In the early days, this meant taking advantage of the generosity of friends and moving on whenever security was breached, which was often (Rushdie was considerably easier to hide than the armoured Jaguars that drove him everywhere). Despite being accorded the highest possible level of government protection, it was up to Rushdie to find and pay for his own accommodations. Throughout, there’s plenty of unexpected, illuminating detail. It also shamelessly name-drops (Rushdie’s “friends” are a veritable who’s who of late 20th century writers and intellectuals, not to mention actors, rock stars and world leaders). It speaks passionately against religious fundamentalism and for the universal right to free speech. It takes up old grievances (with the writers, publishers, politicians and journalists who failed to support him, with his second and fourth wives, with Cat Stevens - who, Rushdie says, “bubbled up like a fart in a bathtub”) and credits his brave defenders (the members of his “prot” team, his loyal agents, the friends who harboured him, his first and third wives). Titled for Rushdie’s alias during his years in hiding (an amalgam of the first names of two of his favourite writers, Conrad and Chekhov), Joseph Anton has a varied, ambitious agenda. Twelve years later, of course, the “Rushdie Affair” would come to seem like a dress rehearsal for what Rushdie himself calls “the main event.” In the years to come it would become a household word, one inextricably linked to the writer previously famous for his 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children. The day took a drastic turn for the worse, however, when a BBC reporter called to inform Rushdie that, as a result of perceived insults to Islam in his book The Satanic Verses, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced him to death.īefore that call, Rushdie, like most people in the West, had never heard the term fatwa. His second wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, had recently declared she was unhappy in their marriage. Valentine’s Day 1989 started inauspiciously for Salman Rushdie.

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie