Author: Salman Rushdie
Published: 2012, Random House
I will admit it took me a while to get through this book, for all the usual reasons (work, child-rearing, house maintenance, sleep-deprivation). But there’s also this fact: this is not a narrative that immediately grabs hold of you and pulls. Salman Rushdie, in his fiction, has been described as an “exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist.” This book is not that. It’s largely straightforward and unadorned (which is just fine) and it’s a slightly disjointing because Rushdie wrote this, his autobiography, in the third-person. Given that the bulk of the book is his journey through a decade-plus of protective custody, the cause of which was the fatwa (a death sentence, read, an ordered assassination) issued in early 1989 by Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, his step-back from first person is precisely the point. Rushdie was forced to assume an entirely different narrative—and fast—to live his life. He became Joseph Anton, international publisher. The name created from two of his favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Checkov.
The third-person device works also because it perhaps allows Rushdie a more honest assessment of his own shortcomings, many of them no doubt exacerbated by the situation, but shortcomings nonetheless, particularly surrounding the ultimate demise of his third marriage. There are extremely touching moments, too, such as his enormous affection for his children, and his relationship with his first wife that had evolved, not without ups-and-downs, into a great friendship.
There are parts that fly like a thriller, particularly when news of the fatwa hits and Rushdie is whisked from one “safe” residence to another by highly-trained British security officers until a secure permanent residence can be found. There is his early life, recollections of growing up in India and entering boarding school in Britain, and dealing with his outsider status as he finds his path forward. There are his relationships with his parents and family, and the particular detours, triumphs and defeats that shape everyone forming their identity—Rushdie’s are particularly interesting because of Britain’s history in India. They all push together to explain Rushdie the writer and the themes on which he began to focus in his fiction, and what led to his writing The Satanic Verses, with which radical Islamists (many—if not most—without reading the book) took deadly issue.
The Satanic Verses, Rushdie explains, is not an anti-Islam book. Rushdie, himself an atheist, and a lover of history and his homeland, India, writes that the actual “Satanic Verses” that give the title to his book are part of Islamic history, and his basis for his novel were questions surrounding decisions made by the Prophet Muhammad (yes, I’m being vague, for two reasons: Rushdie’s account in Joseph Anton is extraordinarily interesting and not prone to easy summary, and I have not read The Satanic Verses).
Rushdie writes toward the end of Joseph Anton about a brief encounter with a former radical who took part in the vitriolic protests against the book. The former radical approached Rushdie to say he had ditched his extremism and finally read The Satanic Verses, and that he didn’t see any problem that earned the outrage.
And that is the real tragedy. The outrage—the fatwa—for what, really? But that is what happens in societies that don’t support and codify freedom of expression. Further, the fatwa, Rushdie makes quite clear, not only affected him and his immediate family, details of which he notes in tedious—again, that’s the point—daily routines we take for granted that were disrupted. (Because it was an ongoing active and aggressive assassination threat, the British government ordered highly trained security officers to protect Rushdie and his family ‘round the clock, which meant the security lived in his house. Friends had to be constantly cleared by security, and make space for security when Rushdie, say, wanted to go over to someone’s house for dinner. Circuitous routes needed to be established for every drive, anywhere. Several airlines banned Rushdie, making air travel difficult, and thus his livelihood.)
On the other end of the spectrum was the truly frightening: Constant death threats and the assassination cells thwarted by British secret service. Publishers, editors, copyeditors, translators and booksellers across the globe that published and sold the book were harassed with protests, attacked physically with fists, knives, guns and bombs. And, yes, killed.
On top of all that, Western governments, including his own (Rushdie is a British citizen), were initially reluctant to take a firm stance against Iran (oil and other goods being primary reasons) to resolve the issue, with some members of parliament saying he was at fault for expressing himself.
When the ordeal finally ended, Rushdie writes, the lingering effects remain. While The Satanic Verses ultimately “had not been suppressed, and nor had its author, but the dead remained dead, and a climate of fear had grown up that made it harder for books like his to be published, or even, perhaps, to be written.”
Despite the toll, however, it’s hard to imagine a more important battle waged, for its relevance today is glaring. “At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie writes, “behind all the accusations and abuse, [is] a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?”
Joseph Anton is as much Rushdie’s account of a horrifying attack on free speech as it is an argument for unfettered storytelling, for the existence of probing and lengthy narrative, and, one could add, the existence of the novel itself as a vehicle for those things, as a counterweight to the shortened attention spans and tribal social media groups that restrict us today. Given that this book was published when social media still seemed more an amusement than disruptive force, and that currently world leaders exist that try to exploit divisions created by that disruptive force, Rushdie’s thoughts could be called prophetic:
“In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous, not homogenous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory,” he writes, adding that we don’t present the same exact identity to our parents, our friends, coworkers, lovers and children. Which is normal.
Characters in books help us identify with our many selves, and make us, in a word, empathetic. Which is good. “Readers and writers could take that knowledge of broad-based identity out into the world beyond the pages of books, and use the knowledge to find common ground with their fellow human beings,” Rushdie writes. “You could support different football teams but vote the same way. You could vote for different parties but agree about the best way to raise your children. You could disagree about child rearing but share a fear of the dark. You could be afraid of different things but love the same music. You could detest each other’s musical taste but worship the same God. You could differ strongly on the question of religion but support the same football team.”
In short, by banishing ourselves to tribal instincts, be it extremism in any form or what’s offered on our smartphone screens and the truncated narratives contained within, we forget the fine tissue that connects humanity. Eventually we believe that tissue doesn’t exist. That is the reality we are looking at today, and why Joseph Anton is an important book.
Author image courtesy of http://www.salmanrushdie.com.
