On the morning of 12 August 2022, at an event in upstate New York concerning the importance of keeping writers free from harm, the author Salman Rushdie was attacked – a knife plunged into a raised hand, and then “many blows, to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere.” Like me, you probably saw the story on the news and felt shocked by it. The knife of the title travelled a long way, from the fatwah issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on 14 February 1989 as a result of Rushdie’s writing The Satanic Verses.
Readers of Rushdie’s extended nonfiction, Joseph Anton, know that story. The life in hiding. The decades protected by a security detail. The ongoing critical mauling from those people (people like Boris Johnson, that bastion of moral virtue) who felt he brought it on himself. Knife doesn’t really look to resurrect the history of all that. Knife, for the most part, is the story of a man who was almost killed by being repeatedly stabbed by a stranger rebuilding his life.
Some years before the attack, Rushdie began a new relationship with the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who became his 5th wife back in 2021. Knife is also their story, the story of how a couple deal with a powerful trauma in their own private ways, one alongside the other. But, in the main, this is a book about a man dealing with several medical issues at the same time – a famous man, yes, famous for having written a great many successful books, a man who is celebrated around the world (there are several events occurring to promote his at the time latest book, Victory City, as Rushdie himself deals with his various ills) – but still a human being, dealing with an attack that almost left him dead.
I’ve seen a couple of reviews of Knife that find Rushdie’s own self-regard to be a bit of a bother. He’s a bit full of himself, isn’t he? This writer of a great many successful books. This writer who has done a lot to try and protect other writers in the world. This man of talent. Right bloody full of himself. To which I can only say: shouldn’t he be? Vilified as he is by a great many people for, you know, just writing a book. Stabbed as he was a great many times for, you know, just writing a book. Blinded, as he is, for just writing a book. Let the man have a little self-regard why don’t you? And if you can’t have self-regard for having written Shame or Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses or even Victory City, please tell me what you can have self-regard for, oh self-regard police.
There is a little bit of the book devoted to the end of Martin Amis’ life, letters back and forth from one ailing man to another. What those letters do is tell you – it doesn’t matter how successful you are in life, you still have doubts about your own worth and you still need to hear that you have done ok, from people you trust. This is the same the whole world over. There is also a section of the book where Rushdie tries to get in the head of his attacker. It’s an exercise but it isn’t without value and if Rushdie doesn’t get to confront his attacker in court (as Samuel Beckett once did – Rushdie now the not so proud member of a club of writers that have been stabbed for one reason or another), and it allows him to draw a line under things, so be it.
The most important part of Knife for me, other than it tells us Rushdie is well enough to go on happily living his life and writing, is in the exhortation about what art is:
“…art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…”
And also:
“Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.”
And finally:
“Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.”
I’m glad Knife exists in as much as Rushdie got to live and write it. I’m also sorry it exists. It’s a terrible indictment of the polarised world in which we find ourselves.
Any Cop?: Knife is in some senses inspiring and in some senses gruelling, as you’d expect. Here’s hoping Rushdie gets to enjoy the next few years and write a few more books and live his life in relative peace.
Bookmunch 