LATE IN THE DAY

Musings on mortality predominate in 'The Eleventh Hour', Salman Rushdie's first collection of fiction since the knife attack that almost ended his life. Martin Chilton is moved

- Martin Chilton

In “Late”, one of the three almost novella-length stories in Salman Rushdie’s new collection, The Eleventh Hour, a ghost comes to believe that none of his former academic colleagues really care that he is kaput, remarking of death: “You doffed your hat to it and moved on.”

It is no surprise that mortality is one of the major themes of Rushdie’s first work of fiction since the horrific near-fatal assault on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in 2022, when the author was stabbed 15 times in 27 seconds, resulting in blindness in his right eye. He wrote candidly about the onslaught in 2024’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Although the assailant's actions shocked the world, it was not entirely out of the blue. Rushdie had lived in fear of a deadly attack since his 1998 novel The Satanic Verses prompted the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for the writer’s assassination.

The Eleventh Hour, whose five stories are made up of two other previously published tales, moves between the three countries he has called home: England, the US and India (where he was born in 1947). One suspects, however, that the famous writer feels rather like the young Indian university student in “Late”, of whom the narrator says, “her hometown was far away. Books were her homeland now.”

Many of the recurring subjects in Rushdie’s fiction - identity, migration, myth, freedom of speech and the search for truth - have been present since his 1975 debut, the uneven science fiction novel Grimus; they feature again in The Eleventh Hour.

The opening story, “In the South”, was originally published in