“I don’t really want to go back to fact,” Salman Rushdie said in a Paris Review interview in 2005. “I want to do less and less of it.” At the time he had published more than 150 essays and reviews in a pair of superb collections, Imaginary Homelands (1991) and Step Across This Line (2002), as well as documentary scripts, a British Film Institute booklet on The Wizard of Oz and an eye-witness account of the Contra War, The Jaguar Smile (1987). Now, he explained, he wanted to devote himself to “the business of imaginative writing”. He had just completed his tenth novel, Shalimar the Clown, and over the subsequent decade and a half, he produced a fairy tale, a fantasia about Renaissance Italy and the Moghul empire, and topical reworkings of the Arabian Nights, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Don Quixote.
But “fact” never went away. Within a few years of the Paris Review interview, he delivered a commencement address at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and wrote essays on, among other things, Beckett’s novels and on the subject of sloth in literature, as well as an introduction to a collection of Paris Review interviews. Then, in 2012, he published an enormous – third-person – memoir, Joseph Anton, and though he felt “a deep hunger for fiction” after finishing it, the context for that remark was a lecture on what he calls “the wonder tale”, one of a series that he delivered in his role as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Today he resembles nothing so much as a celebrity-author version of the ageing Michael Corleone, lamenting, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” – and Languages of Truth bears the same relationship to Rushdie’s earlier volumes as The Godfather Part III does to the films that preceded it.
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