Two old men – long-time friends and next-door neighbours – struggle out of their respective beds and stumble to their verandas for a dawn chat.
Below, in their suburb of Chennai in southern India, children are going to school, coffee is being brewed and televisions are being turned on.
From the aches of old age to their paltry pensions, there is much to bemoan. But this morning, the younger is not in the mood. “Your gloom and doom,” he tells his friend, “will be the death of me”.
The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie’s new collection, is rich with such pathos. It is Rushdie’s first work of fiction since he was attacked in 2022 by a religious fanatic.
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We find Rushdie in a reflective mood, engaging with key moments in his life – and the fiction it inspired. We are transported to India, where Rushdie spent his childhood; Britain, where he began his literary career; and the US, where he moved in the early 2000s.
The ghosts of Rushdie’s past are everywhere. There’s a story about a dead Cambridge fellow – loosely based on EM Forster, whom Rushdie encountered while a student at Cambridge – who haunts the university corridors. There are the questions about God that have preoccupied Rushdie since he left India for boarding school in England in 1961.
Some stories hit home more. The Old Man in the Piazza – a parable about freedom of expression and the dangers of neglecting language – feels contrived; the resonance to the polarisation of our own politics, and the corrosive impact of social media, is almost too obvious. Elsewhere, however, the warmth with which Rushdie’s revisits the landscapes of his life results in both humour and genuine sadness.
In The Musician of Kahani, Rushdie returns to his privileged Mumbai childhood that inspired the multi award-winning Midnight’s Children (1981), one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Mumbai is a “magic space”, the story’s narrator tells us. “Many of the stories I have told were born here.” Soon, however, it would be time to say goodnight.
For Rushdie himself, and for his many admiring readers, we can only hope that time remains a long way off yet.
