Julia's Book Club - Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
46:22 Share

Did you know that two out of three listeners say podcasts are the best way to learn about the things they care about most? That makes podcasts the perfect place to introduce your brand, where ads are more relevant and trusted than any other media channel. Want to learn more? Download the full Podcast Pulse 2024 report now at podcastpulse2024.acast.com and see how you can make your brand part of the conversation.

If you can make a joke, it's like strapping a giant shock absorber to your brain. It takes the sting and the pain out of something. And his work is full of jokes. Clever wordplay. He sews the satire through his work like sequins and it's absolutely dazzling. And that's what he's like to be with. He's the best companion besides you, Julia. Yeah.

Hello and welcome to another Book Club episode with my dear friend, Cathy Lett. We're both in London, UK summer sunshine. What do you think? Well, I love the English summer. It's my favourite day of the year. It has not stopped raining, has it? I mean, I've still got my galoshes on, so... You don't get to put your coat away all that often, that's for sure. I'm wearing a thermal bra as we speak.

Though we have to be sensitive that many of our listeners would be in the middle of winter, so not happy about that. But that's a great time to be reading lots and lots of books. What have you been up to since we last recorded a podcast? Well, you've been at Hay. Yes, I went to the Hay on Wye Book Festival. I'd never been before. I absolutely loved it. For people who don't know it, it's a tiny village that puts on a very famous broadcast.

book festival and you just go from author to author, from discussion to discussion. But more importantly than that, you had the UK launch of your book, The Revenge Club. And you came along to the party, which was really lovely. I love that about Australian women, how we support each other in the human wonder bra mode. So yes, I've been on book tour, ricocheting around Britain. I mean, I've just done a big tour in Australia.

And, you know, you have to drop your own name, which is a bit of a weird kind of weird art form. But women have really responded to it. I think they want encouragement to have a sensational second act.

And I think women are sick of the fact that just when we're at the peak of our productivity and in our prime, you know, post-menopause, society hands us a cloak of invisibility. And I'm like, well, if they're going to give us a cloak of invisibility, shall we use that for good or for evil? And I'm thinking evil. So I think I've been giving women some diabolical ideas about, you know, just how to go forth and be fabulous, you know, and remain visible because –

It's not just me imagining that women at this age are made to feel invisible. MI5 announced a couple of years ago they wanted to employ middle-aged women as spies because nobody sees us. Oh, God.

So be visible, be loud, be proud, you know. Just put yourself first for the first time in your life. And that's what the Revenge Club is and that's what women are loving to get that message. Someone has to pick that up as a great book protagonist. You know, the central character is a middle-aged woman who is actually a very, very senior spy. That's right, exactly. Now today we're going to have to start with a bit of explaining you and I, Cathy, because we are going to discuss a book by a man called

the globally acclaimed author, Salman Rushdie. Now, he's a personal friend of yours, but I can assure our listeners this is not nepotism gone wild. Instead, we selected his most recent book, Knife, because it gives a very personal account of an event that rocked the literary world, reverberated around the whole world. People will have seen it on TV, in their news feeds.

Salmon was repeatedly stabbed and very nearly killed while standing on stage in front of thousands of people in upstate New York in 2022. And he was, somewhat ironically, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping riders safe from harm. Now, this vicious attack meant that he spent 12 weeks fighting for his life.

and it also reignited the debate around freedom of speech, art, what are the consequences. Prosecutors allege the man charged over the attack, who is due to stand trial later this year, so we're going to be a bit careful, acted belittling

belatedly in response to a fatwa issued against Rushdie in 1989. The details of that fatwa we will explain later, but it was issued following the release of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which the Iranian leader who issued the fatwa said contained a blasphemous representation of the Prophet Muhammad. So Cathy, let's

Let's start at the very beginning here. How long have you known Salman? How did you meet? Gosh, I met him when I was in my early 20s because he was going out with an Australian author at the time, Robin Davidson, who wrote Tracks, who's a good friend of mine. So he was just on the cusp of fame, really.

