Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie – ISBN 9780224093972 (h/b) – Jonathan Cape – © SR 2012 – 636 pp
I remember vividly the day the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his death sentence, the `fatwa`, on Salman Rushdie on 14 February 1989, because on that day I was actually reading The Satanic Verses while lying on my hospital bed, undergoing tests for a suspected heart attack. Verses had been published in late 1988 with a fanfare of publicity and a spate of reviews, many of them quite hostile. When the fatwa was announced, there was a flurry of activity at all levels, and Rushdie was rushed into hiding by Scotland Yard`s special branch team (the prot) assigned to protect him from Iranian state sponsored assassins. One of the very first demands they made of him was to find a pseudonym for himself, `pretty pronto` with the advice `not make it an Asian name`! And so he came up with an amalgam of Conrad`s and Chekhov`s first names: Joseph Anton, now adopted by him as the title of his memoir of those years of his wilderness following the fatwa.
And so Joseph Anton (JA) became Salman Rushdie`s alter ego in very special circumstances. The standard catchphrase or acronym aka (also known as) may not therefore be quite apt, because JA was not `known` to be Rushdie`s other name - the world did not know of the connection between the two - rather it was an imaginative creation of Rushdie`s fertile mind. But the net result was the same: Rushdie adopted the name JA to shield his real identity – it was a masquerade. One of his early discoveries was that as a throwback to the adverse publicity about the book, he `was no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The. The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author`.
At 636 pages then, this is the longest book, as well as the weightiest (and, for 5 weeks of bedtime reading, physically the awkwardest to handle) I have read this year. It is also the most gripping and reads like a thriller, even though you know it is not a work of fiction and what the ending is. Beginning with the fateful events of Valentine`s Day 1989, Rushdie recounts everything that followed in meticulous slow motion, interspersed with reflections on his life back and forth across time and space - his family background and childhood in India, his unhappy years at Rugby and the more relaxed and fulfilling time at Cambridge, and his emergence as a writer of eminence and controversy. He is brutally frank about his past, his parents and siblings, his marriages and affairs, his relationships with his children, his literary friends and publishers, his `prot` team, and indeed all and sundry (with a lot of name-dropping) with whom he interacted during the period covered in the book.
It is not thus just a memoir but also a work of autobiography. We learn a great deal about him, his inner self, of course, but also about the politics of publishing and diplomacy, about the intricacies and intrigues of state protection for high profile individuals, about the world of literature and literary giants and prizes, and about the genesis of each of his own masterpieces. So full marks for his long-awaited self-portrait. It is rich in colour, extraordinary in detail about places and events, utterly frank about people, and makes no apology for the book that was the cause of his travails. I shall leave it at this for now; more may follow later.
RAMNIK SHAH
(C) 2012
Surrey, UK
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