The Eleventh Hour

Celebrated author Salman Rushdie was famously and brutally stabbed in 2022, leaving him with severe internal injuries and a permanent loss of vision in one eye. The Eleventh Hour is Rushdie’s first work of fiction since the attack; and while it’s unlike his 2024 memoir Knife - an explicit response to that traumatic experience - his new book feels shadowed by an awareness of mortality. It contains other autobiographical elements: a retrospective of Rushdie’s arrivals and departures from three different countries – India, England and America – as he strove to find a sense of identity and belonging. As well, threading its way through The Eleventh Hour is the desire for revenge. Perhaps it’s not too fanciful to suggest that this is Rushdie’s more oblique response to the religious fanaticism that drove the 1989 fatwa, as well as the numerous and ominous threats to which he has since been subjected.

The Eleventh Hour is an unusual collection of three novellas bookended by two short stories. The stories can be read independently, or as Rushdie himself describes it, as a quintet that can be read as a single work in which the five stories “speak to” one another. The opening story ‘In the South,’ set in Chennai, features an unhappy wife who avenges her husband, Senior, by plaguing him with swarms of relatives. Counterpointing her cruelty is the enduring friendship between Senior and Junior, two old men in the “eleventh hour” of their lives. The revenge motif in the novella that follows, ‘The Musician of Kahani,’ is also set in India; it blends Rushdie’s trademark savage satire and magic realism to show how a gifted young musician uses her magical power to destroy the religious frauds who preyed on her father and caused the loss of her child.

The third story ‘Last’, is set in Kings College in Cambridge, from where Rushdie graduated in 1968 with a Bachelors’ degree in History. It’s also the place where as a colonised Indian, he developed his loathing of British colonisation. His iconoclastic attitude to British tradition and authority is clear in the story’s Prologue: “The college was almost six hundred years old. It had been founded by a king who was mad for most of his life.” The story ‘Last’ centres on the ghost of a Cambridge don who, with the help of a lonely Indian student, enacts revenge upon the tormentor of his lifetime. It’s an exhilarating, unexpected story which uses a blend of wry humour and anger to critique the promise of eternal life offered by all forms of religion.

The final novella, and penultimate story in the collection, is set in America, where Rushdie currently resides. A clever story-within a story, the ageing narrator, who is also a writer, is confronted with the question of how to leave our earthly existence: “How must a man face the past days of his life? Serenely, or with rage?’ He might either accept death with equanimity or use his skill as a writer to denounce tyranny and the destruction of freedom of speech. In a thinly veiled allegory about the current American president, the writer chooses rage against a would-be king. Political writing is thus presented as an act of revenge against a despot; while the dangerously authoritarian individual will eventually die, the writer’s words will live on as an expression of moral conviction and a warning for the future.

‘The Old Man in the Piazza,’ The final story in the collection reinforces the need for freedom of speech in the form of a parable or fable. Set in an unspecified country, the story’s narrator ultimately rejects what he calls the certainties of “bar-room moralists” in favour of being “aficionados of ambiguity and devotees of doubt.”

The Eleventh Hour is a wild ride of a collection that uses realism, magic realism, satire and fable to raise crucial questions about ageing, death, freedom of speech and the desire for revenge and freedom of speech. It also explores the role of the writer and intellectual in politically turbulent times. A highly entertaining and provocative read.

The Eleventh Hour will be released in November. You can pre-order a copy at the Lane Bookshop.