Famous last words

Death has been called the most overused trope in fiction, and yet it seems a logical theme to visit after one has almost been murdered.

Salman Rushdie’s new collection, The Eleventh Hour, is his first book after his recent memoir Knife. Rushdie came close to dying in a 2022 stabbing attack in New York State, which left him without sight in his right eye and the loss of the use of one hand. The title of the book points to that moment when, at the penultimate time, we are faced with our own demise.

The quintet of stories contains two shorter pieces and three novelettes. The latter is an awkward way of naming the longer pieces, but describes well the worlds created within the stories.

Rushdie’s prose is masterful, both in the descriptions of settings and even more so in the drawing of his characters. The theme of death weaves through each story, but in diverse and inventive ways. The five stories take place in the three countries where Rushdie has lived — India, England, and the U.S. These tales are not to be rushed — a reader needs time to fully enjoy them, or perhaps to experience them.

In the South tells the story of two old men whose friendship is akin to the long relationship of a bickering married couple. There is a deep longing and eventual sadness in the tale, which ends with a well-known natural disaster. A closing line, “Death and life were just adjacent verandas,” echoes that feeling we have when grieving a loss.

The Musician of Kahani visits familiar Rushdie territory, where children gifted with special powers are born at midnight (as in the author’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Midnight’s Children). It is here that magical realism first emerges in the narratives. A child is born and soon discovered to be a musical prodigy, but as her skills grow, the gift transcends into something much more powerful — an ability to influence, and even harm, people with her music. Twin themes of redemption and revenge play out here and in the other stories. Again, these are logical reflections from a writer who has been haunted with violent threats most of his life — in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination.

Late, the best piece in the collection, is set in a university that feels like Oxford, full of dusty hallways and hidden-away professor’s offices of dark wood and stacks of hardcovers. Rushdie may be criticized for using the trope of a ghost story, where honorary fellow S.M. Arthur wakes up dead, and then wanders the college considering what has happened to him. In the foggy mist that stands in for a state of limbo, a young student recognizes the ghost and helps him gain revenge on the provost who has caused S.M. so much pain. It is a common ghostly tale, and yet the uncovering of hidden knowledge brings the story to a moving close, reflecting on the sadness of a death with unresolved conflict, and the deeper truth that was squelched.

The fourth story, Oklahoma, reveals yet another theme — one of truth versus corruption. In a story within many other stories, the Kafkaesque tale presents a king who has put criminal gangs in charge of the police force. “There were crooked lawyers, crooked judges, crooked legal clerks, all there to make sure the laws of the land would crumble and fail beneath the stamping foot of the king who had placed himself above the law,” Rushdie writes. He describes the corrupt state of the kingdom, led by a ruler who has changed the meaning of words.

The author’s purpose is revealed in this pair of quotes: “These days being confused about truth and untruth have become the human condition,” and “There’s forgiveness, which is a transaction between human beings. There’s absolution which is a transaction between a man and his god. And then there is revenge.”

The final story, The Old Man in the Piazza, is the most parable-like of the five. Here, free speech is described as an old man observing and then judging the arguments of people gathered in a town square by a fountain. Language is pictured as a character, a woman sitting quietly on a simple stool in the corner until she can’t take the degradation anymore.

Rushdie has poured a lifetime into these stories. A man whose life has been shadowed by the spectre of death for so many years has a unique perspective on what it means to be in one’s 11th hour. One of the world’s finest living writers makes observances about the human condition that need to be considered.

The book may get you thinking about your own life — and that’s reason enough to read it.

Winnipeg writer Craig Terlson just re-released his award-nominated novel, Fall in One Day, where, yes, one of the themes is death.