Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (154 page)

His first published novel was
Grimus
(1975). The title of the novel, we are told (few occidental readers would have guessed) ‘is an anagram of the name “Simurg”, the immense, all-wise, fabled bird of pre-Islamic Persian mythology’. Rushdie’s later verdict on the novel is an uncompromising ‘garbage’ and there was nothing in the reviews to correct that opinion. ‘After the critical beating
Grimus
took,’ he records, ‘I completely rethought everything. I thought, OK, I have to write about something that I care about much more.’ He was also ‘scared’ at this period in the late 1970s; he felt he was losing the race. Amis and Ian McEwan and many other young stars were ‘zooming’ past him.

The problem was, he recognised, ‘to find himself’, not to find a subject. He did so with Saleem Sinai and
Midnight’s Children
. Once created, it was Saleem, he felt, who was battering away at his typewriter keys. It was Saleem who mastered the trick of ‘dragging in everything’. The narrator-hero of the novel is conceived as one of the 1,000 children born at the precise chime of the moment of Indian Independence. They are blessed, or cursed, with ‘powers’ (Saleem’s is located in his majestic conk) and are inter-clairvoyant. Science fiction readers will recognise them as a version of the aliens in John Wyndham’s
The Midwich Cuckoos
– there is usually a broad strand of science fiction in Rushdie’s fictional tapestry. Saleem’s lifelong foe, and twin, will be Shiva, named after the Hindu god of destruction. Mythology – Hindu, Greek, Iranian and Roman – is another broad strand. Saleem and Shiva’s interwoven narratives comprise a history of the new, but primevally old, country. There are no English characters, although a strain of colonial blood, we learn, may course through Saleem’s veins thanks to some hanky-panky by the family’s now departed occidental landlord and some mischief in the hospital where he was born.

The novel won the 1981 Booker Prize – and then kept on winning (as the Booker of Bookers). It was Salman Rushdie who was now zooming. He followed up with
Shame
(1983), which dumped – as controversially as its predecessor – on Pakistan and its ruling Bhutto dynasty. His novels were gaining him fame and making him dangerous enemies in equal measure. The Gandhi dynasty were mightily displeased by elements in
Midnight’s Children
and reached for their lawyers, but Rushdie had realised that the novel was one of the few free-fire zones left in modern life and rejoiced in the fact. Nothing was to be sacred. Sacrilege is a risky profession. The momentous date in his CV is (he loves the irony) St Valentine’s Day 1989 when he received, from the paramount leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, a ‘love letter’ in the form of a fatwa. The word was not one familiar in the West although, thanks to Salman Rushdie, it now forever will be. The offence was, of course,
The Satanic
Verses
, published a few months earlier. The novel opens with a powerfully symbolic episode. An Air India jumbo jet explodes. Two Indians fall 30,000 feet on to Hastings – that symbolic beach, where William the Conqueror ate his symbolic mouthful of sand. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are, like William, illegal immigrants. Or angel and devil. Or Hindu and Muslim anti-types.

Mid-air explosions which slaughter hundreds of infidels were not something to distress the Ayatollah Khomeini. What drew down his theocratic wrath was (1) an impudent depiction of his fundamentalist self in
The Satanic Verses
; (2) an even more satirical depiction of the Prophet, under the insulting Western name ‘Mahound’; and (3) the allegation that the Qur’an had been strategically altered (‘Satanically’) and rephrased by a Persian scribe called ‘Salman’. Rushdie’s aim was less heresy than to suggest the same kind of imagination at work in the Muslim holy text that German New Criticism had found, a hundred years earlier, in the Bible. Put another way, the holy book was not Revelation but the almighty’s novel. The fatwa laid on every devout Muslim the obligation to kill the apostate. Rushdie was bundled into protective custody by Britain’s Special Branch, under instructions from Mrs Thatcher – ‘Mrs Torture’ in the novel. It was wormwood for the ruling Tory party. Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary in 1989, observed that ‘The British government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book … It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany.’

