Joseph Anton – a Frankensteinian stitch-up of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov that Rushdie came up with as a ‘safe name’ to be used by his ‘protectors’ during his ‘hiding years’ (they just called him ‘Joe’) – is more than just A Portrait of the Artist Under A Death Sentence.

But how good was Rushdie’s version going to be – not only as an author-ised text but also just as a book?

The character of Salman Rushdie and the very plot line of a man who has to go into hiding after there’s an “extraterritorial murder order” – which the reviewer strangely misread as an “extraterrestrial murder order” – were the stuff of a Philip K Dick novel in which large parts of the book were already known in the public domain before the book was even written. This, of course, was never going to be possible. Instead of trying to conjure up a supra-narrative around what was being said about the book and what Rushdie himself was saying, the reviewer decided to heed Rushdie’s own words from the book: “When friends asked me what they could do to help, he pleaded, ‘Defend the text.’” So he set out to judge the text that was Joseph Anton: A Memoir, and not go into the non-existent Salman-namas that fluttered outside as ‘current affairs’. Even before he lovingly touched the purple cover with its title etched on the hardcover, the buzz around Joseph Anton had been louder than words.

But then, there was already a heavy downpour of information about the book and the author’s views in the media. Reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir – 636 pages long and without any index to facilitate matters – and then batting out a coherent, moderately informed review in 72 hours was not going to be easy for the reviewer.

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