And what I loved about him is that he sort of straddles both ends of culture. He's incredibly erudite, as you know, a great intellectual. But he's also silly and funny and loves pop culture and a giggle and puns. So he's mischievous and playful. You get this wonderful...

Very complicated, well-rounded human being. He's also incredibly funny. His humour is deliciously self-deprecating. So we spend a lot of time just laughing and making up poems and limericks and being silly because he loves wordplay. And he also adores women and women adore him because he's very sensitive person.

to the fact that women are kind of runners-up in the human race. And I think that probably comes from the fact that he was raised with his three sisters and hardly any boys in his extended family, very female-centric family. And also I think coming to hear it from India when he was seen as a kind of – he would have suffered all that racism from the upper class and the patriarchal class system here.

means that he would have also been seen as an underdog. So I think he has empathy and sympathy with women because we're also fighting the patriarchy. We're fighting the sexism. He was fighting racism. So and even after the terrible attack, when he came off...

the ventilator in hospital because his friends were on the phone the whole time to his son saying, how is he, how is he? And the first thing he did was make a joke. So this is his survival mechanism and he understands that if you can make a joke, it's like strapping a giant shock absorber to your brain. It takes the sting and the pain out of something. And his work is full of jokes.

clever wordplay and he sows the satire through his work like sequins and it's absolutely dazzling and that's what he's like to be with. He's the best companion besides you, Julian. I mean, he is a remarkable author. Growing up, as you say, in India in what was referred to at the time as Bombay and then coming to the UK for education and living here for a lot of his life but now living in New York and

I mean, he really hit the global scene as long ago as 1981. His breakout book was his second book, Midnight's Children. And that not only won the Booker Prize, which of course is probably the biggest literary prize internationally, it went on to win the Booker of Bookers, which is a real trick.

So in 1993 and then again in 2008, the judging panel did best of prizes. So who's been the best of the booker? They said when they were celebrating their 25th anniversary. And then who's the best of the booker when they were celebrating their 40th anniversary? And so he won that twice. So Midnight's Children is quite a novel.

But, unfortunately, there's going to be a but in the sentence. Would you agree that his style can be pretty challenging for readers? I mean, he's famed for magical realism. Yeah. And people might say, oh, what on earth's that? Well, to give you an example, Midnight's Children tells the story of India, but it does it through the lives of children born close to midnight on the day in 1947 that India became an independent nation.

and then Salman gives these children magical powers and then through their lives the story of India is told. How are you about magical realism? It's not my favourite genre. I mean, I think the world is weird enough. I don't think we have to make anything up.

But his prose style is so pyrotechnical and so dazzling, what he can do with language. I mean, every sentence you just want to hold it up to the light and look at it and examine it like a diamond.

and the panache with which he writes, the passion. I mean, it's a brilliant book. I mean, that's actually my favourite, I think, of all his books besides Knife. So Midnight's Children, he's globally famous and acclaimed after that, and then he writes and he writes and he writes. He's written more than 20 books. And life, of course, for an author at that level can be a challenging thing. You've got to keep writing, but he's much celebrated for that.

And then his life changes when the Satanic Verses is published in 1988.

And I just want to give listeners a little bit of context here. In preparation for this podcast, I read the Satanic Verses. I'd been meaning to read it for years. So the time had come. And I'm going to tell people it's not an easy beach read. But if you're in, you know, wintry weather and you're looking for something to really get stuck into, then this could be a book for you. It starts with two men plodding.

plummeting through the sky from a plane exploded by a terrorist bomb. They survive and they are washed up in the UK. Of course, this is not feasible the way that it's described. One is washed up still wearing his bowler hat, for example. This is not feasible. But after the fall, they are both fundamentally changed.

Gabriel, one of the men, is plunged into constant dreams where he takes on the persona of the archangel Gabriel and the other, Saladin, grows horns, a tail and looks like a devil and is consequently shunned, as you would imagine, shunned by all except an Indian family in London who look after him.

