A hero for our time?

They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt a tap on his arm. From the pew behind, the American novelist Paul Theroux whispered: ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.’

Earlier that day the religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa demanding that the world’s Muslims had a duty to murder the author of The Satanic Verses; the frail old thug had almost certainly not read the book, but the fatwa was embraced with great eagerness — and so began Rushdie’s exile from his own life for the best part of a decade.

Forced to flee his home and endure a peripatetic existence, his every movement was controlled by the team of policemen who comprised ‘Operation Malachite’, the grudging official response to the threats against him. The regimen saw him separated from his family, his friends, his professional life and his own name — Joseph Anton was the pseudonym he adopted at the behest of the police: yep, Conrad and Chekhov. He takes himself seriously, Rushdie, as well he might.

This is a long, harrowing and painful book, and it may be the most important book of our times — comparable, in a sense, to Primo Levi’s If This is a Man; for there is tyranny, and there are those who connive with tyranny, or out of cowardice tolerate tyranny because it is the safest option.

In the end, reading this account, one feels less angry towards the mad mullahs and their bearded, jabbering, opportunistic half-witted western emissaries than towards those enlightened souls in the West, and in Britain in particular, who found it inconvenient to give Rushdie the unequivocal support he both deserved and required— and which the principle of the matter surely demanded.

Politicians were obviously to blame — the odious Keith Vaz and Jack Straw (anxious to protect their local, heavily Muslim, majorities) being pre-eminent among them. But Margaret Thatcher should also be included, for simply doing nothing whatsoever in the face of Iran’s murderous intransigence.

Indeed the most distressing trope of this memoir is Rushdie’s rapid progression from being victim to perpetrator in the eyes of far too many people. As he explains, the bien pensant left deserted him because he had transgressed the wishes of the masses, i.e. the Muslim Ummah. And the right never liked him much to begin with, because Rushdie is himself a leftie, and a foreigner to boot. He was eviscerated for his supposed ‘ingratitude’ towards a state which valued not freedom of speech but merely, so it would seem, an easy life.

Lord Tebbitt was early off the mark in sticking the boot in to Rushdie — but incredibly, the right was at it again last weekend, with the Daily Mail howling about this ‘ingratitude’ thing. Nor were his fellow writers all comfortably on board: the ghastly Roald Dahl was a frequent tormentor, and among many others, John le Carré was spiteful and suggested that Rushdie was getting what he deserved.

That is a truly shocking point of view to hear expressed by any writer, albeit a thriller writer with highbrow pretensions; but then Robert Harris was at it again also last weekend. It seems to be agreed, among the literati, that Rushdie is a difficult, diffident, rather self-important and quite probably arrogant man, not necessarily easily likeable. This judgment — and whether or not it is true I have no idea and even less interest — undoubtedly queered the pitch against him.

Others plainly, if bizarrely, resented the publicity which came to him as a consequence of his death sentence, suggesting that his fame rested upon his unfortunate circumstances rather than upon any supposed literary abilities. It is an odd charge to level against someone who has won the Booker Prize of Prizes; in any case, the writing here is witty, sharp and sometimes exquisite.

For sure, there is humour to be found in these pages; a rather dark humour, of course. The friends of Rushdie who call him every 14 February to wish him a ‘happy anniversary’, for instance. And I wish I had been there to hear his ex-wife, Marianne Wiggins, tell William Golding at an awards ceremony that she was thinking of writing a feminist version of Lord of the Flies. And his police protection unit — Prot for short — who form a sort of rough Greek chorus throughout. One of their number was nicknamed the King of Spain because he had left his car unlocked outside a tobacconists, and when he emerged from the shop it was gone. King of Spain. Juan Carlos. Geddit?

But in the end we should be ashamed of our half-heartedness, our easeful equivocations, our craven determination to tread a middle line between decency and homicidal absolutism. There is no middle line between right and wrong.