This book begins and ends with stories for children. The first piece Step Across This Line, a 10-year collection of essays, newspaper columns and speeches, is a wise and funny meditation on The Wizard of Oz — the last, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values given at Yale last year, opens with Alice in Wonderland, a medieval Sufi Muslim poet’s story of a conference of birds, and Arthur and Merlin in TH White’s The Sword in the Stone.
These narratives (as much loved by adults as by children) give Salman Rushdie one of his main themes and beliefs, the value of leaving home and crossing frontiers (linguistic, intellectual, imaginative, racial, geographic), of learning that ”once we have left our childhood places and started to make up our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand … that there is no longer any such place as home; except, of course, for the home we make”.
”The crossing of borders, of language, geography and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deeds and the universe of the imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world’s many different kinds of thought policemen: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of my life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or ‘artistic’ reasons.”
This is a writer who has travelled a long way from home and who, for a considerable and terrible section of his life, was not allowed to have a home. But it’s characteristic that he should, all the same, be so absorbed in childhood stories, fables, memories and homes.
Some of the best pieces here are to do with origins, influences, and returns, like the touching account of Rushdie’s (heavily guarded) return to India in 2000, after 12 years of bitter estrangement, eagerly showing his son (who’d never read his books or been to India) the Delhi of his own novels and the family house near Simla he had claimed back from the government.
It comes as no surprise to learn that ”the original impulse” for Midnight’s Children ”had been to write a story out of my memories of growing up in Bombay”. This collection, though sadly much less about literature than his last volume of non-fiction, Imaginary Homelands (1991), is full of interesting revelations about the influences — from all over the world — on his own work: Italo Calvino on Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Virgil on The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Suetonius on ”power-mad” Roman rulers for Shame, the dazzling ”babu-English” of GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr for Midnight’s Children, alongside Dickens’s combination of ”naturalistic backgrounds and surreal foregrounds”. Rushdie’s influences step across genres as well as nationalities: one of them is Federico Fellini, from whom he learned ”how one might transmute the highly charged material of childhood and private life into the stuff of showmanship and myth”.
There’s something childlike about Rushdie: his appetite for really silly jokes (including fatwa jokes), his unreconstructed passion for 1960s rock music and Tottenham Hotspur football club, and his unabashed narcissism. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that he has earned the right to be self-aggrandising. History has turned him into a global public figure as well as a novelist, and these pieces, inevitably much more about his own situation and opinions than the earlier volume, carry that weight with varying degrees of impressiveness.
There are a few pomposities such as: ”I recently asked Vaclav Havel …” or ”I supported the Nato operation in Kosovo”; a few self-indulgences, like his own praise of Richard Avedon’s photo-portrait of him showing his ”resistance and endurance”; and an occasional mean streak, as in his grudging reaction to JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, which beat Rushdie to the Commonwealth Prize. In his largely hostile treatment of Britian, it’s sometimes hard to separate individual score-settling from his justified outrage at the attacks on him in the 1990s by the British right-wing press. (He has nothing but honourable gratitude, however, for his protectors and supporters.)
In general, though, it’s astonishing how level-headed, rational, courageous and sane his tone is from the fatwa years. If he sounds grandiose at times (”So, beyond grief, bewilderment and despair, I have rededicated myself to our high calling”), he is entitled to feel that his opinions matter.
Paradoxically, there’s a preacherly tone to his exhortations, which, now more than ever, celebrate and justify secularism and non-belief. The mixed feelings in his earlier work about the permeable borders between the sacred and the secular, the material and the transcendent, have hardened into a firm line. The line falls on the side of free speech, intellectual liberty, frontier-crossing, national and individual tolerance and multiplicity, a refusal to be co-opted (what he calls ”unbelonging”), and, above all, scepticism: ”To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities … It is perfectly possible … to construct our ideas of the good without taking refuge in faith.”
The context for his secular sermons, now, is post-September 11 America. Step Across This Line is a much more American book than Imaginary Homelands. In the wake of September 11, Rushdie calls himself a New Yorker. Even before that day, he was defending (to a British audience) American culture and ”the authority of the United States” as ”the best current guarantor” of freedom against ”tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism”. He is outraged by the ”left-liberal”, ”bien-pensant” anti-American onslaught that followed September 11, and he thinks that ”America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done, and did it well”.
Yet he is ambivalently preoccupied with the awful paradox of America: ”that a nation which sees itself as leading the world towards a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone, fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers”. In this context he encourages us usefully — and he has the right to do so — ”not to let fear rule our lives”. ”How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorised.” — Â