And then ultimately, and if you're going to read the book, you might want to just jump a little bit here. The one who's taken on the persona of the arch angel kills himself and his lover in a jealous rage. And the other, Saladin, having reverted thankfully to human form, finds peace back in India, having for years despised it and done everything necessary to make himself more British than the British. The

The novel at its base is about identity and migration and rootlessness and sense of self. But as soon as it came out, it was controversial because a number of Gabriel's dreams contain content that was viewed by hundreds of millions of Muslims as blasphemous.

Cathy, I want to take you back to that time. I mean, Satanic Verses was generating protests and it was banned from publication in some countries, but everything took a much more serious turn when the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, a command, on the 14th of February 1989, saying, and I quote...

I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents,

have been declared those whose blood must be shed. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.

Do you remember where you were when the fatwa was issued? Look, it was so terrifying because things accelerated very quickly. And Salman was living in Islington, as were we. So we were almost neighbours and we saw each other all the time. And then...

This kind of like a grenade went off in our lives. And the book was being burnt, as you say, throughout the world. 22 protesters were killed by police in Pakistan. In the US, there was a $3 million bounty offered for the author's capture, alive or preferably dead. Translators were being murdered. Publishers were being murdered. And someone had to go into hiding.

So he was staying with friends initially because he had to keep moving every three days because the terror was so great. So he came to stay with us for a short time. So I'll tell you what was funny about it though. Well, first of all, Salman still could find the funny in all of this because I remember he said to me,

It's very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. Another day he said to me, the only worse thing than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini. So he was trying to keep himself buoyant.

throughout all the horror and the drama. But the funny thing is when he was staying with all his sort of left-wing literary friends, we kind of all had to share our space with a special branch. You know, this is not a natural... This is not a sort of natural cohabitation.

So you're putting all of your writings and files away just in case they think, what's that? Especially at the time I was married to Jeff Robertson, who's a human rights lawyer. And he said, you know, Special Branch had been trying to get into his files for decades and now they're in the house. And there were funny things happened too. Like sometimes we went away a couple of weekends to stay secretly with friends in the country. And of course, the Special Branch would come with us.

And I would say to the other women there, what is wrong with this picture? All our left-wing so-called feminist men would be sitting in the – lying by the fire reading while the women were getting the food ready in the kitchen. Well, who was helping us? The special branch guys who were really domesticated. We were like, hang on, we've gone with the wrong men here. Yeah.

And then the other thing that happened is that they came to see us to say we had to be on super high alert for bombs and terrorist attacks in the house, an assassin, whatever. And they were coming to debrief me about what I should do to keep the family safe. And I thought they were going to – they said I had to look for car bombs every day under my car. And I thought they were going to come and give me some high-tech equipment. And they said, just attach a mirror to a broom and put it under the car every day.

And so I put a mirror on a broom, put it under the car. Everything under a car looks like a car bomb, okay? Yes. I'm not that familiar with the underside of the car. But it reminded me of what you told me when you left office.

What the special branch came and said to you? Yeah, we don't refer to them as special branch in Australia, but we do have the Australian Federal Police close personal protection. And thankfully in Australia, because we are a happy country, you can transition out of full-time security after you've left office. So not everywhere around the world is like that.

But you talk to them about how you'll manage it going forward. And I was starting to do a lot of international travel, particularly with the Global Partnership for Education. And that was routinely taking me to African countries. And I was asking them, you know, about security arrangements and all the rest of it. I think in a whimsical way, they did say, well, you know, in Australia, you do come out of security. So you might want to buy a can of mace. And just remember, the Australian government does not pay ransoms. Yeah.

But I think that should be the title of the next section of your next memoir you put out, just called, okay, farewell, hooroo, here's a can of mace and we don't pay ransom. Something like that, you know. Get on with your life. Get on with your life. But I never thought of tying a mirror to a broom and starting to look under the car. Yeah, I know. And poor Salman, you know, he lived like this for years. Yes.

