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Salman Rushdie has been giving a lot of interviews recently to promote his new memoir, Knife – his “meditations” on being stabbed multiple times in August 2022 while giving a lecture in upstate New York. The attack left him hospitalised for six weeks without sight in his right eye. Chances are that you may have read one, so the question was: could Alan Yentob bring anything new to the party in Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly?
In short, yes. This felt like the last word on the life-changing incident.
Some of the documentary consisted of Rushdie simply reading from his book, while Yentob lobbed in questions without interrupting Rushdie’s flow. How it felt to be dying (“strangely unemotional”) and what he thought of his attacker (“He took very little trouble to educate himself about the man he wanted to kill”).
Rushdie recalled a dream two nights prior to his fateful lecture at Chautauqua Institute – a nightmare in which he was attacked by a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre. This apparent premonition was almost enough to make him want to cancel the lecture. “I did wonder if someone was going to jump out of an audience one day,” he said.
Footage of the attack recorded the horrifying chaos and the heroism of those who subdued his assailant – including the moderator Henry Reese, also a contributor here, who ran across the stage and rugby-tackled the 24-year-old man Rushdie refers to only as “A” (as in “attacker” or “adversary”, to deny him fame). And then there was a man Rushdie simply referred to as “The Thumb” – because he kept his unusually large thumb across the gash in Rushdie’s neck.
The author had similarly reductive names for the medics who treated him, including “Dr Pain”, a physician who put him on a ventilator (“like having an armadillo’s tail shoved down your throat”) and inserted a catheter into his penis (“I wouldn’t recommend it”).
If he was able to speak with a degree of wry detachment about this ordeal, he was more emotional about the joy of returning home – to the Manhattan brownstone shared with his fifth wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Griffiths was also interviewed, often close to tears as she recalled her initial shock, as she shared more practical considerations, such as ridding rooms of mirrors so that her husband didn’t see the full extent of his disfigurement. While Rushdie himself may have processed his trauma through writing his book, Griffith, you felt, was still reverberating with the shock of this horrendous incident.
Griffiths and Rushdie did movingly describe a cathartic visit to the scene of the crime (“I gasped,” said Griffiths about stepping onto the stage at Chautauqua), while Rushdie spoke about their relationship in the aftermath of the attack. They had lost their innocence, he said, but discovered a “wounded happiness”.
Griffiths’s contribution wasn’t the only aspect of Yentob’s film to differentiate it from other recent Rushdie interviews. He also introduced an unexpected and slightly odd sequence in which Rushdie confronted a CGI version of his attacker and quizzed him about his motivations. This computerised “A” remained sullen and uncommunicative, but it did allow Rushdie to push his theory that “A” had been radicalised while visiting his estranged father in Lebanon.
And if he didn’t get any more out of the CGI figure than the police did from the real one, at least it gave Rushdie some agency, as indeed did his memoir. As he put it, in a discussion about how odd it was that knives kept cropping up in his works: “Language is a knife… a way of cutting things open to find the truth. This book is my way of fighting back.”
Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly is streaming on BBC iPlayer.
