In his recent memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens writes that one of the worst mornings of his life came in 1990 when he heard that Rushdie had written a conciliatory article titled “Why I have embraced Islam.”
“Mmm. He wanted me to be more combative,” says Rushdie, steepling his fingers in contemplation. While he does denounce what he sees as the “terrible backsliding in the world of Islam in the last 50 to 60 years,” noting mordantly that he has “perhaps more reason than even Hitchens to dislike it,” he holds out an olive branch. “Islam also means my grandfather, who I thought of as a very open-minded and tolerant man. It seems to me that there are millions of people inside Islam who would be more like my grandfather than [like] the Ayatollah Khomeini.”
If Haroun was, in part, an attempt to address through fiction the issues of censorship and intolerance that Rushdie was then facing, Luka was integral to Rushdie’s aim to write enough books to “bury” that period of his life. When I last interviewed him, in 2008, he was just conceiving of the book and expressed the hope that “the more work I can do, the easier it’ll be to go beyond that moment.”
But now, in an about-face, he is unearthing rather than burying his fatwa era. He spent the first part of this year reading various accounts of his exile, finding the results “interesting and bizarre,” and is currently writing a memoir of that time, to be published in 2012. Last month, Wylie arranged a worldwide deal with Random House; the book promises to be the biggest literary event of Rushdie’s career since The Satanic Verses.
“For a long time,” he says, “I felt that [a memoir] was the last thing in the world I wanted to write, that I’d come out of that period of nine years and I wanted to get back to the day job and be the writer that I had always wanted to be. But I also knew in the back of my mind that this was a really good story and I was the only person who could tell it, because nobody else knew it.”
Which isn’t to say that nobody else thinks they know it. In 2008, a former Special Forces driver, Ron Evans, attempted to publish a memoir that made a number of hurtful and inaccurate claims (among them, that Rushdie’s bodyguards were so keen to be rid of him that they locked him in a cupboard so they could go to the pub). Rushdie sighs when I bring it up: “Oh, that stupid thing.”
He succeeded in extracting an apology from Evans and having the book pulped, but others may have similar designs. Is writing the memoir, then, a means of wresting control from those who would warp his story?
“A little bit,” he admits. “There’s been all kinds of speculation, some of it unpleasant, like that bunch of lies [Evans] tried to put together to make himself some money. It became a very prevalent myth in Ireland that I’d spent a lot of those years living in Bono’s guest house. If you want to be invisible, would you go to the guest house at the bottom of the garden of the lead singer of U2?” Rushdie chuckles. “I’ve spent three or four weekends there—this was magnified into the ‘fact’ that I was living there. Various other friends of mine said in interviews that there had been occasions where we had dinner together or spent a weekend. Ian McEwan, for example, said something of the sort, and then suddenly there were these articles about how Ian McEwan sheltered me in those years, and I thought, ‘This is just silliness.’ ”
But his main motivation, he insists, is to tell “an interesting story.” Perhaps writing Luka closed a literary circle for Rushdie, allowing him to turn the page on an incredibly difficult time and freeing him to recollect it in tranquility, so he could finally write about it. For the compulsive storyteller, who wreathes every book with layers of myth, legend, and literary allusion, it surely would be a waste to leave his own unique story untold.
“Somebody asked Saul Bellow about whether he would write an autobiography, and he said, ‘What would I put in it that I haven’t put in my novels?’ I sort of understood what he meant: the better use of experience is its transmutation into literature rather than to do it directly.” Rushdie smiles wryly. “But then I had the misfortune of acquiring an interesting life.”
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