There is a mood of heavy seriousness at the Bloomsbury Theatre on a sweltering September night. This may have to do with the stickiness of the air. Or the fact that audience members have had to walk through a phalanx of police officers outside and have their bags searched. Or it may simply be because we're here to listen to Salman Rushdie, the very serious novelist and reluctant free-speech martyr.
Rushdie, talking about the murder at the start of his new novel, Shalimar the Clown -- from which he will read in several Canadian cities later this month -- is in the middle of an anecdote about Umberto Eco and The Name of the Rose: "I remember Eco saying, 'I have a great desire to murder a monk.' So I guess I have a great desire to murder an American ambassador."
Rushdie delivers this line with a perfect poker face, and only a few members of the audience giggle: He's not being serious, is he? ". . . And a fictional one," Rushdie adds, "seemed preferable." That line gets the laugh, although it's more relieved laughter than anything.
This is what people perhaps don't realize about Salman Rushdie: He's very funny. Possibly even goofy. Certainly sly. The humour is there in his novels, where the heartbreaking and the comic butt oversized bellies, and no subject is so hallowed that it can't be pricked with his pen. This tendency has, famously, got him into deep trouble, but it's still there in the new novel, in all its whoopee-cushion glory. Thus the murdered U.S. ambassador of the story is laid out on his daughter's doorstep, nearly decapitated, "like a halal chicken dinner."
Talking about the humour in his novels makes Rushdie happier than, say, talking about how his personal experience is reflected in their pages, a conversation he enjoys about as much as non-anesthetized dental surgery."The thing is," he says, while sitting in his agent's London offices a few days earlier, "I'm not a gloomy person. When I'm dealing with material which has a lot of sadness, I'm always looking to see how I can provide the other notes. I don't believe that the world, however terrible it is, is ever unrelentingly sad."
Hence the novel's title. A couple of weeks ago, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, a reader got up and asked Rushdie why he called the novel Shalimar the Clown. After all, by the novel's end, the character of Shalimar -- cuckolded, rage-filled -- has turned from a benign, tightrope-walking clown in a Kashmiri village into a Muslim terrorist set on an international quest for blood. Hardly a red-nosed laugh riot, really. Rushdie loved the question, and explained that he wanted readers to remember the sweetness and levity of the young Shalimar, before he was corrupted by the violence in Kashmir.
It clearly makes Rushdie a little irritated that people want to call Shalimar "a novel about terrorism," or even "topical." To him, it's as much a story about love: the triangle of Shalimar, his wife, Boonyi, and the American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls; but also the love of the Kashmiri villagers for the lost paradise of their violence-wracked homeland.
"I'm three-quarters Kashmiri," he says, and plucks at his arm. "The reason I'm relatively light-skinned for an Indian person is because of Kashmiri blood."
Rushdie is 58, and for years he's been circling around the topic of Kashmir, the idyll remembered from childhood visits, the carpets of wildflowers against the walls of the Himalayas. "And the bees," he says. "Very good honey, Kashmiri honey."
Shalimar the Clown is the first of his novels -- there have been eight others, as well as collections of stories and essays -- to make him cry. He wept while writing the death scene of the old village pandit, who is one of the only contented characters in a story of revenge and betrayal (both personal and political) that moves from the Europe of the Second World War to 1960s Kashmir to present-day Los Angeles.
Kashmir is half a world away, but the spectre of extremism is as close as the nearest Underground station. No: It's even here, in Rushdie's agent's office. In the attic where the author sits, wearing a mustard shirt and blazing orange socks, the walls are lined with books by other authors represented by the agency. One is a memoir by Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. Also on the bookshelf is an English translation of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which carries a blurb from Rushdie on the back: "I can think of no other writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, while London burns, while the world ends."
Well, London was burning, at least for a couple of weeks this summer. Rushdie was at a literary festival in Brazil when he heard the news of the Underground explosions; he spent hours trying to get through to family in London. In the aftermath, he wrote a much-quoted article about the need for reform in Islam, and the problems of a literal interpretation of the Koran.
And that, right there, is the rub. For the thing that has made Rushdie most famous -- the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini for alleged blasphemy in his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses -- threatens to become his epitaph. "The biggest problematic legacy of those years," he says, "is that people who don't know my work, my fiction, think of me more in a political than a literary context. And that's damaging to someone who wants to be thought of as a novelist."
The threat to his life may be over (the fatwa was lifted in 1998), but it casts a long shadow. He is worried, and vocally so, that his novels will always be read through an autobiographical lens. And yet he relishes the platform, in some ways: As president of American PEN, it means his phone calls get answered.
"If, as a serious person, you have inherited this ridiculous level of celebrity, then you have to put it to work. You have to find what to do with it, more than just getting tables in restaurants." He smiles, and with that hooded gaze and his comic's timing, it feels like the last beat is waiting to fall. ". . . although it's good for that, too."
