You Can't Make This Up

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One of the best moments in Step Across This Line , Salman Rushdie's provocatively named book of essays (Jonathan Cape; 454 pages), comes when the author is invited on stage at a U2 concert in 1993 by his friend Bono. At the time, Rushdie was in hiding from Muslim assassins after Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his allegedly blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses . Bono, ever the good guy, meant the invitation as a gesture of support. To Rushdie, the moment was a revelation. He suddenly felt "what it's like to have 80,000 fans cheering you on. The audience at the average book reading is a little smaller. Girls tend not to climb on to their boyfriends' shoulders during them, and stage-diving is discouraged."

Easy for him to say. If there ever were an author who knows what it's like to have multitudes cheering you on — or howling for your head — it's Rushdie. Born in India to a Muslim family, educated in Britain and now living in New York, he's the closest thing to a literary rock star since Byron. Much of the civilized world rose to his defense when the fatwa was imposed in 1989, though, as he notes here, a shocking number of people blamed him for provoking his would-be killers. When the death sentence was lifted after nine years, he found himself courted by statesmen, entertainers and smart hostesses. Readers who didn't know from Indian magical realism started buying his energetic novels. Did you catch his movie cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary ?

The hard-partying novelist turns out to be a thoughtful and feisty essayist, if a bit of a name-dropper. There's too much "my friend Alan Yentob" and "I recently asked Vaclav Havel" in these articles, letters and speeches. And some shouldn't be here at all — including, truth be told, a moldy piece on independent India's 50th anniversary that I edited for this magazine. But he's brilliant on the real message of The Wizard of Oz , which is that Dorothy's "no place like home" ender is all wrong. After a trip like that, Rushdie insists, you can't go home again: stepping across the line into Oz transformed her into a seeker of the wider world, as all good voyages do. "The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross." And he is perceptive on the perils of giving up freedoms in a time of crisis. Prescient too: 21 months before the Sept. 11 attacks, he warned in a newspaper column, "The defining struggle of the new age [will] be between terrorism and security."

Even at his worst, Rushdie is engaging: talking music with Bono (who wanted to discuss politics), hanging out with Van Morrison (who disliked his lousy dancing), trying to get his novel Midnight's Children made for TV (in vain, though a London stage version opens Jan. 18). Or sitting in a heavily guarded New York hotel as poet Allen Ginsberg shows him breathing exercises to relieve fatwa-induced stress. "How extraordinary it was," says Rushdie, "for an Indian by birth to be taught Buddhism by an American poet sitting cross-legged in a room full of men armed to the gills. There's nothing like life; you can't make this stuff up." With a life like that — speaking up, stepping across lines — a little vanity is forgivable.