Summer read: In 1988, 25-year-old John Mitchinson, then a bookseller in London, was the first person to interview Salman Rushdie about his new book The Satanic Verses.

First published September 11, 2022.

While he was writing The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie had this note pinned to his wall: “To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse. To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.” Quite the degree of ruination that was to follow could hardly have been foreseen, and as the waves of repulsion and outrage reverberate to its latest manifestation – the grotesque attack at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12 – I’m reminded of turning up on his doorstep in Islington in July 1988.

I was a 25-year-old bookseller who’d found himself working for the publications department of Waterstone’s, the UK’s new and rapidly expanding bookshop chain. We had decided to add author interviews as an enhancement to our seasonal catalogue and the first of seven I’d been co-opted to write was with Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, scheduled for publication in September. I arrived with my tape recorder and a proof copy of the novel. I was, he said, the first person to formally speak to him about the new book and he proved a warm and enthusiastic interviewee. He was oddly impressed that I’d not only read it, but that I’d also read Midnight’s Children and Shame as well. I pointed out that it was my first ever interview – I like to think my rookie enthusiasm put him at his ease.

Re-reading the interview some 34 years later, I’m struck by how much ground we covered and by how far he went out of his way to frame the novel as an attempt to understand rather than condemn religious belief. “To dismiss it would be a very condescending thing to do to a whole culture, in effect it denies their view of the world equal status with your own.” 

We now know, it was precisely this world view that would be condemned and vilified, saddling him with a death sentence followed by a decade in exile and isolation and a threat that, apparently, will never fully recede. “I suspect there will be problems,” he told me that sunny morning, when I asked him about his expectation regarding the book’s reception in India. The problems arrived sooner and closer to home than he, or anyone else, expected.

In 1990, we smuggled Salman into Waterstone’s in Hampstead with his son Zafar, to sign copies of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Other live events followed. In 1992, he appeared (unannounced) at the Hay Festival and in 1995 the Hampstead branch hosted a live reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh, a sell-out even though tickets were only advertised on the morning of the reading. Gradually, the situation improved and Salman started appearing regularly at literary parties, festivals and conferences. Until last month, it seemed he had been fully rehabilitated into the world of books rather than that of politics, protest and police protection. I was touched when, along with a lot of other booksellers, I was invited to and publicly thanked at the launch of his memoir, Joseph Anton in 2012. 

Looking back on those early years, what strikes me most forcibly is how straightforward it seemed then to defend a writer’s right to self-expression. There were no Twitter pile-ons to negotiate, less scope for public shaming and blaming and much less anxiety about causing offence. When Salman won the author of the year at the British Book Awards in 1995, I remember the whole room cheering. 

He mentions this in Joseph Anton: “I mustn’t forget that there is an England that’s on my side.” There was and there still is. But the discussions about free speech have found themselves cheapened by the endless cry-wolf outrage of social media and the egregious attempts to align the basic human right of a writer to not be killed or violently with so-called “cancel culture”. The Satanic Verses was a novel, not an ill-considered tweet. 

I re-read the book recently and was amazed by how much I’d forgotten: what a good and subtle novel it is, how funny and generous. In the interview, Salman talked about the book trying to establish an “ethic of impurity”. He added: “Most of our problems begin when people try to define the world in terms of a stark opposition between good and evil, or in terms of racial and national purity”. I suspect that’s what really stoked the fundamentalist’s fear. Novels change us from the inside, blur boundaries, allow ideas to cross-fertilise and new ones to grow and flourish. 

But fiction’s subversive magic requires you to read it. Hadi Matar, the man charged in the Chautauqua attack, confessed he had only managed a few pages of The Satanic Verses. Plenty of other people over the years have complained about how difficult or even unreadable Rushdie’s fiction is. (Reader, it really isn’t.) That’s why we booksellers can feel some pride. We held firm and made The Satanic Verses something people could, and can, still read.

But the final word goes to Salman: “The way in which art changes society is never in a broad sweep – you write a book and governments fall – that never happens. What matters is the way in which a book acts on the people who really read it and connect to it. It is then that it can make an irreversible shift in the way you see things – you’re not the same person you were before. There’s been some tiny shift in your perception of the world which sticks and never shifts back. That’s why I write fiction.”

Salman Rushdie was attacked on 12 August 2022 as he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. The Satanic Verses is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.