Rushdie on how the best magical realism transcends fantasy

Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman. Remember the ‘irresistibubble’ tag for Aero chocolate bars? He was responsible for that, too.

If there’s any embarrassment on Rushdie’s part (and why should there be?) that some of his best-known words are from the sides of buses, it was undetectable as he sat down with John Wilson on This Cultural Life last week. Their conversation was especially poignant because it had originally been scheduled to take place the week after Rushdie was stabbed in America in August 2022. Describing himself now as ‘surprisingly well’ and ‘a medical miracle’, the novelist alluded to his recent memoir Knife as ‘a way of handling’ what happened, before speaking of his determination to move on.

This Cultural Life being a broadly retrospective programme, moving on, in this case, meant moving back beyond recent history to Rushdie’s childhood and formative literary influences. He cited first of all the independence and partition of India in 1947 as the foundation and deepest source of inspiration for his prose as well as his character: ‘I feel at rock bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has just been piled on top of that.’

The programme acquired a distinctly biographical flavour as Rushdie used his selection of cultural influences to more or less tell his life story, proceeding from India to his arrival at Rugby school, thence Cambridge (where E.M.