Self-pitying, pretentious and ungrateful - so why has Rushdie been knighted? | the Daily Mail
This is an article by Ruth Dudley-Edwards, criticising the decision to give a knighthood to the infamous Salman Rushdie. The contention is a familiar one - that his books, including Midnight's Children, which won him the 1981 Booker prize - aren't much good, and that he basked in the admiration of literary London after writing a gratuitously offensive book which led to him costing the taxpayer a huge amount of money for protection, and then went off to New York and started slagging off the UK, including that same literary community:
In his official citation, Rushdie gets his gong for "services to literature". To which the only sensible response is, "what services and what literature?".
Like many who have attempted to read his work, I have never yet managed to make it to the end of one of Rushdie's books. I've tried, I honestly have.
When he won the Booker Prize in 1981 with Midnight's Children, I conscientiously attempted to read it three or four times, but struggle as I might, I could never get past page 50: there was something about its portentous tone and an absence of simple humanity that irritated me profoundly.
So too did the way he banged on relentlessly in public about his sufferings as a post-colonial expatriate.
It seemed to me that he didn't like India, his birthplace, and he certainly didn't like the United Kingdom, his host country.
But he was, of course, a wow with the masochistic liberal intelligentsia who loved his savaging of British values as insufficiently cosmopolitan.
Yet, as a taxpayer, I never grudged a penny of the £10 million or so spent on protecting Rushdie for a decade after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his murder because he considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous towards Mohammed.
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