By Peter Craven
Credit: AP
FICTION
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
No one who has worked strenuously at the art of literary fiction has achieved the stardom or undergone the horrors of Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, was a dazzling inhabitation of magical realism that rivalled Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but no one imagined that Indira Gandhi – who Rushdie portrayed as a dangerous absolute monarch – would pursue him in the London courts.
Nor did anyone dream that The Satanic Verses would lead to a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. (The greatest Muslim school of theology, the Al-Azhar in Cairo, condemned the fatwa even though they deplored Rushdie’s representation of the origins of Islam.)
Then in 2023 he was attacked by an assailant who seems barely to have known his significance and was left blind in one eye as a consequence.
Now he has produced The Eleventh Hour, a suite of novellas and short stories which, as the title suggests, are concerned with the valley of the shadow of death. Again, they are variable, but it’s extraordinary how much juice and zest he gets from his wavering thematic, how much virtuosic humour and uncanny shifts of tone and register.
The Musician of Kaham is about a musical prodigy. She is a whiz on the piano and the sitar and lives are changed and kingdoms might collapse at her touch. This is very familiar Rushdie – a cartoon sketch from the painting box that produced Midnight’s Children.
The stories in Rushdie’s new book are concerned with the valley of the shadow of death.Credit: AP
Late, on the other hand, should enthral anybody. It is the story of a man who wakes up dead and then watches the effect his demise has. The time is the early 1970s and the protagonist (who can be seen only by a mild-mannered girl) is clearly based on E.M. Forster. He is the Honorary Fellow of his college and like Forster he is the author of a single masterpiece, about The Matter of India.
Evelyn Waugh, who for the purposes of this story is older than our hero, says he should concentrate on The Matter of Britain. This appertains to the fact that his name is Simon Merlyn Arthur: a reference to the fact that Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury crowd called E.M. Forster “Morgan”– dim echoes of Morgan le Fay, “The wan licentious Queen of Avalon,” King Arthur’s half sister.
Like Forster, our hero is gay, and we see him in an unconsummated affair with a posh nawab and then a no-holds-barred relationship with an Indian policeman.
Simon Merlyn Arthur deals with the Provost of the College who has the delicious title Lord Emmemm. All of this is related to the Enigma spy team and then – quite outrageously, but the tricky connection somehow works – with the case of Alan Turing.
Late is the key story in The Eleventh Hour, and it has the leapfrogging trashiness of the greatest Rushdie story, where no rules apply.
Rushdie manages to be very beguiling in his pursuit of what may be illusions and may be the lineaments of his own face. The upshot is tricky and trashy, but you won’t stop reading it, and you can tell that its tricksiness has an absolute seriocomic gravity.
The final story, The Man in the Piazza, is an extraordinary, animated allegory in which the terms we might use for the basics of narrative technique become figures in a kind of dance. It’s a wonderful essay on what gets called – forbiddingly – narratology but somehow Rushdie succeeds in putting the logos back in the celebration and cerebration of language. This is a lovely attempt to bring allegory alive and somehow it works.
If you’ve always meant to have a go at Salman Rushdie, have a look at these requiems. Sometimes they’re a bit clamorous, even a bit obvious, but more often than not they have the spellbinding quality of a great writer who on a good day can create a whirlwind of enchantment.
Somehow writing is Rushdie’s shepherd. Novellas like Late and Oklahoma are prima facie evidence of why Rushdie is a wonder-worker. Who else in the history of the world has shown such ease in negotiating the different faces of the world: the passage to truth, the Matter of India.
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