Death stalks the pages of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Eleventh Hour, and it’s there in the first story in this collection. “They were eighty-one years old,” he writes. “If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.”
Salman Rushdie is 78 now and conscious of his mortality. Thank goodness, though, it’s ordinary death — the bloke with a scythe — that invests these stories, not an assassin. It’s three years since a young Islamist almost killed Rushdie, leaving him blind in one eye with paralysis in one hand.
