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Saturday 4 July 2009

‘We have been wimpish about defending our ideas’

Salman Rushdie tells Matthew d’Ancona that the idea at the heart of his new novel set in 16th-century Florence and India is that universal values exist and require robust champions

The last time I interviewed Salman Rushdie was, as he remarks, a lifetime ago. That was in February 1993, in a safe house in north London guarded by Special Branch officers, only four years after Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for the alleged blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. On that occasion, quite understandably, the novelist seemed shrunken: not only spiritually subdued, but physically compressed by the ordeal of the fatwa.

Fifteen years on, we meet in very different circumstances to discuss his new novel: The Enchantress of Florence, a lushly magnificent exploration of East and West in the 16th century. No longer creeping in the shadow of theocratic murder, Rushdie — or, more properly these days, Sir Salman — is animated and puckish. In a magic realist touch, it is as though the 60-year-old novelist is actually younger than he was in 1993. At any rate, his countenance and the spark in his eye today prove that you can come back from the dead.

Not that this particular novel, his tenth, was straightforward to accomplish. The idea has been brewing since 1999. And its delicacy of touch and playfulness (how can one not like a book that includes ‘the rarely used Breat Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse’?) conceal the terrible spectre of writer’s block.

‘It was a pretty horrible year for me in many ways, last year, with my marriage [his fourth, to Padma Lakshmi] breaking up,’ he says. ‘There was certainly a moment, early last year, when there was just so much noise in my head that I really feared that I was losing the book and just losing grip of it. I became, for the first time that I can remember, really scared that I would not be able to write it. By some extra gear of concentration and will, I managed to find it. I worked in a more concentrated, more focused way, as a way of shutting out this destructive stuff that was around me.’

Rushdie says he feels as he did after Midnight’s Children, which was published in 1981 and went on to win the Booker of Bookers. ‘I did feel there was an awful lot riding on that book, and fortunately people thought it was OK. I felt the same thing with this. When I finished it I thought: by any standard that I know, this is a good book, and if people don’t agree with me, I will be really devastated. Because it would show that there is either something wrong with the world, or something wrong with me.’

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