Sir Salman Rushdie: Writing fiction in a time of lies

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1:16Hello, I'm BBC presenter James Kamarasamy and this is The Interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world. I'm disappointed in him. I deal done four times and then you go home and you see just attack a nursing home in Kiev. I said, what the hell was that all about? I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me, but I was still 15 years old and I did not know who I was. I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it. Today we are spending trivians on war and peanuts on peace.

1:55For this interview, I met author Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the most influential literary voices of our time. His latest book, The Eleventh Hour, marks his return to fiction after surviving a near-fatal attack in 2022 by a man armed with a knife who is now serving 25 years in prison. Sir Salman told a story of that attack in last year's non-fiction book Knife. His new collection of novellas and short stories explores mortality, farewells and even the afterlife. They feature a rich cast of characters, a musical prodigy in post-partition Mumbai, a ghost with a secret at a Cambridge college and a young writer caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare in modern-day America.

2:40Our conversation goes beyond the stories. Sir Salman reflects on writing in an era of rising disinformation, censorship and authoritarianism. He shares his concerns about book bans in the United States, the erosion of free speech and the political climate shaped by figures like Donald Trump. We discuss the role of fiction in telling the truth and why, after everything, he is still committed to the freedom to imagine. People do ask about writing fiction in a time of lies and my view is that although there's a superficial similarity between fiction and untruth, because fiction is imaginary, and so are lies.

3:21But the purpose of literature is always to reveal certain kinds of truth. Whatever techniques literature uses, it aims at the truth about human nature, about why we are the way we are, why we treat others the way we treat them. The truths about human nature are the truths of literature, and that's where literature aims, irrespective of the techniques it uses, whereas the lie is a way of obscuring the truth. So although they may superficially seem similar to each other, they're actually adversaries and should be.

3:57Welcome to The Interview from the BBC World Service with Sir Salman Rushdie. After the attack, it was very difficult for me to think about fiction because this subject was so large in my consciousness. And I realised that the only way of getting past it was to go through it. And that's why I ended up writing Knife, the memoir. But what I hoped would happen actually did happen, which is that more or less immediately on finishing the memoir, you know, the juices of fiction began to flow again. And I started writing these novellas almost immediately. So before writing that, did you fear then that those juices had dried up?

4:38Well, I knew that they, I hoped it wasn't permanent, but certainly there was no fiction in my head for quite a while after the attack. And I just felt that the way of getting it back was to deal with the subject in front of me, get it out of the way, and then hopefully, you know, if you like, my real life as a writer would return. And you have turned to the past in these new novellas in different ways, haven't you? The different countries you have lived in, made home, been citizen of. Tell us about, they're very different, these three novellas. They muse on death, but on birth as well. Yeah, and I wanted them to be, to have a kind of lightness to them.

5:22I wanted them to be playful, you know, and I think I tried to play with form as well as with story to create that atmosphere. But you're right that they go back a little bit. The Indian story, The Musician of Kahani, obviously revisits a literary location that I've used in great detail before. Sure. Every time I've gone back to India, I've always revisited that tiny little neighborhood where I grew up. And it means a lot to me. And I thought, I'm not sure that I have a lot of extra stories to tell set in that place, but maybe I've got one. And so this became, in my mind, maybe some kind of a farewell to that location, to that neighborhood.

6:03So the characters in that story are not facing mortality in the way that many of the characters in the other stories are. But the author is dealing with the end of something. And the story Oklahoma, in a way, revisits my younger days as a writer when I first came to America in the early 80s, after the publication of Midnight Sharan. Although I have to say that the kind of young writer character in that story, I have to insist, is not me. In fact, he's not, how can I put it, he's not nearly as nice as me. He's a little creepy. Well, he's a bit of a stalker, isn't he? He's a bit of a stalker, yes.

6:42And as we discover, as the story goes on, he might well be a plagiarist as well. Yes, I mean, you mentioned Midnight's Children and you rather playfully, as you say, come back to midnight. You talk about the child genius, the child musical genius Chandni, who's the star, the musician of Kahani, that first of the three new novellas as being born at midnight. And then in the second book, the second novella, Late, the protagonist dies at midnight, or at least the hands of the clock are at midnight in his room when he is found. Yes, it's just a little private joke. And there are quite a few of them there in the book, aren't there, in the novellas?

7:28Yes, there are. There's so little insider jokes, you know. It's my Taylor Swift technique.

7:37Clancy little Easter eggs. Well, quite. I mean, for you, when you approach this, you're consciously looking back at the past. I mean, when you look, for example, at Cambridge, which is where that second novella, Late, is set, and you have a ghost getting his revenge from beyond the grave in this one. Yeah, I mean, strangely, unexpectedly, I wasn't planning it, but two of the three novellas end up being revenge stories. So I'm not exactly sure why I had revenge on the brain, but clearly I did. Well, yes, any reflections on that? I mean, I think one could draw fairly obvious conclusions about who, towards whom I was feeling vengeful.

