So there’s more going on than meets the eye. It transpires, in one of Rushdie’s familiar games-within-games, that all these characters are themselves fictions of an author called Sam DuChamp, or Brother, another character with family disorders and deracinated confusions. But its primary target, as satire, is the sort of simplistic narrative – the TV shows to which Quichotte is addicted, for instance – through which the media filters the world, but which is inadequate to global multiculture. The novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, attacks what American (and English, and Indian) politics has become, and speaks compellingly of violence towards minorities, while also mocking both Right and Left-wing amnesia: “We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves”. “He was a brown man in America longing for a brown woman, but he did not see his story in racial terms.” Longing, too, for the son he never had, he brings into existence a make-believe one, his own Sancho.
Ismail Smile, a half-cracked commercial traveller who has suffered a stroke, watches too much television, becomes besotted with the celebrity Salma R (one letter away from “Salman”) and decides – having renamed himself Quichotte – that his destiny is to meet and fall in love with her. His new novel is satire, too, like its archetype Don Quixote. “It’s more important to have satire in these times,” he said in an interview last year, about his 2017 novel, The Golden House. Overtaken by our bonkers politics, it has been made irrelevant by larger-than-life buffoons who, having arrived at the centres of power, engineer an aura of freewheeling absurdity which surpasses any attempt – in any medium – to lampoon them. It’s commonplace to say that satire is out of date.
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