Diplomatic relations with Iran broke down and Rushdie would spend years in the ground beneath the world’s feet. As his friend Martin Amis wittily put it: ‘He vanished into the front page.’ His own view was that it was like ‘a bad Salman Rushdie novel’. Whatever else, it disrupted his personal life and, as doubtless biographies will one day reveal, may at least partly explain a series of broken marriages and short-term relationships with beautiful women (something else that kept him on the front pages). He produced in this jail-time children’s books and major works, notably
The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1995), depicting an India where he was no longer able to go, on peril of his life, but which he still cared about. The most ambitious work of this period is
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(1999), a novel which, among much else, examines the new supranational culture of pop music. Rushdie later ventured on concert appearances with U2, for whose congenial leader, Bono, he wrote lyrics. Hard to imagine Kingsley Amis doing anything of that kind.

By the turn of the century Rushdie, with necessary precautions, was free to emerge from underground. He moved to America, citing as one reason the bitchiness of literary London. He has no explanation for the personal animosity he evokes. ‘It was a strange feeling’, he says, ‘to be characterised by some in the British press as an unlikable person. I’m not quite sure what I did to deserve it.’ He was also recoiling from the breakdown of his latest marriage. The fictional outcome was
Fury
(2001).
In it Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, similarly recovering from a broken marriage and broken career, sets out to find a new life in New York City. It can be seen as what alcoholics call a ‘geographical cure’. But simply because history deposited him in Manhattan didn’t mean Rushdie liked his new home any more than he liked ‘Mrs Torture’s’ Britain, Bhutto’s Pakistan or the Gandhi’s India. As he pictures New York, it’s a circle of hell, metropolitan fury, wide-bore, full-volume: ‘Garbage trucks like giant cockroaches moved through the city, roaring. He was never out of earshot of a siren, an alarm, a large vehicle’s reverse-gear bleeps, the beat of some unbearable music.’

Disowned as it might be, England still felt it had a stake in him and in 2007 Salman Rushdie was knighted. Predictably it provoked riots across the Islamic world and threats of retaliatory suicide bombing.
The Enchantress of Florence
(2008) was written in the throes of yet another divorce and doubly centred on Renaissance Italy and the Mughal Empire. In a hostile review Nirpal Dhaliwal made the case that the novel is Hinduphobic. The art of making friends constantly eludes Rushdie. He continues to write and stir up hornets. His depictions of what that writing amounts to are self-deprecating and ironic. One depiction, in
Midnight’s Children
, is the dying man’s pickle factory – a place where dead fruit preserves a misleadingly tangy artificial afterlife. Another ironic portrayal is that in
Fury
, where the hero Malik goes from academia into show-business, doing ‘philosophical dolls’ for TV: half Wittgenstein, half
Thunderbirds
.

Overarching all Rushdie’s works are two grand symbolisms: one – most fully developed in
The Ground Beneath her Feet
– is that of Orpheus, the postmodernist icon. Torn apart, his dismembered head continues to sing, unstoppably. The other grand symbol is that of Scheherazade and the 1001 nights – the story which must go on, if life is to go on. Rushdie is rarely one for short narratives. His oeuvre has been lumbered with the label ‘magic realism’. What is more significant is how that fiction divides commentators into ferociously opposed camps. He refuses to recant, pull in his horns, or recycle – ‘Midnight’s Grandchildren’ will never happen. And, with every change of step, Rushdie irritates. But, as Cocteau said, savage reviews are love letters, of a kind. Like fatwas.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.

Like others of my generation (and his), I have grown old with Stephen King. I first encountered his work, some thirty-five years ago, with the primal ‘Gunslinger’ episodes in the magazine
Fantasy & Science Fiction
. The mixture of Mallory and Sergio Leone was not to my taste – although sufficient numbers of fans liked it well enough to encourage King to continue it as his seven-part
Dark Tower
saga. His first-published ‘Our-World’ novel,
Carrie
(1974), was indeed to my taste. Carrie White is an unhappy little girl in a crummy little town who discovers she has ‘powers’. It’s payback time for all those school mates who have picked on her. She goes on a telekinetic shooting, slaughter and urban demolition spree. It’s justified Columbine.