8:22But when I was writing the stories, I wasn't aware of that. I wasn't conscious that I was thinking about my own need for vengeance. It was just the way the stories worked out. Because the book you wrote, and let's be explicit about the attack, Knife, was in its way an act of literary revenge, wasn't it? you deliberately didn't name your attacker. You just called him by his initial and you wrote your own story about the attack. Well, I don't know whether it was revenge, but it certainly was a way for me to take ownership of the story, to make it mine, so to speak, rather than being a victim of somebody else's narrative.

9:03And I was happy to do that. I was happy that I did that. What has the process of writing been like since the attack? Obviously, you lost the sight in one eye. It's been hard if you use an iPad, I think, rather than write with a pen. What sort of challenges has that presented? Everything is slower and clumsier. I was never a fluid touch typist, so the fact that my left hand is somewhat impaired damages me less than it would damage others who were used to using all ten digits. But it's slower, and there are more typing mistakes, and that's what it is. It's just messier. But, I mean, it's been three years now.

9:45I'm pretty much used to it. And what about life? because you're here talking to me, promoting your new book, but presumably promoting and going out in public now is a very different thing post the attack. Well, going out in public now does require security precautions and we will take those. I mean, when I come to London in a couple of weeks, I am going to do a quite large public event at the Royal Festival Hall, but that obviously will require security precautions, which we will take. You touched on possibly whether you feel vengeful about the perpetrator who's of course now been sentenced. But I wonder for you personally, as you say, you're back out again in public.

10:33Is the experience you had during all those years of the fatwa, has that helped you to deal with this? Yes, of course it has. I mean, I've had this in my life for a very long time. so I do have some experience and actually my feelings towards the attacker are not of revenge, they're really of I feel that I've dealt with him and I've put him out of my head so he's in jail and I'm not and life goes on

11:10You're listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story? What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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12:29For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Sir Salman Rushdie. Among the general public, Sir Salman is better known for his dramatic life than his fictional work, His years of living under the Iranian fatwa and the 2022 knife attack, whose impact remains clearly visible as he stares down the lens during our interview, with a black eye patch covering his blinded right eye. He's also known as a man about town. He's been married five times. His last three wives have all been much younger than him. The only time I'd met him before was at a White House correspondence dinner in Washington, nearly 20 years ago when he was one of the guests at a neighbouring table.

13:11A star attraction in a way that few authors can claim to be. He's an easy conversationalist, happy to discuss a range of topics, but during our interview he seemed particularly pleased not just to be writing fiction but to be speaking about it again. OK, let's return now to my conversation with Sir Salman Rushdie. Let's get back to the new book because you clearly, as well as reflections on your earlier life. You have reflections on language and on freedom of speech, which is something, again, which has been very much something you have been associated with, perhaps for reasons you, again, might not have wanted.

13:52That final short story, The Old Man and the Piazza, in which language becomes a character. Tell us about that. Again, it's not a new one, but you clearly felt it was important to be in this collection. Yeah, it's four or five years old, but I felt it belonged in the collection. And it is, I suppose, the most directly allegorical of the stories in that it does deal with what happens in a society. And the society and the story is a small town in which people assemble in the town square, essentially to argue with each other. And the point about language being a character is that what the story is suggesting is that maybe we're losing the ability to talk to each other.

14:33Maybe we don't understand each other when we talk to each other, even though we're using a single language. We can't communicate, you know, and what happens in a society when people cease to be able to talk to each other? That's the question the story asks and suggests that it's that what happens is nothing very good. And there's also a period in the story when there is no disagreement, where everyone is on the same page, everyone is a yes person. Everybody's ordered to be on the same page. Quite. Does that ring bells about what is happening now in parts of the world? I do think that there is pressure on people to conform to various lines of attitude.

15:21And that's true across the political spectrum. I mean, here in the United States, of course, there's a major censorship push. and that PEN America recently put out a paper saying that there are currently 23 ,000 active book bans in the United States. And that's an attempt to control the narrative of the country, if you like. And then coming from the liberal progressive side, there's also a desire to keep people in line, you know, to tell people how to speak and how not to speak. And I find them both worrying. And so the story is about what happens What happens when people can't speak their mind?

16:02You know, what happens to the people themselves and what happens to the greater community? You've certainly spoken your mind about President Trump when he was running again last year. You said the prospect of him winning was unbearable, unthinkable, because he'll be much worse this time. He'll be unleashed. He's a liar and a bully and cares about nothing except himself. And you said that America would be unlivable. Well, it's more or less right, wasn't I? He's done all those things, you know, to be revenged upon his adversaries, to be even less truthful than he used to be, to drop bombs on fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela.

16:41There's a horrible thing every day that we have to deal with. So it's a hard time in America. I was in London recently, not so long ago, and there was a demonstration of something like 150 ,000 people in London supporting the far right. So it's not only here, it's in England as well. And the rise of Hindu nationalism in India is something also an echo of that. So it feels as if all these countries that I've spent my life thinking about and writing about are going through variations of the same theme. Can I return to something you said earlier? You talked about your concern about the books being banned, the number of them.