And it was just so, everything was so disjointed and so frightening. And, you know, as I said, we got to know the special branch way too well. And my job at the time, I felt, was to try and cheer Salman up in any way I could. So we'd have secret dinner parties where his friends would come and I'd put music on and we'd dance and we'd do the limbo and we'd play Scrabble. And one day, this sounds like I'm going for gold in the name dropping Olympics. I'm not. But

But he loves Scrabble and so does Kylie Minogue. So I got Kylie over for Scrabble competitions. But we also played Twister, which I think was the happiest day of his life, playing Twister with Kylie Minogue. And then she brought this game where you had to strap a Velcro cap to your head.

And it was winter, so we had to make our own fun indoors. And you ran around the house and whoever was in would throw these Velcro balls at your head and get different scores. So you can imagine, I've got Kylie Minogue and Salman Rushdie chasing each other up and down the stairs around the house throwing Velcro balls at each other's heads. And it sounds ridiculous, but he needed that score.

that kind of pressure valve, you know, to be released. He needed to just have some fun and frivolity and forget for a few moments every day that he was the most wanted man in the world. So, yeah, I saw that as my sole role was sort of chief...

Chief Fund Executive or something. Yeah, Chief Fund Executive. And the years rolled on, but life for him continued to have this huge pressure. I mean, he was looked after by British Security Services for a long period of time. But he decided in the year 2000 that he was just going to get

back out there. He would move to New York. He'd move out of the bubble of full-time protective security and he'd try and reclaim his life. I mean, you and other friends must have been very anxious about that decision. We were very worried, but the fatwa had been rescinded

with a lot of diplomatic work that had gone on behind the scenes. So it was not so much a fat war, it was more of a thin war, we thought at the time, but we were very, very worried about him. But, you know, he seemed in New York, he just became a sort of part of the furniture in a way. He said he wanted to go out and be seen at as many places as possible to show that he wasn't living in fear, which I thought was also incredibly heroic.

And in the end, people started taking it for granted that he lived there and stopped being frightened of having him as a neighbour. And we were all kind of lulled into a false sense of security that things had changed. Although he always said to me that he knew one day, he suspected one day there'd just be someone coming out of the dark, which is exactly what happened.

at a time when we didn't expect it. And we all went to visit him there and he would boomerang back to Britain and see us a lot because his two sons were here. The debate at the time...

There are many people who obviously were very offended that anyone should be the subject of a death threat because of what they'd written, just a belief in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, you know, the freedom of authors to write whatever literature they want.

and rushed to his defence. And actually, The Satanic Verses became a blockbuster bestselling novel after the issuing of the fatwa. I mean, I think people in their millions would have rushed out to buy it just to show solidarity, and many of them probably still got it sitting on the bookshelf untouched all these years later. Well, don't forget other people rushing out to buy it to burn it. Yes, that's true. That's true too.

an unusual way to get sales but that's also true you could say hot off the press boom boom hey marketers are you ready to discover the latest trends in podcast advertising the podcast pulse report by acas is out now packed with fresh audience insights into why podcasts are a must-have marketing strategy learn how podcast audiences are more engaged than ever why hosts are trusted voices for brands and how niche shows are delivering massive impact

Download the report today at podcastpulse2024.acast.com. There were others who were effectively putting the analysis that he kind of brought this on himself. And I understand how a person of Islamic faith could be deeply, deeply offended by it. I do understand that.

And I also understand the way the book is set up, that you're talking about content that's in a dream, in a magical realism novel. So it's not being put as an accurate version of history or anything like that. Anybody who reads the book can tell that from a mile off from the style of the book. Salman is not suggesting that this is actually what happened with the Prophet Muhammad or

But if you were a person of deep faith, I think you could be very offended. I think if someone had written in the same way about Jesus Christ, many Christians would have been deeply offended. But they wouldn't have called for his death. Yeah. I mean, look at the life of Brian, for God's sake. Yeah. And that's the difference, isn't it? You know, people expressing...

offence, which of course they're entitled to do because that is freedom of speech for his novel to be met by people contesting the content and saying that they found it offensive, but not for the death threat. And yet it was like people didn't follow that reasoning. They just went, well, he should have been more careful. Or there were people who were basically very protective and

of diversity of religion, but to the extent that they weren't being empathetic with the position that Salman was in. Do you remember all those debates? Oh, it was incredibly polarising. And there were some authors like John le Carre who came out against Salman. So the literary world was completely sort of, there was a schism for sure between

But, you know, as Salman said to me at the time, we must be allowed to poke fun at everything, including religion. Even though he says when he wrote the book, he didn't, it was never in his mind that people were going to be offended by it. He was writing this magic realism.

