book launch

What I didn't say in the two earlier posts is how ironically timely the violence is. It can, with only slight mischief, be seen as fireworks for a most unusual anniversary, heralding an array of activities whose culmination will be tomorrow. If the rioters knew what they were celebrating, they'd pack up their sticks and go home in a second.

A good twenty-four years ago, Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses and got believers' knickers in a twist the world over, much like they are now. A few months later, on Valentine's Day of 1989, the chief spiritual hooligan of Iran called for the murder of the author who went into hiding and lived under police protection for the following decade. (The hiding is long over now, the ayatollah has died, and Rushdie lives freely and continues to write. This is all you really need to know about god and free speech.)

Rushdie has now written his memoir of those years, to be published tomorrow. The propaganda around it is quite extraordinary. The New Yorker, for example, carries a long excerpt that should probably be called paid advertisement, and short comments here and (possibly soon) there. Radio 4 has abridged the book into five episodes that will constitute this week's Book of the Week. Earlier already, Andrew Marr sat down to interview Rushdie for Start the Week, which broadcast today. To round off the publicity blitz, the BBC will show a documentary on Rushdie's years with the fatwa on Thursday.

I've listened to the interview and will probably have Joseph Anton put me to sleep this week because I don't know exactly what to make of Salman Rushdie. I've had my share of his prose, having read Midnight's Children (initial breathtaking literary beauty petering out towards the end) and The Moor's Last Sigh (not nearly as good and also too long). There is no doubt that he his an exceptionally talented and creative writer and a very courageous man. But there are also no fewer than four broken marriages and trophy girls paraded around celebrities' parties in New York.

None of the current interviews, articles and documentaries are probably any useful for getting any closer to the man. There's more available online (interviews for Desert Island Discs when he was just the author of Midnight's Children and for Book Club nine years ago when memories were fresher, for example), but the key to Rushdie is probably the careful reading of his defining work.

I've had the The Satanic Verses on my bookshelf for a few years now, but I've been hesitant to dive into it, afraid of not understanding or enjoying it without at least a master's degree in Religious Apocryphology. But in the current times, with the fear of offending increasingly dominating over the freedom to offend, I will make it my next read – and how I wish I commuted to work on the tube.