Reviews

Salman Rushdie has chosen to counter violence with something stronger—his art. Do the rest of us have the courage to follow?

by Matthew D’Ancona

When Salman Rushdie wrote Joseph Anton (2012), a 600 page memoir of his years in hiding, he used the third person to describe himself: a novelist living in the shadow of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, calling for his death as the author of The Satanic Verses.

That book concluded with an assessment in 2002 by the intelligence services that the threat level had fallen significantly; a party held in Rushdie’s honour by the Special Branch officers who had protected him; and his exit from the darkness into the light: “He walked out of the Halcyon Hotel on to Holland Park Avenue and stuck out an arm to hail a passing cab.”

In vivid contrast, Knife is written in the first person. As he remarked to the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, last year, only a few months after a brutal attempt on his life had been made at a literar y event in Chautauqua, New York, on 12th August 2022: “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me. I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”

That the book should exist at all is miraculous—a word that the atheist Rushdie uses often and unabashedly in these pages. From the platform of the amphitheatre, he sees “a squat missile” hurtling towards him through the audience. Then, the recognition that his release from the fatwa had only been provisional: “my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.”