Knife by Salman Rushdie review: living to tell the tale of being saved by love

Knife by Salman Rushdie review: living to tell the tale of being saved by loveLater on, Rushdie was puzzled to learn that his assailant had arrived at the venue with not just one knife but a whole bagful. “Did he think he might pass them out to the audience and invite them to join in?” The suspect, a young man in his twenties, is currently awaiting trial.

. As a lifelong atheist, Rushdie doesn’t believe in miracles as such, but a sense of deep gratitude – to the cosmos, if not a deity – is palpable in these pages. He pays touching tribute to his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and expresses thanks for the messages of support he received after the attack: “I have no doubt at all that the love coming toward me – the love of strangers as well as family and friends – did a great deal to help me come through.

Early on in the book, Rushdie insists he doesn’t want these events to define him. For too long, his status as the beleaguered bête noire of religious zealots overshadowed his work as a novelist. “I have no intention of living in that narrative any more,” he declares. At first, he felt little desire to write about the attack, but his agent talked him round, and eventually he became convinced it was necessary – “my way of taking ownership of what happened”.

Knife ends with a brisk recap of the Enlightenment principles which Rushdie holds dear. His 2022 address to a United Nations PEN America gala, in which he railed against the “dishonest narratives” underpinning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is reprinted here. He also calls out the “bigoted revisionism” of right-wing populists from Donald Trump in his adoptive country, the US, to Narendra Modi in the country of his birth, India.

This is welcome, as far as it goes. On the big, black-and-white questions that separate liberals from outright reactionaries, Rushdie is beyond reproach. But what of the more complex issues – the ones that pit liberals against liberals? One wonders, for example, if Rushdie has a view on US academics being fired from their jobs for expressing opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza. On such questions, he is above the fray.

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