One of the problems with London, which is partly why he has chosen to opt for the relative anonymity of Manhattan, is that it’s such a small world, “with endless overlapping circles. You do get to the point where you assume that you’ve met people in some way.” But the underlying idea behind the new novel is that no matter where you are in the world now, everyone and everything has a connection.
“It used to be possible to write a novel about, say, London or Kashmir or Strasbourg or California, without any sense of connection. But now it’s all one story. That’s what I want to say. Everybody’s story is running into everybody else’s story,” he says.
“Four years ago, nobody would have suspected that the story of al-Qaeda and the story of New York City would be connected, for instance. So it’s not like when I wrote Midnight’s Children where essentially I was writing about India and Pakistan and I didn’t need to write about the rest of the world in order to tell that story. Now I feel more and more that if you’re going to tell a story of a murder in California, you end up having to tell the story of many other places and many other times in order to make sense of that event and that place. To try to show how those stories join.”
Just as the precise shade of a colour can alter dramatically when it is placed next to a different colour, so does the context of a country’s history redefine the way in which we view its politics or social change, and it’s always informed by our own culture’s perspective. “For instance, in France, you have Max [Ophuls, the former American ambassador to India whose murder on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter in California drives the narrative of the book] involved in the Resistance. Now the Resistance is what? The Resistance is an insurgency against an occupied power – which we think of as heroic. But in Iraq, you have an insurgency against what is believed to be an occupied power and we call it terrorist. The same thing is happening but as the context changes, the meaning you give to it changes dramatically.”
Overlapping circles, coincidences, connecting stories… in the London section of the novel, Rushdie briefly revisits the notorious Lord Lucan murder case in Lower Belgrave Street. The novelist was living there at that time with his first wife, the late Clarissa Luard, and so was I, in a house directly opposite his. I drank my first schoolgirl’s half of lager-and-lime in the Plumbers Arms, the pub into which Lady Lucan fled after the mistaken murder of her
children’s nanny. He remembers the Italian restaurant and the Steak House and the newsagent in “which one ran into Enoch Powell sometimes”. Michael Redgrave, Rushdie tells me, lived in the house next door and sold it to the wife of Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator. Years later, Rushdie went to Nicaragua and wrote his book in support of the Sandanistas, The Jaguar Smile.
One of his closest friends – who gave him the confidence, he says, to believe that he could make a go of fiction – was the blazingly magical writer Angela Carter, who died of lung cancer 12 years ago at the age of 51. I was fortunate enough to meet her in Sydney in 1984. She ended up staying in my flat for a week, with her baby son and partner, and cooked a wonderful casserole one evening and invited her friend Robyn Davidson, the Australian writer who had crossed the continent by camel, who met Rushdie when he was over for the Adelaide Festival at the same time and the two ended up having a much-publicised passionate three-year affair (he was still married at the time) and, and… overlapping circles, connecting stories.
It was on this Australian trip that Rushdie hitched up with the late Bruce Chatwin who was researching what became probably his best-loved book, Songlines. The two friends flew from Adelaide up to Alice Springs, hired a four-wheel-drive and set off into the red interior, staying in grotty motels and being blown away by the vast, parched beauty of the landscape. “We even climbed Ayers Rock. I mean, how politically incorrect can you get?” Rushdie says. “Bruce climbed it like a rocket. He just soared up, and I’m sort of hauling myself wheezily up. He kept coming back down to say, ‘Are you all right?’ and then he’d turn around and – zoooooom.”
Like many writers, who look upon their books as a form of literary progeny, Rushdie shies away from picking a favourite. “I can’t choose,” he says. “But also, you know writers…? You can’t satisfy ’em. People say, ‘It’s your best book’, and you say, ‘So what’s wrong with the others?’” Like someone commenting on how well you look, I begin to say, and he jumps in: “So I wasn’t before?” Which reminds him of yet another close writer friend who is no longer here.
“Edward Said was a very good friend of mine, and years ago when he was very courageously fighting that cancer there was a moment where he really got better and stopped being so gaunt and emaciated and came back to looking like himself,” Rushdie recalls. “And I had lunch with him and said, ‘God, Edward, look at you. You look great! You’ve put on some weight and you look really great.’” And Said’s grave response? “‘Yeah, but I’m not fat, Salman.’”
When we both stop honking with laughter at this unbeatable proof that while there’s vanity there’s still life, I remark on how often the mournful phrase “the late” is attached to people who have been pivotal in Rushdie’s life. He says that, yes, it’s true and that there are holes in the world for him and then he returns to the crater which was left by Carter’s death.
He is remembering how he met the novelist through Liz Calder – who was the Rushdies’ lodger back in Lower Belgrave Street – in the days before he’d had a book published: “and the amazing thing about Angela is that she had absolutely no elitism or snobbishness about her, so that even if you were this young unpublished writer and she was ‘Angela Carter’, she would treat you exactly as if you were on the same level as her, with no sense of, ‘Gee, if you haven’t even been published who knows if you’re ever going to amount to anything.’ And I know she was very close to Ian [McEwan] when he first started out and they were living near each other in Clapham at the time.”
He was not part of the Barnes-Amis-McEwan lit-lad circle back then and, as someone who was still struggling to find his voice, was keenly aware that they had found their way as writers far earlier on: “There was Martin with The Rachel Papers, Success and Dead Babies, and Ian with his first collections of short stories, In Between the Sheets and First Love, Last Rites, and I thought, ‘I wish I would be able to write as well as this’, but I was still stumbling around trying to find out what to do. It took me a long time to get going as a writer.”
