‘The Eleventh Hour’ book review: Are words failing Salman Rushdie?

For an author as voluble as Rushdie, who has always put much stock in the power of language, the conclusion feels dire, reeking of finality and despair that he has never let stand in his way. In fact, the weight of the sentence stands in stark contrast to the rousing faith the author had put in the redeeming qualities of words in his last book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published in 2024. “Language, too, was a knife," as he wrote. “It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife."

In 2022, Rushdie survived a life-threatening attack at an event near New York, carried out by an assailant armed with a knife that left his internal organs, arms and one eye severely damaged. For a while, Rushdie teetered on the threshold of life and death, recovering in hospitals and rehabs. The entire incident felt like the culmination of the prophecy made by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, when he imposed a fatwa, or death sentence, on the writer in 1989 for alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses. But eventually Rushdie recovered and, in his indefatigable style, bounced back not only with a memoir but also a newfound faith in life and love after his marriage to the writer and poet, Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

The Eleventh Hour is a less optimistic book, in contrast. Its dark core is subtle but unmissable. As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are woven around a funereal theme, into an act of tying up all the loose ends before the curtain comes down. In the opening tale, two lifelong friends, Senior and Junior, live next door to each other in Chennai until death does them apart in their 80s. The sardonic, even cantankerous tone, is vintage Rushdie and it is one of the two stories in the collection where the reader is able to glimpse the writer’s old flair. It is also an account of a bittersweet friendship between ordinary old men, not geniuses or artists lauded by the world, which gives it a more humane flavour from the other stories.

For the most part, though, the collection feels clunky, burdened with recycled tropes and themes that the reader, especially those who have followed Rushdie’s work over the years, have become all too familiar with. In The Musician of Kahani, set in the writer’s childhood home city of Bombay (now Mumbai), natural and supernatural forces collude to bring about a satisfactory revenge for the protagonist, Chandni Contractor, who is a prodigy, adept at both the piano and sitar. Such is her mastery over these instruments, especially the sitar, that, like the boy genius Ormus Cama in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, she is able to wield magical influence over the lives of others by simply air-playing her beloved instruments.

In Oklahoma, a younger writer in thrall to the influence of an older, and reluctant, mentor meets his metafictional Nemesis through a peculiar turn of events that have the bite of a parable by Kafka. In the end, though, it is too disjointed and mannered to affect the reader more than superficially. The anti-climactic denouement is made worse by the jumble of sentiments with which the narrator rounds up his account.

Only in Late, the finest story in the collection, does the barrier between Rushdie’s quick wit and emotional vulnerability finally melt away. The writer drops his usual wisecracking act and pulls a strikingly different rabbit out of his hat of tricks in this ghostly tale of reckonings.

S.M. Arthur, a writer and life fellow of an Oxbridge college, wakes up one morning to find himself dead. He begins to haunt the portals of his home, wading through a thick greenish fog, and judging his peers for their indifference to his absence. A composite of E.M. Foster and Alan Turing—like both men, he was homosexual at a time when it was forbidden—Arthur has published one hugely popular anti-colonial novel set in India as well as worked on breaking the Enigma Code during World War II.

His posthumous legacy may have been a bit muted but it does not go unacknowledged. Yet, the heaviness of his past keeps him tethered to the world of the living instead of allowing him to finally move on to a higher realm and find peace.

He finds an unlikely confidante in a young Indian student called Rosa, who is the only living person able to see him, and decides to bequeath the terrible darkness of his living years to her. Instead of the signature Rushdie voice, with its “chutney-fied" vocabulary and puns, the reader is pleasantly surprised to encounter a wry English humour and pathos that come from Arthur’s awareness of a life misspent.

If the stories in The Eleventh Hour are covered in a miasma of sorrow and apprehension about life after death, Rushdie’s indomitable sense of humour remains the silver lining. Even as S.M. Arthur is grappling with his demise, he cannot help feeling hurt by the tepid reaction of his colleagues to his passing. “It appeared that death was a more sentimental, narcissistic condition than life," Rushdie writes, “It wanted—needed—attention." It is tempting to read this remark as an archly self-critical dig at the vanity of human wishes, especially of gigantic artistic egos, which not only balloon and grow out of proportion through a lifetime of success but also continue to haunt others in the afterlife.

In this sense, all the stories in The Eleventh Hour are Rushdie’s attempts to make sense of endings—literal and metaphorical. What is it that an artist is left with at the end of a long, prolific and eventful life? Is salvation to be found in the gift of language or does it lie hidden in feelings which remain unspoken? Who, at the end of it all, is in control? The one who makes the work or the one who gives meaning to what is made?

Having enjoyed dazzling highs of success, Rushdie’s stars have been fading over his last few books, though he seems reluctant to accept the bitter truth that he articulates at the end of The Eleventh Hour. That words do fail even the finest masters of language, especially ones who have spent their lives weaving magic with them. In such moments of extinction, it is wiser to keep silent instead of offering the reader paltry throwbacks to a glorious career that has already passed.