Sam Leith Sam Leith

Salman Rushdie: ‘The implausible has become everyday’

The author on writing in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen

When I say goodbye to Sir Salman Rushdie in his offices at New York University in Lower Manhattan in early March, we bump elbows. Not that it’s much more than a gesture, by this stage: we shook hands unthinkingly on first meeting, and we’d just shaken hands again. It’s a novelty, still halfway to being a joke. As I descend in the lift to Cooper Square, it occurs to me that if I’ve given Rushdie coronavirus I will be halfway to achieving what the mullahs couldn’t. Halfway funny as a hypothetical; halfway not at this distance, writing the piece up three weeks later. As Alan Moore’s nihilistic Rorschach puts it: ‘Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.’

I don’t imagine Rushdie will take offence at this. The active threat to his life from radical Islam is two decades behind him; and his own fiction has a way of dealing in sour, sometimes apocalyptic ironies. His latest, the Booker-shortlisted Quichotte, is set in what it describes as ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’. As we were only beginning to realise, talking above the bright bustle of a sunny spring day in Lower Manhattan, anything was busy happening all over the country in the bloodstreams of the populace.

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis,’ he says. ‘The implausible has now become everyday.’ Isn’t this a problem for a writer whose books drink from the fantastical traditions of magic realism and science fiction — where crazy stuff happening is what sets them apart?

‘It is,’ he says. ‘The book before this, The Golden House, was for that reason almost entirely realistic. I thought: it’s strange enough, you don’t need to add to that. Then this one uses all the tricks in the book, I just took the whole bag out.’

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in