And he also said to, you know, to read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you. Well, you've done a lot of work to be offended, you know. Just close the book. So, and we were all agreeing with him. What's that famous quote about, I don't agree with what you say, but I defend your right to the death to say it or whatever? Whoever said that. And that's what freedom of speech is about, freedom to speak.

And the papers were, you know, a lot of the newspapers, it was like freedom of screech. They were screeching out a lot of the tabloids saying that someone didn't deserve to have police protection, that he brought it on himself. I mean, talk about kicking a man when he was down. And that all fuelled his desire to move to America where he could start again. And we all understood that even though we were terribly, terribly worried. And we were right to be worried in the end because when he was attacked...

There was absolutely no security. The guy had took something like, I think, 15 knives were in his bag and there was no checking. This is Salman Rushdie. I mean, you get checked going into the local supermarket, you get your bag checked, into the theatre. So we were right to be worried, you know. So let's go to the moment of the attack now. So it's the 12th of August, 2022.

Salmon is in upstate New York and I'm saying upstate because everybody's got that image of New York in their mind, you know, skyscraper, skyscraper, skyscraper. But once you get out of that part of New York State, you actually find countryside and little villages and some of them are impossibly cute. It's a bit like the American equivalent of hay, hay on wire where you've just been. Yes, yes, like going to a regional town somewhere in Australia. Bowerald.

good example and there's been a ideas festival there for a long period of time so people coming together to talk about books talk about ideas and it is there that Salman is appearing and he's

on stage and a 24 year old man rushes out of the crowd he's he's got Salmon effectively for 27 seconds before organisers of the festival and very brave people from the audience just rush and disarm him and subdue him and fortunately there were doctors in the crowd uh

who were then immediately on scene attending to Salman and it was very important he had a wound in his neck so if someone hadn't put their thumb to stop the blood spewing out... I don't know who that was. Salman told me. There was a retired fireman in the audience and he had very, very big hands.

And he rushed up and if it weren't for this fireman with his huge heavy hand, someone would be dead because he pressed it on that artery and kept it there the entire time until the helicopter came.

stayed there right up on the gurney until he got into the helicopter and that's what saved his life. Yeah, I mean, it's just... The footage, if you look at it on YouTube and you can, is extraordinary. And you can tell the shock, you know. It's one of those things where people are looking and they're not even sure whether for a second or two... It's a stunt to dramatise... Yes, because they were talking about...

the protection of writers. So it could have been, you know, a very bad taste stunt. Yeah, a very bad taste stunt. But people did, you know, overwhelmingly did the right thing and, you know, rushed and were very brave. Yeah, Salman says he saw the best and the worst of human nature that day.

because the audience was full of retirees. You know, there were older people. When they said, is there a doctor in the house, you know, 50 hands went up, whatever. I mean, doctors have letters as well. But they rushed towards danger. And I often think to myself, would I have rushed towards that knife? I mean, I adore Salman. I love him like a brother. But would I have rushed towards the danger? The heroism was extraordinary because the attacker was frenzied.

He was out of control. Yes. So he, yes, it's not like there would have been discernment if you were in the way of the knife, you were in the way of the knife. Salman in the book does talk about one of the organisers of the festival who's more than 70 years old, who's one of the first

to just rush across the stage and start grappling with a 24-year-old man. So, you know, intellectually, you'd have to know, I'm in my 70s, he's 24, he's going to be stronger than me, he's got a knife. And they...

You know, this man still runs to start grappling. I mean, extraordinary. And what someone told me also when we've talked about that night, that day, he says that as he realised the man was rushing towards him, all he could think in his head was, oh, it's you. You're here at last.

