[1947-]
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, the oldest child and only son in an affluent Muslim family. At the age of fourteen, he left India to study at Rugby in England. Rushdie eventually took a history degree at King’s College, Cambridge. Meanwhile, in 1967 his parents moved to Pakistan.
Surrounded by books and story-tellers in his youth, Rushdie knew that he wanted to become a writer from an early age. After graduating from King’s College, he stayed in England, where he worked in the theatre and as a copywriter in an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus (1979), was met with negative reviews. Undaunted by the setback, he wrote Midnight’s Children (1981), an innovative blend of fantasy and reality. Ambitiously conceived and widely praised, this novel was born of Rushdie’s desire to write an ‘epic’ about India, and was begun when he revisited Bombay after a ten-year absence. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, ushering Rushdie into the literary spotlight and enabling him to begin writing full-time.
The next novel, Shame (1983), is set in Pakistan, where it was banned upon publication. In 1986 Rushdie travelled to Nicaragua as a guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. The result of his visit was The jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). In 1989 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. Set in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the novel contains what Rushdie calls the ‘most spectacular act of immigration’ that he could imagine, when his two Indian protagonists fall out of the sky and into the English Channel. Both an attempt to ‘give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture’ and an exploration of religious faith, The Satanic Verses was banned in India a week after its British publication. Several countries with large Muslim populations soon followed suit.
In 1991 Rushdie published Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. In 1994 he published a collection of short stories, East, West, and in 1995 his first major novel in six years, The Moor’s Last Sigh, appeared. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize for best novel of the year.
Rushdie’s ‘post-colonial’ essay ‘A General Election’ (1983) tackles British society with the kind of unsheathed vigour that a ‘colonial’ writer might well have shied away from. Here is the fully developed voice of the British writer who was not born in Britain but who fearlessly dares to criticize. This is no Equiano, learning the language and the customs, nor a C. L. R. James, anxious to impress. The ramparts have been breached, neither by stealth nor by bluster. The force of confident and elegant argument challenges the reader’s understanding of what constitutes a ‘British’ writer.
I returned to England only recently, after spending two months in India, and was feeling pretty disorientated even before the general election was called. Now, as successive opinion polls inform us of the near-inevitability of a more or less enormous Tory victory, my sense of alienation has blossomed into something close to full-scale culture shock. ’‘Tis a mad world you have here, my masters.’
Have they been putting something in the drinking water while I’ve been away? I had always thought that the British prided themselves on their common sense, on good old-fashioned down-to-earth realism. But the election of 1983 is beginning to look more and more like a dark fantasy, a fiction so outrageously improbable that any novelist would be ridiculed if he dreamed it up.
Consider this fiction. A Tory Prime Minister, Maggie May, gets elected on the basis of her promises to cut direct taxation and to get the country back to work (‘Labour isn’t working’). During the next four years she increases direct taxation and contrives to add almost two million people to the dole queues. And she throws in all sorts of extra goodies: a fifth of the country’s manufacturing industry lies in ruins, and (although she claims repeatedly to have vanquished the monster Inflation) she presides over the largest increase in prices of any British Prime Minister. The country’s housing programme grinds to a halt; schools and hospitals are closed; the Nationality Act robs Britons of their 900-year-old right to citizenship by virtue of birth; and the great windfall of North Sea oil money is squandered on financing unemployment. Money is poured into the police force, and as a result notifiable crimes rise by twenty-eight per cent.
She constantly tells the nation that cash limits are tight, but finds untold billions to spend on a crazy war whose legacy includes the export of drinking water to the South Atlantic at a cost to the British taxpayer of five pence a pint; and, speaking of peace, she earmarks further untold billions for the purchase of the latest weapons of death, although common sense, not to mention history, clearly indicates that the more such weapons exist, the more likely they are to be used.
So far, the story of Prime Minister May is almost credible. The fictional character does come across as unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent, but there have just occasionally been Tory politicians of whom such a description would not be wholly inaccurate. No, the story only falls apart when it gets to the end: Maggie May decides to go to the country, and instead of being hounded into the outer darkness, or at least Tasmania, like her namesake, it seems that she is to receive a vote of confidence; that five more years of cruelty, incompetence, etc., is what the electorate wants.
