THE LONG READ
members of any religious faith, no matter
how zealous, getting wound up about a
mere novel. Novelists had the freedom to
imagine whatever they wanted, right?
I saw a fair bit of Salman after the
fatwa, in hiding though he was. He came
round to dinner a few times (our kids
grew up with the idea that whenever
you have a supper party, two security
men with guns will be sitting in the next
room watching television) and, on the
first anniversary of the fatwa, the Inde-
pendent on Sunday, to which I’d moved
from The Observer, carried his first major
article after a year of silence, the essay
‘In Good Faith’. A supporting (and sup-
portive) interview wasn’t originally part
of the deal, but Salman agreed to it and
I met him at a ‘secret location’ to record
it. As the paper went to press, there were
last-minute worries about my safety,
since I was now implicated as an associate
of his. A bodyguard was assigned to myfamily, and spent some days passing on
tips about checking for suspicious pack-
ages and keeping a car in motion at traffic
lights. The man stuck doggedly to his
task for a couple of weekends, agreeing
to leave us alone only during an outing to
the gardens at Wisley, which he decided
were probably free of Islamic extremists.
Truly those were strange times. I never
felt in the slightest danger but do remem-
ber thinking that, if I had to die, freedom
of expression was a cause worth dying for.p
An insult hurled at those of us who sup-
ported Salman was that we belonged to a
‘metropolitan elite’. Prominent Remain-
voters have recently been accused of the
same crime. Other adjectives are also
thrown in, such as ‘Oxbridge-educated’
(not applicable in my case), ‘Guardian-
reading’ (fair enough) and ‘liberal’ (a
term tainted by association with neo-
liberalism, though, as Noam Chomsky
has said, neoliberalism – free-market
capitalism – ‘is neither new nor liberal’).
‘Cosmopolitan’ (another gibe) I could
accept, but not ‘metropolitan’, let alone
‘elitist’. Still, when you’re white, male and
middle-class, and edit the book pages of
a London-based national newspaper (as I
did until the mid-1990s), you’re bound to
come under suspicion. It’s assumed you’re
a gatekeeper, opposed to innovation and
diversity. And no matter how open your
pages are to world literature – as Boyd
Tonkin’s famously were, for example,
during his time as literary editor of
The Independent – there’ll always be a
few people who regard you as narrow-
minded, bigoted and bland. In short, as
an – or the – enemy.
I got off lightly, perhaps. In his book
Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010),
Gabriel Josipovici includes me among a
generation of writers, including Julian
Barnes, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis,
whom he attacks for their English ironiz-
ing and cynicism. But it’s a mild swipe,
and he and I have had friendly dealings
ever since. More annoying was what
James Kelman had to say in Some Recent
Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political, a book
published in 1992 but which I didn’t come
across till years later: ‘Some of you may
know of a recent controversy featuring68 NEW INTERNATIONALIST
Hope of a new beginning: Caribbean migrants
arriving at Victoria Station, London, in 1956.
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