They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt a tap on his arm. From the pew behind, the American novelist Paul Theroux whispered: ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.’
Earlier that day the religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa demanding that the world’s Muslims had a duty to murder the author of The Satanic Verses; the frail old thug had almost certainly not read the book, but the fatwa was embraced with great eagerness — and so began Rushdie’s exile from his own life for the best part of a decade.
Forced to flee his home and endure a peripatetic existence, his every movement was controlled by the team of policemen who comprised ‘Operation Malachite’, the grudging official response to the threats against him. The regimen saw him separated from his family, his friends, his professional life and his own name — Joseph Anton was the pseudonym he adopted at the behest of the police: yep, Conrad and Chekhov. He takes himself seriously, Rushdie, as well he might.
This may be the most important book of our times, comparable to Primo Levi’s ‘If This is a Man’
This is a long, harrowing and painful book, and it may be the most important book of our times — comparable, in a sense, to Primo Levi’s If This is a Man; for there is tyranny, and there are those who connive with tyranny, or out of cowardice tolerate tyranny because it is the safest option.
In the end, reading this account, one feels less angry towards the mad mullahs and their bearded, jabbering, opportunistic half-witted western emissaries than towards those enlightened souls in the West, and in Britain in particular, who found it inconvenient to give Rushdie the unequivocal support he both deserved and required— and which the principle of the matter surely demanded.
Politicians were obviously to blame — the odious Keith Vaz and Jack Straw (anxious to protect their local, heavily Muslim, majorities) being pre-eminent among them.
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