Through the fatwah-shadowed Nineties, Rushdie produced richly imagined novels of migration and modernity ( The Moor's Last Sigh The Ground Beneath Her Feet) a delightful children's tale ( Haroun and the Sea of Stories) critical essays an anthology of Indian writing even a study of The Wizard of Oz. At the time, I thought how astonishing it was that he had survived his 10-year purgatory so well. The "trivial monster ego" went out of his way to praise the coming generation of writers. Then, this alleged spiritual wreck gave a graceful, generous speech to mark a writers' award named in honour of his first wife, Clarissa Luard, the much-loved and much-missed senior literature officer of the Arts Council, who died of cancer, aged 50. The last time I saw Salman Rushdie was at an Arts Council event in June. AN Wilson, once a pallid novelist of upper-middle-class manners and now a tabloid rent-a-mouth, even presumed to judge the state of its author's soul: "The experience of the fatwah has destroyed not only the imagination but also the inner life of this trivial monster-ego." Elsewhere, Fury was denounced across the board as a "terrible novel", one that "fails on every single level", "a morass of bad writing", full of "pages and pages of gibberish" a "ludicrously bad book" from "an overrated novelist". The ever-dyspeptic Tom Paulin accused Rushdie on television of murdering the English language. So what became of this simmering novel, as crammed with passion and potholes as a New York street, on its recent publication? The answer is that the White Van Men (and women) of literary Britain stepped out to deliver a collective verbal mugging unequalled in its scorn, its savagery yes, in its sheer fury. Even at his worst, Rushdie will wake you up even at their best, many of his politer peers will send you fast into a dreamless, idea-free sleep. I wrote in The Independent's review of Fury that "I would rather read one page of flawed Rushdie than 1,000 of the soporific pap that often passes for 'literary fiction' in Britain today". No other writer has made this diagnosis so shrewdly, and so well.
We cower, adoring but secretly enraged, in the glare of these artificial suns.
Giant celebrities, global brands and fictional figures, from Tiger Woods to Lara Croft and Jennifer Lopez to Luke Skywalker, dwarf and mock our being with their perfect digitised or pixellated existence. In particular, it finds clues to the loss of a settled sense of self – the loss that leads to these paroxysms of wrath – in the takeover of our emotional life by "simulacra and counterfeits". All the same, Fury contains enough thrillingly fresh writing and ideas to show up most of Rushdie's contemporaries as parochial plodders.
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