truthfulness to be found in realist fiction, he seems to have arrived at the view that novelists “can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature”. Really? Novelists? Now?
One only gets the sense of a mind at work in the short pieces where Rushdie takes on a topic on which his views are not already fixed – the letters of the Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, the selfportraits of Francesco Clemente, the photographs of Sebastião Salgado. And there, just occasionally, the prose takes off and one is reminded what he can do. Reviewing a biography of Muhammad Ali, he describes, evocatively, “the screaming halfcrazy mouth on him”. There was a time when Rushdie’s own prose had that energy.