The shock of Salman Rushdie’s horrific onstage maiming last August made it hard not to feel that we had somehow let our guard drop. After all, hadn’t the world’s most famous living writer long been a figure of fun? We scoffed at his thin-skinned tweets bizarrely comparing a female New York Times critic to Shakespeare’s Iago after she panned one of his novels; we giggled when a model leaked his out-of-the-blue message (“you look so gorgeous and hottt!”) and called him a “horny jerk”. By the time Rushdie made a cameo on Curb Your Enthusiasm to explain the pleasures of “fatwa sex”, did any viewer truly keep in mind the continuing threat to his life?
And either way, if he was enjoying himself, who could begrudge him? Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton recalls how, after Ayatollah Khomeini called for his murder in 1989, he came under pressure to apologise for The Satanic Verses (1988) for the sake of British hostages in Beirut. A novelist! Seldom since has his work ever been allowed to stand free from the outsize freight loaded on to it by foes and well-wishers alike, and no doubt extravagant praise awaits his new book, Victory City, simply because it’s his first since last summer’s assault.