So somewhere in the back of his psyche, he'd always been half expecting this murderer to appear. And Saman also says what's interesting, he had no stab wounds in his back, so he didn't try and flee. He fronted his attacker. He stood his ground, which was also heroic.

And he finds that amazing himself, that he didn't try and escape. He was just fixated on this murderer and he didn't show cowardice, you know. And all of this is canvassed in the book. So this is what the book is, Knife. It is Salmon's Meditations After an Attempted Murder is the subtitle. And it tells us the story of that day afterwards.

and the recovery and Salmon's thoughts about it all. But it also tells us the story of his now wife, Eliza, and their love story. And that's the other reason I was really keen to do this book. I know we normally champion female authors, but this is a love story. This is a long love letter to a fabulous female, Eliza.

I mean, she's so warm and genuine and compassionate. She's a poet. She's a very talented writer. Her own novel has just come out to great reviews. And, you know, we all melted in the way that Salman melted. And also, she seems a very soft person, but through this ordeal, oh my gosh, she showed her mettle.

She had to stay completely strong for him and hold his hand through all the recovery. And she'd often leave the hospital room. He writes about this in the book and go and find some place where she could cry, but where he could never see her fear. So she, I mean, this is, my goodness, they talk about balls of steel. This is labia of steel that she got through this with such...

Such strength of character. So it's a beautiful book in that way, I think, don't you? The way he writes about her.

Oh, I do. I do think it's a beautiful book. I mean, they are effectively still newlyweds and, you know, they've married relatively quickly. So, you know, this is a still new relationship. And it does take you very much inside the moment that she gets the call and manages to organise being on a private plane to get to where he is. I mean, she spent a fortune. Yeah.

But she didn't matter. She just had to get there. And she thought when she was running up the steps of that private plane that she was, you know, racing to reach him before he died because that was the most likely outcome. Yes. So, you know, absolutely terrifying.

And, you know, on this podcast, the first book we started with, of course, was Wifedom. Wonderful book and a funder. And a funder. So we have talked about times that women's achievements are written out of history. And so it's really refreshing to see Salman Rushdie devote an entire chapter to Eliza to detail her achievements as a poet.

as a poet, as a novelist. He talks about her exceptional skills in photography, dancing, singing. Cooking. He's got this beautiful quote, as a person who can only do one thing. Like this is a man who is the most acclaimed novelist and most awarded novelist of this era and he's describing himself as a person who can only do one thing.

I was in awe of her multiple talents. It became clear to me that this was not just a relationship of equals, rather it was one in which I was by some distance the less equal party. How many men would say that? Yeah. I mean, most blokes have got elephantises of the ego. I think a lot of them keep fit by doing step aerobics off their own egos. And?

And so the love story is a huge theme of the book. But he does also go into detail, some of it a bit humorously done, but it's pretty

grim about what has happened to him physically and what his injuries are like. I mean, the bit that resonated with me is he's referring to one of his eyes hanging down his face like a soft boiled egg and he ultimately lost vision in that eye. He describes being on the ventilator. It was like having an armadillo's tail shoved down his throat and

He ends up naming the various doctors who come and go, Dr. Eye, Dr. Hand, Dr. Stabbings, Nurse Bladder, as he uses a lot of dark humour to take us through all of the medical procedures that he's needed to have. And he talks about all of this in the weeks after. He also talks about the humiliations that come along with it. I was really struck by this quote. He says...

In the next months, these are the months of treatment, there would be many bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist. You lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. Mm-hmm.

And I think there'll be a lot of women reading this. With whom that resonates totally. Yes. Whether it's the experience of childbirth or whether it's... Pat smears. Yeah, exactly. Many other experiences, health experiences where you have to surrender to the humiliations because it just is. It's so well observed. Isn't it just? Yes, I think women readers will definitely relate to that.

