His refusal to censor himself led to a decade in danger of his life, but even Salman Rushdie puts a limit on free speech, he tells Shane Hegarty in London
Salman Rushdie knows that in writing a book about Islam and fanaticism and assassination, people will assume it is about him. That for everything that happens in Shalimar the Clown, regardless of how it moves across characters and decades and continents and conflicts, people will presume that only one character matters: Salman Rushdie.
"If one could do these things any more, I wouldn't have minded it being published anonymously," he says. "So people could read it without wondering about the writer's life. I think there's a lot to be said for not knowing too much about the writer when you read the book.
"Because books, if they're any good, outlast their authors and they're built to do that. If the primary interest was its relationship with my life, then the interest in that would dwindle dramatically when the subject of my life comes to an end. Which, when you're 58, is not that far away."
We do know a lot about Rushdie's life. Despite his literary reputation, more people know his biography than they do his bibliography. Specifically, they know how, for nine years, it seemed unlikely that he would ever be allowed to relax in a London office, free of a security detail, in an appointment arranged weeks previously - and jest about ageing naturally. Everything about Rushdie remains both obscured and framed by The Satanic Verses and the fatwa lifted seven years ago.
This week, though, he has been using that to his advantage. He has been critical of the Muslim Council of Britain, of Tony Blair's support for faith-based schools, of the way successive British governments allowed fanaticism to blossom in Britain because of some naive notion that it would ultimately protect them from attack. He knows that his words go straight from his mouth to the news editors.
"I think if there's one consequence of what happened to me, it is that I have a kind of voice on this subject," he says. "And, as it happens, I have quite strong opinions on this subject. If you have a voice and strong opinions, you'd be dumb not to use it, wouldn't you? So my view is that I got attacked viciously and violently for a long time and if I am now able to counter-attack then I might just have a go at doing it."
Especially, he says, because Tony Blair's actions are "beyond dumb", even if he is "not a stupid man". He's a leader obsessed with image, who thinks that "as long as he gets a couple of people with Muslim names standing beside him for a photo opportunity then that's his bit for community relations".
"And that's playing games with the country's future. And the whole faith-based schools thing is the same thing. So yes, I get to say my piece. And I think, well, if there's a small benefit of nine years of hell, then that'll do. I'll take that."
His Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death for his association with The Satanic Verses. Its Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot three times in the back. But Rushdie does not regret writing it, not least because Nygaard absolved him of responsibility and ordered a reprint.
"Of course I feel very deeply for the people who were hurt, but I didn't hurt them," he says. "The people who are responsible are the people who attacked them. It's a basic simple moral principle that you are responsible for your actions.
"I am responsible for my actions. I wrote The Satanic Verses and I'm proud of it. I didn't encourage people to kill people. It's not my fault. And the thing is that now, after 7/7, you have all these articles with people saying we're all Salman Rushdie now and basically articles that say, oh, now we get it."
Much of his frustration is that people didn't get it before the attack of July 7th.
"Ironically, one of the things that many of us had been writing about for 20 years or more is exactly the problem that just exploded," he says. "It's a strange thing, because everybody's giving us literary prizes but they're not listening to what we're saying. If they had listened to Hanif [ Kureishi] when he wrote My Son the Fanatic . . . The writers have been telling people this stuff for some time. And they'd been getting fantastic reviews and big sales and reputations but nobody's been listening to what they said, and that's the stupid thing about it. And now it puts us in a position of saying I told you so - but nobody likes a smartarse."
He says this not in a flippant way, but resignedly.
Meanwhile, he finds himself, he says, in the odd position of being aligned with neither the left nor the right on this issue. The left has become confused and has made an "intellectual mistake" in its desperation to criticise American actions. He is disdainful of President Bush and his allies, but had no problem with them removing Saddam Hussein or deporting preachers of extremism. Even this most celebrated of causes célèbres puts limits on free speech.
"If there is a limiting point on freedom, it is to deny freedom to people who would destroy your freedom," he says.
Shalimar the Clown can be read as a commentary on Islam, fanaticism and current global developments, he says, but not of his personal experience of it. Nonetheless, some have insisted on doing that. He is particularly annoyed by John Updike's review in the New Yorker, and not just because he is accused of suffering "as a literary performer" under the weight of the fatwa.
"The Updike piece, I have to say, is one of the dumbest reviews I've ever seen," Rushdie says. "And the fact that he spends, you know, six column inches complaining about the name of a character - who cares?"
It is his right not to like his style, says Rushdie, but as a critic he could have at least noticed that each of the five sections is written in a different style. It is "a grumpy old man's review".
Shalimar the Clown is propelled forward not just by the energy of its language and the scale of its context, but by an unrelenting narrative surge. It is another attempt, says Rushdie, in his career-long project to break through the "false distinction" between literary and popular fiction. He has been successful, most notably with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which remains a pivotal moment in recent British literature and in the life of a writer whose mind was crowded with doubt after the dismal failure of his debut, Grimus. Rushdie has been quoted as saying that he doesn't recognise the hand behind Midnight's Children, that he is amazed it was his.
"What I meant was that it was a much younger man's book," he says now in clarification. "When I started it I was 28, and now I'm 58, so there's a lot of water under a lot of bridges. When I look at it, it reminds me of a younger self, in a good way. I admire the energy and daring of it and the thing only a young person can do: to say, okay, I'll take on the whole of India. All of it. I'll write this book about it, and that'll be the whole of it. And that's a kind of youthful daring, but what I think is I've come a long way since then and I don't think that author could have written this book and I don't think this author could have written that book. But that's all right. That's what the journey's about."
It should be the book he is known for, but it is not. "The Satanic Verses is probably the most technically complex of all my books and yet it is, of course, the one that got the most attention," he says. "And, as a result, many, many people who had never picked up a book of mine picked that one up first and thought 'this is a bit difficult', and got put off. I myself think that no one who reads my work should read The Satanic Verses first."
He is a magnet for misconception. "I don't often recognise the person in the newspaper report and it's because it's a collage of previous misapprehensions, that when you put them together they create another one. My wife can't read them; she says it doesn't sound like you."
What's the biggest misapprehension? "Oh, I don't know. There's lots of nasty stories about me, but I'm not going to repeat them."
Go through the clippings, and the character portrayed is not always the most sympathetic. He's a party animal. An egoist. He was ungrateful to the people who helped him through those dark years, nasty to London. And there is his obsession with celebrity, either his own or that of others. Most obviously, young, female celebrities. He is a friend of Kylie and Dannii Minogue, of all people! He has played Twister with the pop stars. Or maybe it was Scrabble. He has been intellectual arm-candy to beautiful women. Meanwhile, there was something unsettling about his relationship with a beautiful young model. It'll never last, they said. It did, and he and Padma Lashki are now married. Ah yes, people point out, but she is his fourth wife.
He wishes journalists would occasionally ask him about his work with Pen American Centre, which campaigns against censorship, and his organising of its recent festival of world literature. That, though, doesn't make decent headlines.
"This idea of painting me as some sort of shallow person because I have friends who get their picture in the paper, that's the kind of thing that really does irritate me," he says. "Because I work very hard. I spend years doing things which are very intellectually and emotionally demanding. I give most of my spare time to other stuff which I consider to be very important to do and if every so often I decide to go out for the evening, that's okay.
"There's nothing wrong with having a bit of fun. There's a curious puritanism that says that big-deal writers shouldn't hang out with pop stars."
Shalimar the Clown is published by Jonathan Cape, £17.99