The hapless novelist submits his story, and is immediately submerged in a flood of rejection slips. Desperately, he tries to make his narrative more convincing. Maggie May’s political opponents are presented as hopelessly divided. The presence of alleged ‘full-time socialists’ amongst her foes alarms the people. The leader of the Labour Party wears a crumpled donkey-jacket at the Cenotaph and keeps falling over his dog. But still (the rejection slips point out) the fact remains that for Mrs May to hold anything like the lead that the polls say she holds, the unemployed – or some of them, anyway – must be planning to vote for her; and so must some of the homeless, some of the businessmen whose businesses she has destroyed, some of the women who will be worse off when (for instance) her proposal to means-test child benefits becomes law, and many of the trade unionists whose rights she proposes so severely to erode.
At this point, our imaginary novelist (compromising the integrity of his vision for the sake of publication) would, in all probability, agree to rewrite his ending. The trumpets sound, the sleeping citizenry awakes, le jour de gloire arrives, and Maggie May gets, in 1983, the same sort of bum’s rush given to her hero Winston Churchill in 1945.
Is it not passing strange that this, the plausible and happy ending, is the one that looks, in the cold light of real-life Britain, like the one in which it’s almost impossible to believe?
I find myself entertaining Spenglerian thoughts about how there can be times when all that is worst in a people rises to the surface and expresses itself in its government. There are, of course, many Britains, and many of them – the sceptical, questioning, radical, reformist, libertarian, non-conformist Britains – I have always admired greatly. But these Britains are presently in retreat, even in disarray; while nanny-Britain, strait-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped, jingoist Britain, is in charge. Dark goddesses rule; brightness falls from the air. ‘The Ancient Britons,’ says the best of history books, 1066 and All That, ‘painted themselves true blue, or woad, and fought heroically under their dashing queen, Woadicea.’ The Britons are even more Ancient now, but they have been fighting once again, and that blue dye takes a long time to wear off. Woadicea rides again.
What an achievement is hers! She has persuaded the nation that everything that goes wrong, from unemployment to the crime rate, is an Act of God or someone else’s fault, that the forces of organized labour are actually the enemies of organized labour; that we can only defend ourselves by giving the United States the power of life and death over us; that to be an ‘activist’ is somehow far worse than being an inactivist, and that the left must once more be thought of in Latin, as sinister. She propounds what is in fact an ideology of impotence masquerading as resolution, a con-trick, and it looks as though it’s going to work: Maggie’s sting.
And it was as recently as 1945 that the British people, politicized by their wartime experiences, threw off the yoke of the true-blue ruling class … How quickly the wheel has turned, how quickly faith has been lost in the party they forged as their weapon, how depressingly willing the nation seems to be to start touching forelocks once again. The worst thing about this election is that nobody seems really angry about what has happened, is happening, and is sure to go on happening if Mrs Thatcher is standing on the steps of No. 10 on the morning of 10 June. (What will she quote from this time? St Francis of Assisi again? St Joan? The Hitler Diaries?)
I believe the absence of widespread anger matters enormously, for this reason: that democracy can only thrive in a turbulent climate. Where there is acquiescence, cynicism, passivity, resignation, ‘inactivism’, the road is clear for those who would rob us of our rights.
So, finally, and in spite of all the predictions and probabilities, I refuse to accept that the cause is lost. Despair brings comfort to one’s enemies. And elections are not, at bottom, about reasoned arguments; they are about passions. It is just conceivable that even now, in this eleventh hour, a rage can be kindled in the people, rage against the dying of the light that Thatcherism represents. The electorate, we are told, has never been so volatile; so maybe the miracle can still be worked. Maybe, on the day, real life will turn out to obey the same laws of probability as fiction, and sanity will return.
If not, we can look forward to five more years of going to the dogs. Guardian readers will no doubt remember these unappealing canines; a few years ago, they used to be known as the running dogs of capitalism.