8 - Interchapter

Summary

This book on Rushdie's fiction, first published in 1999, borrows a device from fiction itself to bring the story (or the commentary on the stories) up to date. It is now 2011; by which time the author has celebrated his 60^th birthday, published four further novels, moved to his third continent, and seen other significant changes in his life – not least, becoming in 2007 Sir Salman Rushdie, thus lining himself up beside the fictional father-figure from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the ennobled anglophile Sir Darius Cama. One is sure Sir Darius would have been pleased (and we overlook the fact that in the novel itself Sir Darius is later disgraced, and returns the citation for his knighthood).

Meanwhile this novel, anticipated at the end of the last chapter, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, was published in 1999, and partly because of its upfront subject matter – rock music – and partly because of its relocation – via Bombay and London to America – enjoyed a somewhat mixed critical reception. (More on that in a moment; I must not get ahead of myself.) Later that same year Rushdie met the actress and model Padma Lakshmi. In 2000, having eventually been granted a visa, he travelled with his son Zafar to India, for a kind of reconciliation with the country ‘after a gap of twelve-and-a-half years’. At the end of the same year he expressed his frustration with life in London and moved to New York. The novel Fury was published in 2001, with the Empire State Building impaling bright clouds on the cover; just weeks before the Twin Towers come tumbling down in Manhattan. This time, the novel was greeted in some quarters with frank hostility. One reviewer went so far as to say it was time for Rushdie to be ‘relegated’ to a second division of novelists, prompting a spirited defence by John Sutherland of a Rushdie who had been unfairly victimized by the press. 2003 sees a second collection of Rushdie's essays, Step Across This Line. These essays are from the previous ten years, and include many written towards the end of this decade for the New York Times and the New Yorker, which together give some idea of Rushdie's increasing identification with his newly-adopted country and its values.