Month: July 2026

Posted on

It’s a Shame How Things Sometimes Turn Out

Yesterday, a young man called Hadi Matar was convicted of federal terrorism charges in the United States. He refused to testify in his own defence. The conviction, in a sense, matters little in real terms. His life is effectively over, since he was already serving 25 years for attempted murder in relation to the same action which caused this additional conviction, for which a life sentence is expected.

What did Matar do to attract two heavy sentences? He got up on stage at an amphitheatre where the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was speaking and attempted to stab him to death, back in 2022. The frenzied assault left Rushdie blind in one eye and very close to death for some time. Thankfully, Rushdie has recovered and is still writing. He now looks like a venerable old pirate.

In this latest prosecution, Matar was accused of terrorism because his murder attempt was alleged to have been inspired by the fatwah placed upon Rushdie in 1988 for the sin of having written his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which features magical realist scenes in a dream sequence of a very human prophet Mahound who knowingly transcribes demonically inspired verses into his holy text.

That fatwah was placed on Rushdie by the late Ayatollah Khomenei, the theocratic Shi’ite leader who overthrew the Shah and initiated a theocratic Islamist state in Iran in 1979, a state which persists to this day and is, at the time of writing, currently at war with America and Israel. This context among other animosities informs why Hatar faced the additional terror charges.

Rushdie, one may recall, was forced into hiding in 1988 and was on the run for years, under the assumed name of Joseph Anton, itself the title of his memoir of that period of being hunted. This was especially heartbreaking for me at the time, as a young man whose writing had been encouraged by Rushdie, who had offered to show anything I wrote to his own agent. I’ve felt a gratitude and bond to the man ever since.

But when Khomenei died, the Iranian regime distanced itself from the fatwah and Rushdie slowly returned to public life. At the time of the attack, he had been himself again for two decades.

Rushdie had assumed a level of resumed normality which was not shared by some of Khomenei’s more rabid apostles, however. Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have been the route by which Matar, a Lebanese ethnic of American birth, was radicalised in this regard. Matar thus threw his life away in the pursuit of Rushdie’s in an attempt to demonstrate his own fidelity to the hatred of Khomenei.

But it’s worth remembering that back in 1983, Salman Rushdie published his third novel, ‘Shame’, about Pakistan. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, which he had already won with ‘Midnight’s Children’ two years before.

But ