These days, Rushdie seems serene and quietly happy—exactly the type to be calm in the eye of a storm, literary or otherwise | Alberto Estevez/EPA/Keystone Press; Mohsin Raza/Reuters
Midtown Manhattan is almost afloat, battered by a near-monsoon. Sheets of rain drench anyone foolhardy enough to cross 8th Avenue, but when Salman Rushdie saunters into the Wylie Agency, umbrella in hand, there’s nary a droplet to be seen on his pinstriped suit.
He may look rather devilish in photographs, but in person, Rushdie, now 63, seems serene, unflappable, quietly happy—exactly the type to be calm in the eye of a storm, literary or otherwise. In a spacious office, he reminisces about how much smaller Andrew Wylie’s headquarters were when the literary super-agent poached him in 1987; the move helped the predatory Wylie earn the nickname “The Jackal.” The next year, Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, which would vault him to an unforeseen level—and undesirable type—of fame in 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him.
Ancient history, in one sense: Rushdie is no longer a cause célèbre, forced to dash from one hiding place to another. And today, he is here to speak about his second children’s book, Luka and the Lake of Fire, a boisterous adventure tale dedicated to his 13-year-old son Milan, the inspiration for Luka. It’s a sequel of sorts to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, published 20 years ago, but the circumstances of their creation couldn’t be more different. “When I wrote Haroun,” Rushdie recalls, sitting back on a couch amidst Wylie’s literary memorabilia (a street sign reading “Philip Roth Drive,” a photograph of William S. Burroughs taken by Allen Ginsberg), “it was the year immediately following the attack on The Satanic Verses. The themes [in Haroun] have to do with language and silence, with those who rejoice in chatter and those who want to shut them up.”
Rushdie dreamed up the story while in hiding. British bookstores selling The Satanic Verses were being bombed, and Special Branch policemen were moving him around secret locations in England; he’d recently separated from his second wife, and for security reasons, had limited contact with his then 11-year-old son Zafar, to whom he dedicated Haroun.
The few interviews he gave during that time were conducted in undisclosed locales; journalists tended to describe him as a man bravely facing a completely derailed life. In 1993, fellow Booker winner John Banville wrote of finding in Rushdie “an immense and somehow sustaining sadness.” Literature became one of his few consolations, and Haroun was his first book with a happy ending: the hero saves his father, a storyteller, from being silenced.
This time, Haroun’s brother Luka takes on a similar task: he must bring their father the Fire of Life, which burns in a distant lake in the World of Magic, in order to waken him from a near-comatose sleep. Not surprisingly, given this theme, Rushdie counts himself among the parents who see their children as “a kind of salvation,” he says. “When Milan was born, I remember thinking, ‘I’m quite an old father, and when he’s 20, I’ll be 70.’ When there’s a large gap in years between the parent and the child, the subject of mortality becomes very real. You want to be able to raise your child; you want them to have a parent. That became the thing I tried to dramatize in this book.”
Rushdie, who moved to Manhattan in 2000, goes back to London often to spend time with his sons: Zafar heads the PR agency Rushdie Media (with clients such as Moët Hennessy and Next Models), and Milan is still in school.
With his younger son, Rushdie enthusiastically plays the video games that inspired the book: Luka’s magical quest to save his father, Rashid, involves action-packed levels with extra lives to help him complete his task. The novelist showed his youngest son the beginning of the book with some trepidation, as it features a “death figure” that sucks away at Rashid’s life. “To my pleasure, it didn’t upset him,” Rushdie notes. “That made me think, ‘This kid’s got a little bit of darkness in him—I can actually use that.’ ”
Luka, like the best folkloric children’s tales, is full of grotesque images, both funny and disturbing. The darkest are found in a chapter where Luka and his companions visit the “Respectorate of I,” a state run by large talking rats that demand fawning adulation. Rushdie calls the section “an attempt to show how political correctness can be a deadening, rodent-like infestation in a society. It seems to me that people have begun to offer all kinds of views—some of them cockeyed—and disagreement is construed as offensive. Whereas in any open society, disagreement is the stuff of life.” Rushdie bemoans the rise of a “you’re either with us or you’re against us” mentality, in politics and society itself.
While he’s not one to relish conflict, he’s prepared to disagree openly, for instance, with his evangelically anti-religious friends Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Religion, for Rushdie, should never inform public policy, but “it doesn’t seem right for me to go into other people’s private lives and tell them what they should be like.”
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