Salman Rushdie has opened doors between real and imagined worlds

Seven years ago I asked Rushdie how his life was now. It was 26 years after the Ayatollah of Iran had responded to his Booker-shortlisted novel, The Satanic Verses, by calling for Rushdie’s death, causing the murder of some of his collaborators and leading him to live under continuous police protection for nine years.  
  
‘Pretty dull, thank you,’ he said.   
  
We were having coffee in a bookshop in New York; the occasion was an interview about his novel Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. ‘My life got too interesting for a while,’ he explained, ‘and I’m quite happy that it’s boring. When you’ve been deprived of everyday life and then you get it back, you grab it with both hands – it’s all you want.’  
  
Three years earlier he had published a memoir, Joseph Anton (the title is the name he took in hiding – borrowed from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov), which had served to draw a line under the period of his persecution. That had reached an apparent end point when the President of Iran announced in 1998 that ‘we should think of the Salman Rushdie issue as completely finished’. Rushdie’s 600-page factual account emerged, he said, ‘like a kind of flood’.   
  
As a contrast to the reality that had been dammed up inside him he had written Two Years…, an exuberant novel that put his sense of humour on full display. Still, its underlying themes – magic, rationalism and the ideas of a particular 12th century Islamic philosopher – were not a million miles from those that led him to write The Satanic Verses, and I asked him if he thought anything in the book would land him in trouble.   
  
‘Everything lands me in trouble,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I only have to go out for the evening, I’ve landed in trouble. My view is: either write your books or don’t write your books. But don’t write them being scared.’  
  
Two years later the Supreme Leader of Iran declared that the fatwa against Rushdie remained as it had originally been issued.  
  
And two years after that – in 2019 – Rushdie was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the seventh time: a record number, and exactly half the number of novels he has written. He attended events with no increased protection, spoke about that book, Quichotte (which melded Cervantes’ Don Quixote with the American road movie genre, political satire and a poignant reflection on the life of a writer), and, most memorably, he praised that year’s longlisted writers, most of them much younger, on every possible public occasion.  

In 1981, when Midnight’s Children won the prize, the chair of the judges was Malcolm Bradbury – novelist, critic and founder of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, which generated a number of future Booker winners (Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright). After dinner at the winner ceremony, Bradbury gave a speech about the state of the novel, which makes for resonant reading today. 

There was a rumour, he said, that the British novel was over – that after Joyce and Woolf had died in 1941, the American novel had stepped in. And it was true, he said, that the British novel was ‘disposed towards provinciality’: ‘Hampstead talking to Hampstead, Islington and, if daring, Camden Town’.   
  
But in 1981 Bradbury believed ‘a new climate [was] growing in our fictional culture’. In fact, he said, ‘I think it will be looked back on as a major time of creation and invention’. He pointed to more international influences and scope than the so-called Hampstead novel had countenanced, and said that the book his judging panel had chosen as their winner offered ‘hope for the new development of the novel’. It was written, he thought, by someone whose work would be ‘of lasting importance.’   
  
Bradbury described Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s second book, as ‘a work of extraordinary ambition and abundance’, ‘of amazing imaginative fertility as well as of political courage, a tale of the largest intentions’.   
  
And he was right: not only about that book’s lasting influence but about the burgeoning, border-blind creativity that decade witnessed in British fiction, from Rushdie’s Booker win in 1981 to Ishiguro’s in 1989.

A few years ago, Rushdie and I spoke at a Hay festival in Mexico. Because of the location it was fitting that he should speak about García Márquez, who had lived in Mexico for many years. Rushdie explained how magical realism, among other ways of writing, had given him permission, almost, to experiment: 
 
‘Any writer will tell you that there are writers who open the door for you,’ he said. ‘They say: you could go through this door, and go this way. Certainly García Márquez was one of those. And Borges – I remember picking up the paperback of Ficciones [translated as Labyrinths], going home and reading it three times straight through. It was, in the true sense of the word, mind-blowing.  
 
‘In that period after the Second World War – the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies – there was this great flowering of world literature, and a number of gigantic figures, like García Márquez, like Günther Grass, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Borges, became very important to me, and showed me things that I might also want to try and do in my own way.’ 
 
Ishiguro, who went on to win the Nobel, looked back at the moment when Midnight’s Children won the Booker and reflected that it was a turning point in Britain. ‘That was a signal that a substantial core group within the reading public had declared that they were interested in reading books written by people, apparently from the outside, about other societies,’ he told Alan Yentob in the course of an Imagine documentary on the BBC four decades later. ‘Something was happening in British society at that point – not just in the literary culture but in the wider culture. People had suddenly moved on to a different era.’  
 
That era has lasted some time - and long may it continue. Midnight’s Children didn’t just win the Booker Prize once. It also won the ‘Booker of Bookers’ and the ‘Best of the Booker’, as a result of votes taken on the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize.