Tonight:
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Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book," exclaimed Swift, on rereading his early masterpiece, The Tale of a Tub. It's hard to say whether it's more painful to look back on one's earlier work and think you could do it better now, or to realise that it has a vigour that you could never now truly recapture.
Sir Salman Rushdie, perhaps, could tell us. For Midnight's Children, published back in 1981, has just won the second Booker of Bookers award, marking the prize's 40th anniversary. Whereas it seems unlikely that Rushdie's latest effort, The Enchantress of Florence, will make this year's Booker shortlist even, having received some pretty disenchanted reviews.
In this paper, Nirpal Dhaliwal has observed that Rushdie's style is "both fey and bombastic; reading him is like being cornered by a drunk and over-excited Stephen Fry". For good measure, he added that the key sexual passages in the novel combined "jaded prurience and juvenile glee, reading very much like the imaginings of a dirty old man".
So there's been a falling-off in quality? Some might think so. But I have a confession to make. Though there's much I do admire Rushdie for - telling off Martin Amis for being stupid about Samuel Beckett, for example - and believe it a common duty to support his freedom of expression against the fatwa, I have never been able to bear any of his books. It's not just that they are not a great favourite of mine. It's more that the showiness of his prose and the ostentation of his storytelling is everything I dislike in a writer.
In his Diaries, Evelyn Waugh mentions finding it difficult to read his friend Lord Longford's autobiography, before they met. "I had in the preceding days taken a physical revulsion of the MS, and couldn't bring myself to touch it." That's precisely how I have long felt about Rushdie's novels.
When I was a Booker judge myself a few years ago, I had to study his contender, Shalimar the Clown, closely. Did I, on finally giving one of his novels full attention, find myself converted? 'Fraid not. I slogged through, a militant opponent of every page. I found the overloaded sentences and overbearing manner insufferable. And I didn't believe a word of it, which never helps.
Now it seems that I have been proved an ass once more, by popular vote, no less. But this Booker of Bookers was an odd affair. A panel of judges first selected a shortlist of six, leaving off such genuinely popular titles as The Life of Pi and The Remains of the Day. Then just that six were put to the vote. Even with online voting and considerable publicity, only 7,800 people bothered to choose the inevitable winner. So, not that popular a vote.
Reader views (1)
I have never had the good fortune of reading Salman Rushdie's books. I thought he only gained fame after the late Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini prescribed a death sentence for him fro writing the allegedly insulting book on Islam. Obviously, there are people in the UK really like his writings from him to keep winning literary awards there.
- Rizal J Maris, Jakarta, Indonesia, 11/07/2008 11:13
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