Carrie
bears the hallmarks of King’s later fiction. He had a deprived childhood himself and – a sickly, geeky kid – was bullied. He found comfort in comic books. The picked-on child, from Carrie, through Arnie Cunningham (
Christine
, 1983) to Duddits (
Dreamcatcher
, 2001), is a fixture in King’s fictional universe. So, too, is the gory nemesis for whole communities – whether by vampiric infestation (
Salem’s Lot
, 1975), diabolic takeover (
Needful Things
, 1991), telekinetic flame-throwing (
Fire-starter
, 1980), alien invasion (
The Tommyknockers
, 1987), nasty things seeping out of the sewers (
It
, 1986), or – most preposterously – a demonically possessed saloon car (
Christine
, 1983). There are many energies at work in King’s fiction, but fantasised revenge on his long-ago tormentors is clearly among the more powerful. ‘Lost childhoods’, as Graham Greene observed, make interesting novelists. Authors, like generals, need luck and King has had a lot of it.
Carrie
was Class-A pulp, but what gave it the edge over, say, John Farris’s
The Fury
(1976), or David Seltzer’s
The Omen
(1976)? King’s first stroke of luck was his publisher, Doubleday, landing a $400,000 deal for the paperback rights. He was, at one leap, in the big time. The second stroke of luck was the film rights being optioned for a movie directed by Brian De Palma.

Like John Grisham, Mario Puzo and Peter Benchley, King has been blessed with film tie-ins frankly better than the novels they adapt. Stanley Kubrick (
The Shining
, 1980), John Carpenter (
Christine
, 1983), David Cronenberg (
The Dead Zone
, 1983), Rob Reiner (
Stand by Me
, 1986), George Romero (
The Dark Half
, 1993), have added collateral lustre to King’s reputation. And it’s not just directors – King’s narratives elicit terrific performances. One thinks of Jack Nicholson’s ‘Here’s Johnnie!’ (which, incidentally, King hated), but even more unexpected is James Mason doing a prince of darkness in a TV
Salem’s Lot
(1979) – the role the velvet-voiced one was born to play.
The Dead Zone
(1979) is not one of King’s great works, yet Christopher Walken
– maimed and bent on presidential assassination – gives the performance of a lifetime. Even actors whose facial expression is as constipated as James Caan’s (
Misery
, 1990) or as inscrutable as Tim Robbins’s (
The Shawshank Redemption
, 1994) relax in the narrative environment King creates. And, without King, Kathy Bates (
Misery, Dolores Claiborne
, 1995) would still be a supporting actress. If, as the Hollywood proverb goes, there are actors whom the camera ‘likes’, there are also writers too. There have, of course, been clunkers –
The Lawnmower Man
(1992) which King disowns; and
The Running Man
(1987) which he ought to disown, come to mind, though even they have a kind of horrible watchability. Who would miss the spectacle of the future Governor of California in skin-tight spandex, doing battle with the future Governor of Minnesota dressed up as a tin can?

The other thing that King had going for him was energy of composition. The ‘firestorm’, as fans called the spate of writing in his early career, was fuelled, as a cleaned-up King later confessed, by cocaine and booze (he cannot, he claims, remember writing
Cujo
(1981), his shaggy-dog horror tale). In the ten years following
Carrie
, King turned out eighteen full-length novels and four volumes of collected stories. When his publisher felt he might be glutting the market, he invented an alter ego, Richard Bachman, to share the burden. Bachman, alas, has since died of ‘cancer of the pseudonym’. It remains a supreme feat of authorial athleticism.

And it paid off. In 2003, Stephen King made number 14 on the
Forbes
wealthiest celebrity list, with an estimated income of $50 million-plus. Only novelist Michael Crichton ranked higher, and Crichton was, by contrast with King, a child of privilege. He was writing bestselling novels while a Dean’s List medical student at Harvard. Stevie King had no such advantages and believes that he is denied respect. Unlike Crichton, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, from mobile home to mansion. In his acceptance speech for the lifetime award given him in 2003 by the National Book Foundation, he recalled how he, and his wife Tabitha, ‘lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and dryer … When I gave up on
Carrie
, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on.’