Has Salman Rushdie become his own pastiche?

If there were ever a Spectator competition for the best pastiche of the opening words of a Salman Rushdie novel, a pretty good entry might be: ‘On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga.’ By coincidence, these are also the opening words of Victory City, a book Rushdie finished not long before last summer’s stabbing.

And, as it turns out, that first sentence sets the scene for much of what follows – because the novel takes its place alongside the likes of John Updike’s Villages (about adultery in the American suburbs), Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (a Jewish intellectual negotiates the modern world) and Martin Amis’s The Inside Story (Philip Larkin, his dad, foxy 1970s ball-breakers, etc) as one of those late works whose appeal is tinged with a kind of nostalgia.