He calls them "the dark days," when he was surrounded by government security minders; when one of his novel's translators was killed; when, memorably and bravely, then-premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, embraced him on-stage at a PEN benefit in Toronto in 1992. "It was very good of him," says Rushdie, who is clearly itching to get on to other topics.
After the PEN benefit, the liberals of Toronto wandered around (insufferably, it seems, in retrospect) wearing buttons that read, I Am Salman Rushdie. "I have some of those buttons," Rushdie says. "I still wear them sometimes, because, after all, I am Salman Rushdie."
It is a role he clearly enjoys to the hilt. No one who chooses to appear in a comic cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary (giving Renée Zellweger directions to the toilet, no less) could be called a limelight shunner. He revels in the good fortune of a luxuriantly stunning fourth wife, the actress and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi, noting that "every time I write a beautiful woman character, people assume it's my wife." He has fine sons, both of whom show a bent toward writing, and homes in New York and London, where he is frequently seen on the town.
Rushdie does not even really seem to mind that his name has become shorthand, a metonym. It has given him a place in pop culture, and he loves pop culture.
For example, there was that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer thinks he spots Rushdie at the gym. "Ah, I was very proud of that," he says. "But did you know I was similarly in a very, very late episode of Cheers, and" he holds up a finger and an eyebrow simultaneously, "I was also in an episode of The Golden Girls?"
The Golden Girls? As in Bea Arthur and roommates, slutty and nutty? "It was when they had that hotel, do you remember? And people kept saying they'd seen me on the fifth floor, but when you got there, I'd gone to the lobby." (It should be pointed out that Rushdie, still in hiding, appeared in name only.) Rushdie's love of the cinema is well-known -- he has written fondly about The Wizard of Oz, and in Shalimar one of the character's sleep-talking is described as "Sigourney Weaver channelling a demon in Ghost Busters." So perhaps it's not so surprising that he borrowed the name of a well-known German film director, Max Ophuls, for the flamboyant Resistance hero/ philanderer/ genius at the centre of the new novel. What does seem surprising, though, is his indignation that anyone would question his choice of name, as some critics have done.
"I chose it accidentally," Rushdie says. "I was looking for one of those borderline names, sort of Franco-German, and I remember thinking ' like Max Ophuls, but not Max Ophuls, of course, because he's a film director.' But then it got stuck, and Max insisted on being Max, and I couldn't think of him as Hans or Friedrich or Otto."
John Updike, among others, has taken exception to the use of the name -- if not deliberate, why chose it? -- in a review in The New Yorker.
"I think he just wanted to be rude, and it was his way of being rude." Rushdie launches into an anecdote about a man he once knew, when he worked in advertising, whose name was William Shakespeare, and who insisted on being called William Shakespeare -- not Will, or Bill, or Billy. He snorts. "People are called all sorts of things. I'm sure there's a pedophile in Iowa called John Updike."
He looks over to see if this deliciously viperish remark has received the belly laugh it deserves. Of course it has.
Salman Rushdie will be reading in Vancouver, Sept. 24 at 7 p.m. at The Ridge Theatre, 3131 Arbutus St. at 16th Ave., tickets $9 through Ticketmaster; in Toronto, Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m., MacMillan Theatre, 80 Queen's Park Crescent, $12.50, 416-961-4496; in Burlington, Ont., Sept. 29 at 7.30 p.m., Royal Botanical Gardens, 680 Plains Road W., $12, 905-639-0925; in Montreal, Sept. 30 at 7 p.m., Maxwell Cummings Auditorium, 1379 Sherbrooke St. W., $10, 514-281-5549.
The Work
Works from Salman Rushdie's career:
Grimus (1975): A young native named Flapping Eagle drinks an elixir that gives him eternal life. Over the next 700 years, he wrestles with the burden of immortality and decides he'd rather be mortal. Then he discovers Calf Island, where other immortal humans reside.
Midnight's Children (1980): Tells the story of India through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, who was born on the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the day India became independent from the British Empire. Rushdie won the Booker Prize for the work.
Shame (1983): About two rival men and their warring families. The book also won the Booker Prize.
The Satanic Verses (1988): Two survivors of a plane crash are transformed into personifications of good and evil. The novel earned him a death sentence from Iran's religious hierarchy.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). A son tries to help his father, a storyteller, by returning his gift.
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). Billed as a sequel to Midnight's Children. Also won the Booker Prize.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999): Famous singer Vina Aspara is caught in an earthquake and never seen again. Ormus Cama honours the memory of his love, Aspara, through a worldwide stadium tour.
Fury (2001): Former Cambridge professor Malik Solanka tries to find a new life in New York.
Shalimar the Clown (2005): Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls is murdered on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter by a shady character who goes by the moniker Shalimar the Clown.
Sources: biblio.com; complete-review.com