Salman Rushdie’s Latest Blasphemy

“Fictions could be as powerful as histories.” In his new novel Victory City, Salman Rushdie comes as near as he has ever come to issuing a manifesto. His champions see him as a free speech martyr, his detractors as Satan reincarnated, but really, he’s a historian in novelist’s clothing. All his major novels, especially his recherché Indian ones, work at the level of national allegory. As he recently wrote in The Guardian: “For all its surrealist elements, Midnight’s Children is a history novel.” So, too, the new one, his 15th — though at the outset, it doesn’t feel like one.