17:22What impact do you think that might have on young people, on young readers, young writers, more generally? Clearly, there's an attempt to prevent young people from exposure to a narrative of America that the censors want to erase. You know, so the books being banned are not accidental. If you think that they include Tony Morrison's Beloved, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, see what these things have in common? They have in common America's treatment of its African-American community. And there's a desire to limit the discussion of that treatment and to rewrite the history of the country in a way which centres white experience rather than the diversity that is actually the simple truth about America.

18:15What impact might that have then on young minds? No, it means people won't know so much. If you raise an ignorant generation, then it acts out of ignorance. And that's the fear, that there will be a generation growing up which doesn't know the history of America or which knows a version of the history of America which is sanitized. I want to get back to fiction and to writing and to some of the sort of challenges that writers are facing at the moment. I mean, there is the challenge, I suppose, of writing fiction in a world where there is so much disinformation, so much that people are calling into question.

19:01What kind of challenges do you think that presents to writers? Well, I think the question about how do writers respond to a world that's kind of in crisis is something that all the writers I know are thinking about. And people approach it in different ways. You know, some people's response to it is to say that that public arena is not where they want to go. They want to go into private life and the questions of the heart and the mind and the spirit. And that is fulfilling. And that's absolutely a legitimate way to respond. Other writers with more of a kind of public interest try and take on what's going on.

19:40And I'm somewhere in between, you know. I mean, I always wanted to write books which had nothing to do with politics. And somehow I fail. Politics seems to sneak in somewhere. Where are the politics in these new novellas, would you say? Well, that last story we've been talking about, Free Expression, is one version. I mean, clearly, the musician of Kahani, with its satire about the Indian ultra-rich, is kind of deals with public events because there are no rich like the Indian ultra-rich, the super billionaires, who essentially, part of anything else, have bought the media. So they control public opinion to a large extent.

20:20I thought they were a target worth aiming at. What about the balance then between freedom of speech and, you know, disinformation? how do you keep free speech sacrosanct in a way that there can be an informed and properly argumentative public sphere without tipping into disinformation and the dangers that brings? Well, you do it by doing it. You know, you tell the truth instead of telling lies. And I do think... How do you control it, though? Well, you don't control it. That's the point about it being free. You let a thousand voices speak, you know. And I think one of the things that we're getting wrong at the moment is that idea of tolerating your adversary, of defending the right to speak of those that you strongly disagree with.

21:12And where does a novelist come into that? Well, as I say, you do it by doing it. But the thing that I wanted to say about the novel, because people do ask about writing fiction in a time of lies, you know, And my view is that although there's a superficial similarity between fiction and untruth, because fiction is imaginary and so are lies, but the purpose of literature is always to reveal certain kinds of truth. You know, whatever techniques literature uses, it aims at the truth about human nature, about why we are the way we are, why we treat others the way we treat them, what we hope for, what we are afraid of.

21:53The truths about human nature are the truths of literature. And that's where literature aims, irrespective of the techniques it uses, whereas the lie is a way of obscuring the truth. So although they may superficially seem similar to each other, they're actually adversaries and should be. Where does AI fit into all of this? I know you have said that, look, as long as writers can, I guess, have the monopoly on humour or AI is unable to make you laugh, writers shouldn't be concerned. Is that still how you feel? Truthfully, I don't know what I think. I'm trying to pretend it doesn't exist. and just get on with my work.

22:36I mean, just speaking personally, I so far haven't felt it becoming a problem for me and my work. I don't know many creative writers who yet feel that it might be. I think there's kinds of writing which are perhaps threatened by it, kinds of reportage, kinds of non-fictional work, maybe even genre fiction, Maybe AI will become good at thrillers or science fiction or romanticcy or all these new things that are around. But as far as literary fiction is concerned, I think that's so much the product of an individual voice and an individual consciousness that AI, I think, AI has no originality. It just learns everything that already exists and produces versions of it.

23:26Whereas the point about art is originality. So I think we have a little time left to us to do that. What about the future? What about novels? You've chosen to write these novellas. Do you have more novels in you? I hope so. You know, I mean, you're not entirely the master of your imagination. I wasn't setting out to write three novellas. They just showed up. I mean, the first one I wrote was The Ghost Story Late. And when I finished it, I realized it was, what, 75, 80 pages long. I initially thought I didn't know what to do with this, you know, because it's too long to be a short story. It's too short to stand on its own.

24:04What do I do? And I put it to one side for several months. And then to my surprise and pleasure, these other two long stories showed up. And then I began to think maybe there's a book here. So it sort of evolved in that kind of almost accidental way. I hope there's a novel. I mean, that's what I'd like to do next. I'm also thinking about a children's book. so maybe I'm not sure which one will come next. I certainly don't feel finished yet. I mean, I was very surprised, for example, when Philip Roth decided to stop writing because he'd been such a prolific writer and such a disciplined and committed writer.

24:40I thought, what will you do with your time? But actually, he seemed perfectly content to have stopped. I don't see myself stopping. I mean, I feel I don't know what else I would do with my time. So I'd better go on doing this.

24:56Thank you for listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with tennis icon Martina Navratilova, author Sir Philip Pullman, and education campaigner Malala Yousafzai. Until the next time, bye for now.

25:29If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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