The author has already got his "Rushdie rocks!", from Sam Jordison. There will, depend on it, be an answering chorus of "Rushdie sucks!" from the other side.
He can, as yesterday shows, win the judge and vox pop vote. And, unlike David Davis, he had heavyweight opponents. But Salman Rushdie could also win any competition for the novelist who most successfully gets up the nose of the reading public and its mentors. In that category he's in a class of his own. A world beater.
Rushdie's political enemies include: Mrs Gandhi (she brought a libel action against Midnight's Children), the Bhutto dynasty, and – in a brilliant double coup – "Mrs Torcher" and the Ayatollah Khomeini. And he did all this with novels. Novels. In the process, Rushdie has terrified the grey men of Stockholm, denying him (along with Graham Greene, another chronic nose irritant) the Nobel he richly deserves. If there's room on the Rushdie mantelpiece for another trophy. More to the point here, Rushdie has always inflamed the nasal membranes of highly regarded critics and reviewers. For my money the two most (otherwise) sound and sharp (as in cut-throat razor) reviewers of fiction in today's literary London, Peter Kemp (writes in the Sunday Times) and D J Taylor (writes everywhere) are firmly in the "sucks" camp. In a powerfully hostile review of Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, in the Evening Standard Nirpal Dhaliwal made the case that Rushdie is Islamophilic and Hinduphobic. Someone should inform Tehran. The fact is, Rushdie has made the British (ah, but is he British?) novel "hot" again. He's shaken the dust off it. As it happens, I'm in the "rocks" camp, along with Jordison. More controversially – and this is something that is obscured by that 1981 novel being yet again hailed as the greatest thing – I believe that Rushdie the literary artist, far from declining (a commonly held view, even among those who admire him), is actually maturing in fascinating ways. At 61, he's got a couple of decades of top-rate stuff inside that owl-eyed head. He refuses to recycle – Midnight's Grandchildren will never happen. And, with every change of step, Rushdie irritates. Fury (given its reception was ever a book better named?), his eve-of-destruction, 2001 New York novel, provoked the most hostile reviewing which any Booker winner has been subjected to. But, as Cocteau said, savage reviews are love letters; of a kind.
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Saul Bellow subsequently disclosed that he had been in two minds as to whether to accept the honour or not. He did not, he said, want to have to write on with that damned "tombstone" weighing him down. It would be tragic if honours such as Rushdie has received this week may leaden his future writing. I don't think they will. So, hail Rushdie. But read this year's novel as well. It rocks (say I).