Wife after wife told him she did not like living under his shadow. It is a tragicomic account of a life lived under great pressure, where Rushdie's self-confessed "need to be loved" led him to make disastrous mistakes. The disclosures make for powerful reading, but the device of writing in the third person does little to distance the domestic rows about matters great and small – infidelity, video games, pregnancies, fertility, security. The surviving wives cannot have looked forward with pleasure to this publication, which tells us more perhaps than we need to know. He turns himself into an almost Falstaffian figure, shabby and overweight, letting himself go, smoking, at times drinking too much and quarrelling with a succession of wives. The reference to Lord Jim (which could also apply to Razumov, in Conrad's novel of anarchy and terrorism, Under Western Eyes) is suggestive and Rushdie (an authority on Shame) is not afraid to show himself as a coward and a clown, hiding from a sheep farmer behind a kitchen dresser in Wales, shutting himself into bathrooms in north London to avoid a plumber or a cleaner. The former he describes as "the trans-lingual creator of wanderers… of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame". Doris Lessing urged him to tell the whole truth, like Rousseau, but he failed, as she did.įor his double life, he was obliged to turn himself into a fictional character and he became Joseph Anton, after Conrad and Chekhov. He kept a journal, but, being a clever and would-be honest man, he knows we deceive and bowdlerise even in our journals and admits it. Having resisted commercial attempts to fictionalise his life, he has attempted to tell his own truth. Rushdie has now told his version of events and it is more gripping than any spy story. Rushdie's bold, complex and literary novel, The Satanic Verses, was hijacked by the exterminating angels of wrath, a wrath that still flames around us. It'll get sorted." As we know, it took years to sort and arguments against the dying ayatollah's death sentence span out of control into impassioned and often intemperate debates about the blasphemy laws, freedom of speech, the nature of fiction, cultural relativism, Islam, the narrowing of national identities and the alleged cost to the British nation of Stan, his colleagues and Operation Malachite. "It can't be allowed… threatening a British citizen. His first reaction to the fatwa was simple. O ne of the heroes of Rushdie's memoir is a handsome, tennis-playing, gun-carrying police protection officer called Stan, which may or may not be his real name.
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