And that section of the book is so visceral. I mean, because he's a brilliant writer and this time he's not writing about magic realism, he's writing about reality. Yeah, real realism, real gory realism. Oh, it packs such a punch. I mean, I cried many times through this book, many times, because of the way he brilliantly evokes not just the pain of the medical procedures but the attack.

and the psychological trauma afterwards. I mean, he just makes it so tangible. And it's not a big book. It's a slim volume for Salman. It's very slim. And it's a very easy read, I felt. He whizzed me through it. And, of course, writers, we write because it's cheaper than therapy. So it was obviously very cathartic for him to set it down on paper, but it also means he could take control of the narrative.

That's a wonderful gift that writers have, that when something terrible happens to us, we can spin it into gold in a way. We can use it so it becomes something useful, not something destructive. And it also just helps us

formulate it and understand it, it becomes another entity. And I think that's what he was definitely doing in this book. It wasn't just to exercise his own angst, but it was also to take back control. And the other thing I love about Knife, the cover's fabulous. The cover is fabulous. And the title is so significant because it's

One of my favorite bits in the book is where he talks. I'm going to quote this. He says, it's on page 85. Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife.

If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine. Mm-hmm.

For all of your residential and commercial heating needs this year, call the 5 Star Heating Experts at Crop Metcalf. 1-800-GO-CROP or visit cropmetcalf.com. Crop Metcalf is the one with 5 stars. Crop Metcalf, home of the 5 Star Technician.

Every listener feels like their favorite podcast is speaking just to them. If you're a marketer, your brand's message can do the same. With podcasts ranking number one against all other media for good use of time, good for learning, and mentally engaging, podcast ads are proven to be one of the most effective marketing channels. Have your brand heard everywhere with ACAST.

Our podcasts are available on all apps and the only way to reach their listeners is through ACAST. Visit go.acast.com slash ads to get started today. So wonderfully put. And the book does exactly that. It does. Doesn't it? Exactly that.

But being a book podcast, we've got to, you know, find some little things, criticisms to talk about. If I was going to have a criticism of the book, he does have a section where he imagines a conversation with the man who attacked him. Now, this conversation never happened. Of course, it wouldn't.

And the man who attacked him, he never names, which I think is very much the right decision, and is in jail awaiting trial, which will happen later on this year. But he imagines the conversation with him. And I can understand why he went for that device. And I think he's trying to...

...bring reason or maybe not bring reason but even seek to understand something that is beyond understanding because the statements of the young man who had attacked him literally are, he's never read satanic verses...

He'd watched the Ayatollah Khomeini on YouTube and was persuaded by things the Ayatollah was saying. He'd watched something of Salman on YouTube and decided that he was disingenuous. I mean, so banal. Yes, you know, which Salman...

rightly says this is not exactly the motivation for a passionate act, is it? People don't wander around the world saying my motivation for murder is disingenuousness. I mean, very, very odd. And I can see why he's wrestling with that.

but it doesn't land, I don't think. What did you think of that section? Look, I thought it was fascinating to see his psychological steps on how he was dealing with the pain and the bewilderment of the attack, how he was processing it by talking to this imaginary character. And I did talk to him about that afterwards and I was saying to him that with the fatwa and the attack, I was like, how does he keep his optimism and his belief in people alive?

And, you know, I was saying, for me, I'd have enough chips on my shoulder to kind of open a casino or whatever. And he said he just wanted to get past it. He said the thing about bitterness and anger and vengefulness is that you're stuck in it. You know, the only way of being free, he said, is to let that stuff go. He said otherwise I'd still be the prisoner of it. And I think him having that imaginary conversation with the prisoner liberated him.

In some ways. I mean, he does make some hugely important observations about how the information age we live in has been the sort of stew in which this young man has...

Marinated. Marinated is a good word. Yeah, marinated to become the attacker that he was. He talks about, he refers to the attacker always just with the letter capital A. He says, A is wholly a product of the new technologies of our information age for which disinformation age might be a more accurate name. The group think manufacturing giants, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter,

And violent video games were his teachers. And so, you know, in this, yes, it's very, very personal, the inner dialogue, the bodily humiliations. But he's also trying to extrapolate from his experience out into the world. And I really appreciated that.

