Post by Carl LaFong on Sept 7, 2022 16:35:32 GMT
Salman Rushdie.
Interview
Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: ‘It’s beyond the edge of human cruelty’
Lisa Allardice
The author’s new novel explores how global events shape individual lives – but nothing prepared him for this ‘dark moment’
Ian McEwan was on holiday on the remote coast of north-west Scotland when he heard the news that his great friend Salman Rushdie had been attacked in New York. His wife, the writer Annalena McAfee, let out a cry from the next door room in the small hotel where they were staying. The numbness of his first response was quickly followed by a feeling of horrible inevitability: “How could I have been so blind?” Like Rushdie, McEwan had hoped the threat of the fatwa was over. “The tragedy of this is Salman always wanted to get back to having an ‘ordinary’ writing life, and that seemed to have happened,” McEwan says on a video call a week after the incident. The 74-year-old novelist is back in his Cotswolds home, surrounded by books and looking slightly beaten up after his first bout of Covid.
The grim effects of coronavirus added to his “sense of visceral disgust” at the violence of the stabbing. “It all seemed one with my own perception of it,” he says. “A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to push a knife deep into someone’s eye. It is beyond the edge of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to disprove in any way, could bring you to the point.”
We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.”
Although not originally part of the notorious gang of writers – Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens – who made their names in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to their critics), Rushdie arrived a few years later with the publication in 1981 of Midnight’s Children, which transformed both British and Indian writing, and won the Booker prize that year. “It was amazing, it expanded horizons,” McEwan says. “Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief,” he adds. “So we all got on straight away.”...
www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/03/ian-mcewan-on-ageing-legacy-the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-beyond-edge-of-human-cruelty
Interview
Ian McEwan on ageing, legacy and the attack on his friend Salman Rushdie: ‘It’s beyond the edge of human cruelty’
Lisa Allardice
The author’s new novel explores how global events shape individual lives – but nothing prepared him for this ‘dark moment’
Ian McEwan was on holiday on the remote coast of north-west Scotland when he heard the news that his great friend Salman Rushdie had been attacked in New York. His wife, the writer Annalena McAfee, let out a cry from the next door room in the small hotel where they were staying. The numbness of his first response was quickly followed by a feeling of horrible inevitability: “How could I have been so blind?” Like Rushdie, McEwan had hoped the threat of the fatwa was over. “The tragedy of this is Salman always wanted to get back to having an ‘ordinary’ writing life, and that seemed to have happened,” McEwan says on a video call a week after the incident. The 74-year-old novelist is back in his Cotswolds home, surrounded by books and looking slightly beaten up after his first bout of Covid.
The grim effects of coronavirus added to his “sense of visceral disgust” at the violence of the stabbing. “It all seemed one with my own perception of it,” he says. “A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to push a knife deep into someone’s eye. It is beyond the edge of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to disprove in any way, could bring you to the point.”
We had met earlier in the summer to discuss McEwan’s epic new novel, Lessons, in which the fatwa issued against Rushdie for The Satanic Verses in 1989 appears as part of the novel’s far-reaching look at postwar British history. “It was a watershed moment for those of us around Salman,” he says now. For writers, intellectuals and artists in the 70s or 80s, religion wasn’t an issue: “We didn’t even deny religion, it just didn’t come up.” So when the fatwa was decreed, “it was explosive. It cut across the sort of multicultural assumptions we had at the time. People whom we naturally most wanted to defend from racism were burning books in Bradford.”
Although not originally part of the notorious gang of writers – Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and the late Christopher Hitchens – who made their names in the 70s and dominated the literary scene for much longer (too long, according to their critics), Rushdie arrived a few years later with the publication in 1981 of Midnight’s Children, which transformed both British and Indian writing, and won the Booker prize that year. “It was amazing, it expanded horizons,” McEwan says. “Salman is a great conversationalist, with a great taste for fun and mischief,” he adds. “So we all got on straight away.”...
www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/03/ian-mcewan-on-ageing-legacy-the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-beyond-edge-of-human-cruelty