Salman Rushdie is the essential British writer of our time
The author’s career has been determined by his 1989 fatwa, but he always wanted to be a writer rather than a cause, says Leo Robson
BHe has invented a new language for exploring the paradoxes of identity
efore he was a cause, he was a writer. But not just any writer. Sir Salman Rushdie commanded instant recognition as a great novelist with his second book, Midnight’s Children, a magical-realist tale of modern India, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
After winning the prize, Sir Salman became a confirmed and prominent member of a new literary set, along with his friends Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift, enshrined in Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983. More significantly, he also formed part of a looser movement of immigrant writers, many of them resident in England and writing in English, notably Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro.
On the strength of Midnight’s Children, in which Saleem Sinai tells the story of the magically endowed babies, himself among them, born within an hour of the moment of partition, it would be fair to say that he stands above them all. This was a time when there was much talk of a new dynamism in British fiction, and Sir Salman’s book was the first and, in retrospect, the greatest masterpiece, a work of colossal ambition, distinctiveness, vigour and skill.
Sir Salman built on Midnight’s Children with an allegorical novel about Pakistan under Bhutto and Zia-ul-Haq, Shame, which made the Booker shortlist in 1983, and then a portrait of British society, The Satanic Verses, which also made the shortlist, in 1988. He offered historical vision but also jokes and puns and wild flights of invention. In those years, his example was largely associated with a positive breakthrough, the new post-colonial perspective on identity and belonging – the empire writing back, in his own, much-used phrase. (“Midnight’s children” also gained currency, as a way of describing his generation of Indians.)
But his reputation – and his priorities – changed shape virtually overnight. A passage in The Satanic Verses, a dream sequence depicting a version of Muhammed, was considered an insult to Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran. Copies of the book were publicly burnt and it wasn’t long before confirmation of the old claim that those who burn books will soon burn people – or aspire to.
On Valentine’s Day 1989, three and a half months after the book was published, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the theocratic leader of Iran, issued a fatwa – a warrant, complete with monetary reward, for the deaths of anyone involved with the book and aware of its content. Sir Salman was attending the memorial service of the writer Bruce Chatwin at the Greek Orthodox church on Moscow Road in west London, and never returned home. For almost a decade, he lived in hiding, under police protection, a target, the centre of an “affair”.
He didn’t have the makings of an artist of that kind. Born in Bombay in 1947, educated at Rugby School and Cambridge, as a boy he devoured Indian mythology, European films, European and Latin American fiction (Günter Grass, Calvino, Márquez, Borges, Ionesco), and pop music. And though he was never apolitical, until the fatwa he was more likely to quote the Marxists E P Thompson and Benedict Anderson than Enlightenment or liberal thinkers. His positions were characteristic of the soft Left. He was sceptical of both capitalism and communism. He wrote about Nicaragua and the Contra War in The Jaguar Smile. He didn’t believe in censorship. ( Shame had been banned in Pakistan.)
The book’s offending passage had its origins in a course that Sir Salman had taken at King’s College Cambridge with the medieval historian Arthur Hibbert, “Muhammad, the Rise of Islam and the Early Caliphate”. But once attention turned to the theological and putatively anti-Islamic elements of The Satanic Verses, the argument turned not on Sir Salman’s grasp of history but his right to insult a religion and its adherents. Some, notably John le Carré, thought he did not. Such figures were the object of scorn when Sir Salman eventually told the story, in his third-person memoir Joseph Anton (2012).
Sir Salman was arguably a greater advocate for freedom before the fatwa, when he had simply been writing what he pleased, without fear of reprisal, criticising in turn the administrations of three countries (India, Pakistan and Britain, in Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses). It was others who determined that his career would become a story of religious intolerance and the right to offend. But after the fatwa he found a way of mining this subject as a source of art, writing a series of tributes to language and storytelling, and emphasising the status of literature as a site of free expression.
After the Iranian government ceased to support the fatwa in the late 1990s, Sir Salman said that The Satanic Verses could at last – or again – be read “as a novel instead of some kind of hot potato”, living the “ordinary life of a book”, with some people liking it and others disliking it. One strong sign that Sir Salman was no longer defined as an affair was the return of bad reviews. (When The Satanic Verses first appeared, page 15 was said to be as far many readers got.)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), a rock ’n’ roll rewriting of the Orpheus myth, was criticised for its excess. The writer Tim Parks charged Sir Salman with a kind of sentimentality, arguing that the energy of his aesthetic originated in “a rejection of the pathos of choice, of that need, with which most of us will be all too familiar, to become one thing or another… Instead everything is to be maintained in a fizz of promise, potential, multiplicity, and openness.” (Parks’s response prompted James Wood, the leading critic of new fiction, to review the book again – negatively this time.) And when Sir Salman was awarded a knighthood, in 2007, Boris Johnson said that he objected “on purely literary grounds”. (Dick Francis, with his “far better grasp of pace, character and plot”, was one alternative proposed.)
In a way, it’s a position he would have felt obliged to defend. During this period, Sir Salman was busy promoting the “purely literary” as a kind of ideal. Freedom of expression, though an end in itself, was also a necessary means to preserving this space – a space, he emphasised, that should not have barriers, in which storytelling meets high art, the so-called East meets the so-called West. It was partly a historical argument, about placeless people in a globalised world, and partly a timeless one, about irrecoverable origins and the mixed nature of all human beings.
Sir Salman’s desire to be nonabsolute and anti-fundamentalist about most things, but also to resist relativism about facts and morality, to be both lawless and a rationalist, is a difficult balancing act and works better in some books ( The Moor’s Last Sigh) than others ( Languages of Truth). But there’s no question that, along with his early, more innocent work, this vision has been a major contribution to modern literature.
He has alighted on a series of metaphors and allegories that resonate with the modern world, and invented a new language for exploring the paradoxes of identity. For the embodying of literary values in his best work and as a spokesman for them, he is the essential British writer of our times.
When Sir Salman first read the wording of the fatwa, he had wanted to argue with the word “sentenced”. But he decided that the habits of his “old self ” – the literary or linguistic – were “of no use any more”. That defeatism didn’t last. In the series of books he has published since the fatwa, among them The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Enchantress of Florence, and Quichotte, which appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist in 2019, he became reacquainted with this old self – found a way of becoming a writer again.