Think again

A: I always want books to be subversive. I want books to shake things up. But really, once Ive worked out the story that Im trying to tell, Im not thinking outside that. I like to write books that make people think afresh, if possible. Whether thats the past or the present, it doesnt matter. Ive often written books that show how history and peoples private lives collided and affected each other, whether its Andalusian Spain in The Moors Last Sigh or the birth of a religion in The Satanic Verses or the partition of India in Midnights Children. It seems to do with my training; my understanding of the world is to look at how the public and the private intersect and collide. Can we shape the times in which we live or are we at their mercy? Those are the questions that have been behind almost everything Ive written.

A: Theres a kind of tragedy in it. These are usually just bursts, followed by stagnation or regression. The Mughal emperors, the first five of them were pretty tolerant, particularly the middle three: Akbar, and his son, Jahangir, and his son, Shah Jahan. All of them had very long reigns, almost 150 years between them. In that time, it was a period of great openness and tolerance and artistic flowering, but after that, you kind of get Darth Vader. You get Aurangzeb, a fanatic, a temple-smasher very repressive. Thats who we are, I guess; maybe we recoil from too much progress.

A: Maybe its making a slight comeback. In the 60s and 70s, religion was in extreme retreat. It really felt as if that subject was over. The idea that we would have to reckon with religion as a major force in public life would have seemed absurd, if you had suggested it to me when I was in my 20s. For someone of my generation, whats been shocking is the way that religion has rushed back and returned to public life. And its only happened since the 1980s. In the Eastern hemisphere, its the rise of radical Islam and here it has to do with the Christian right.

If theres a slight correction [now], its overdue. But no matter how brilliant [atheist polemicist] Christopher Hitchens is, or Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennett is, its not books that are going to do it. Its going to be another change in public consciousness. I have seen the pendulum swing one way, I can certainly conceive of it swinging the other way. On the whole, that would be a good thing. Where I have a slightly different position to Hitchens and Dawkins is that I have no problem with religion, as long as its private. If people find it consoling or uplifting or nourishing not my business. Why should I dictate to people what they should enjoy? I may think theyre dumb, but its not my business. Where it becomes my business is when it comes into the public arena and is a social and political force that seeks to impose certain norms on society. Then, I think it becomes a malicious force.

A: Its a line with irony in it, because [in the book] its talking about people who were to become the next imperialists of India. Its a joke about the future.

A: I think it can be won, and the reason it can be won is that that kind of activity has a very limited constituency in the Muslim world. Most people in the Muslim world hate it, too. After all, most of the people being killed in Iraq are not Americans, its Muslims, by other Muslims. I think the thing that will end it is the growing revulsion for that kind of activity. You can see a parallel with what happened with the IRA. The reason the IRA were forced to the conference table and to give up their weapons was that their own constituency, the Catholics in northern Ireland, got sick of it and got sick of living in the world [the IRA] helped to create.

A: Theres no question that if you talk to publishers, you talk to booksellers, this is a non-fictional moment; people are buying a lot more non-fictional material than fictional. I myself think its a kind of fad. Now that weve had this revelation that a lot of things that have been posing as non-fiction turn out to be highly invented, I think that discredits the memoir form. And I think thats a sad thing, because that whole area of creative non-fiction is a very rich area.

Also, with this book, its an age where independent verification is not available. A stranger comes and he says hes so and so well, maybe he is and maybe he isnt, but youve got no way of knowing; you can only judge his character and his story. And thats exactly parallel to the act of writing a novel: youve got to decide whether you buy into it.

A: Im always looking for things I havent done. Somebody I was talking to yesterday said that [The Enchantress of Florence] is not like my other books. And I said, "Yeah, but thats what they always say." When I write The Ground Beneath Her Feet, they say, "What, rock n roll music?" When I write Fury, they say, "What, New York City now?" The truth is, I dont like to repeat myself. I always like to go somewhere I havent been, and thats true not only in terms of subject matter, but technically, too.

I have a feeling that theres a book I havent written thats a large-scale social novel about the England in which Ive spent so much time. My instinct is that it would not at all be magic-realist. It feels to me like it would be an old-fashioned, English realist novel. Theres a thing over there [in England], a piece of my experience that Ive never explored.

A: No, not really. The years of the fatwa, maybe, because it forced me to pay attention to a subject that is, as weve been saying, now everyones subject. But for the rest, no. I hate having my private life being public. Most of my private life has been private; Ive had a number of close personal relationships and nobodys known a damn thing about them. But I had this one marriage which for all sorts of reasons that we dont have to go into became very public and, I discovered, I dont like it.

One of the things that has been a relief in the last year or so since my marriage broke up is that Ive actually been able to take my private life back into private. Even though theres been some sort of idiot media speculation about this or that liaison, the truth is, Ive managed to do it Ive managed to get what should be out of the public eye out of the public eye. I like that; I much prefer it. But its difficult for my women friends. Any time I show up anywhere wheres theres a camera, if theres a woman with me, its like Boom! [Claps.] I have to apologize to my friends: "The moment you go anywhere with me, suddenly [according to the tabloids], were having sex."