Review: Vivien Horler

Knife – Meditations after an attempted murder, by Salman Rushdie (Vintage)

Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 when he was 41 years old. It was highly regarded, being a finalist for the 1988 Booker Prize, and winning the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.

But Shia Muslims regarded it as blasphemous, and in 1989 Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed. The government of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher provided Pakistan-born Rushdie, who was living in the UK at the time, with 24-hour police protection. He went into hiding for years.

The novel prompted riots and protests, and in some cases people were killed. The Japanese man who translated the novel into Japanese was stabbed to death in 1991.

On April 12, 2022, when Rushdie was 75 years old and preparing to give a speech in upstate New York, ironically on the topic of keeping writers safe, a young Muslim man mounted the stage and spent the next 27 seconds wildly stabbing him.

Doctors told Rushdie’s family to prepare for the worst.

The would-be assassin, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, who is not named in this memoir, later admitted to reading “barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos on me, and that was all he needed.

“From this we can deduce that, whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.”

This book is the author’s attempt to understand what it was about.

For a man who was, by necessity, forced for years into a shadowy existence, and who clearly values his privacy, Knife gives a brave, honest and painful glimpse into Rushdie’s private life, and that of his wife Eliza and family.

Rushdie does not shirk from providing the most harrowingly graphic account of the attack and its aftermath – his fatally damaged right eye “hugely distended, bulging out of its socket and hanging down on my face like a large soft-boiled egg” – but this is a tale of healing, both physical and mental. (Although not of forgiveness, which sounds reasonable to me.)

It is also, in a very large measure, a story of love. At the time of the attack, Rushdie and the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths had been together for five years and were living, writes Rushdie, in a state of pretty near perfect happiness.

“One of the important ways in which I have understood what happened to me, and the nature of the story I’m here to tell, is that it’s a story in which hatred – the knife as a metaphor of hate – is answered, and finally overcome, by love.”

There are flashes of dry humour. While he is lying bleeding on the stage of the Chatauqua Institution, minutes after being attacked, he can hear what is being said by the people who have rushed to help him, including two doctors, and he notes when someone says his clothes should be cut off so they can see where his wounds are.

“Oh,” Rushdie thinks, “my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”

And how does he feel about “that” novel, The Satanic Verses, today? He says for many years he felt obliged to defend it, and also himself. And he points out it wasn’t just Muslims who thought he was “a bad person”, but many prominent non-Muslims too, including Germaine Greer, President Jimmy Carter, Roald Dahl and even the likes of the British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper.

That same lack of forgiveness pops up here, when he says, with satisfaction: “I’ve outlived Trevor-Roper…”

Now he no longer feels any urge to defend “that” book or himself. He has said all he wishes to say on the subject.

“For the rest, I am content to be judged by the books I’ve written and the life I’ve lived. Let me say this right upfront: I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses. If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here. My novels can take care of themselves.”

In my extremely humble opinion, Rushdie can be proud of this memoir too. I found Knife thought-provoking, brave and utterly absorbing.