And I also appreciated, given all of this, the fatwa, the satanic verses, the

freedom of speech, people believing that they're acting in the name of religion. He deals with that head on too and says he is a famous atheist and he says he remains after this an atheist. He doesn't claim to have found religion or some other change as a result of this traumatic event. He says my godlessness remains intact.

This isn't going to change in this second chance life. I always say about him, he's a self-made man who doesn't worship his creator. LAUGHTER

Yeah, but it's interesting what you... That's a very clever line. I love that. Thank you. Well, when we get together, we do have the Wimbledon of wit. We lob banter back and forth because he's so playful with language. He's so much fun to talk to. But I think what you were saying about the internet is interesting, isn't it? Because it's been brought out the best and the worst in people because it has enabled fantastic change like the Me Too movement. Yes. That was purely...

you know, charged and energised through the internet, through Twitter and Instagram. And that has made the world a better place for women. And yet it's also fuelled extremism and fundamentalism and made the world more terrifying. So...

You know, talk about Pandora's box. Yeah, absolutely. So whilst his godlessness remains intact, I share that with him. I'm also an atheist. He does intriguingly talk very early in the book about having a premonition two nights before the stabbing of being attacked by a gladiator with a spear in a Roman amphitheater.

And he makes clear that he doesn't believe in premonitions or anything like that. Yes. So that is a bit kind of do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Spooky, as David would say. That's right. So there's a little X-Files element for people who want that. But I think you and I are furiously agreeing this is a great read. Would recommend it. You will fly through it. It will take you along the journey with him, with Eliza,

And it's just, you know, emotional, epic in the sense that this is such an important event for literature in our times that understanding it from the inside, from him, is just so important. And then, of course, you've got to love a book where Virginia Woolf gets mentioned. Here we are in the Virginia Woolf building.

We are in the Virginia Woolf building. And Rushdie does say, coming from a childhood in India where privacy is a luxury of the rich, he does refer to Virginia Woolf and he says, to have a room of one's own, one must have money.

I don't think Virginia Woolf ever went to India, but her dictum stands, even there, even for men. And he contrasts that, the luxury of privacy, with what we're doing in the greedy West, where...

And I quote, the thing most hungered for is followers and likes, privacy having become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd. So a book that muses on Virginia's statement, a room of one's own has to get a tick on a podcast of one's own. I love that segue. And I would also say it's what I love about the book too, it's a defence of art.

You know, the old cliche that the pen is mightier than the sword. And it's really important for us to remember that at a time when our freedoms are being challenged. And I would also say to any readers who haven't discovered Salman yet...

He's given us a treasure trove of literary gems and golden nuggets, but I think my favourite quote, the most important quote to end on today would be, he once wrote that the enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism. And I'm happy to say that when Salman was over last time,

We put Kylie on the CD and we danced till dawn. So that is the biggest raspberry you could blow against Fundamentalists. Dance madly. I love that, Cathy. Thanks for joining me. It's been fun to catch up as always and talk books. To our listeners, please share your thoughts. You can head to a podcast of one's own Instagram and leave your comments and reviews there. And I'll be back next month with a new book to discuss. Thank you. Thank you.

A podcast of one's own is created by the Global Institute for Women's Leadership at the Australian National University, Canberra, with support from our sister institute at King's College, London. Earnings from the podcast go back into funding for the institute, which was founded by our host, Julia Gillard, and brings together rigorous research, practice and advocacy as a powerful force to advance gender equality and promote fair and equal access to leadership.

Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepard, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecott, with editing by Liz Kean from Headline Productions and recording support by Nick Hilton. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu.edu.au.

To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl.anu.edu.au and sign up to our updates or follow us on social media at Jewel ANU. You can also find a podcast of one's own on Instagram.

The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time. Music

It's official podcast advertising is transcending audio. Marketers can now tap into audiences across all of our creators channels from social media to video live events and beyond.

And ACAST's new report proves it works, with 84% of podcast listeners having taken action after seeing brands promoted in a podcast-first omnichannel campaign. Get these insights and more by downloading the full report at podcastpulse2024.acast.com.