The Eleventh Hour review: Unsurprisingly, death is a recurring theme in Salman Rushdie’s new book

Credit: AP

FICTION
The Eleventh Hour
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, $34.99

No one who has worked strenuously at the art of literary fiction has achieved the stardom or undergone the horrors of Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children, for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, was a dazzling inhabitation of magical realism that rivalled Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but no one imagined that Indira Gandhi – who Rushdie portrayed as a dangerous absolute monarch – would pursue him in the London courts.

Nor did anyone dream that The Satanic Verses would lead to a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. (The greatest Muslim school of theology, the Al-Azhar in Cairo, condemned the fatwa even though they deplored Rushdie’s representation of the origins of Islam.)

Then in 2023 he was attacked by an assailant who seems barely to have known his significance and was left blind in one eye as a consequence.

Now he has produced The Eleventh Hour, a suite of novellas and short stories which, as the title suggests, are concerned with the valley of the shadow of death. Again, they are variable, but it’s extraordinary how much juice and zest he gets from his wavering thematic, how much virtuosic humour and uncanny shifts of tone and register.

The Musician of Kaham is about a musical prodigy. She is a whiz on the piano and the sitar and lives are changed and kingdoms might collapse at her touch. This is very familiar Rushdie – a cartoon sketch from the painting box that produced Midnight’s Children.

The stories in Rushdie’s new book are concerned with the valley of the shadow of death.Credit: AP

Late, on the other hand, should enthral anybody. It is the story of a man who wakes up dead and then watches the effect his demise has. The time is the early 1970s and the protagonist (who can be seen only by a mild-mannered girl) is clearly based on E.M. Forster. He is the Honorary Fellow of his college and like Forster he is the author of a single masterpiece, about The Matter of India.

Evelyn Waugh, who for the purposes of this story is older than our hero, says he should concentrate on The Matter of Britain. This appertains to the fact that his name is Simon Merlyn Arthur: a reference to the fact that Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury crowd called E.M. Forster “Morgan”– dim echoes of Morgan le Fay, “The wan licentious Queen of Avalon,” King Arthur’s half sister.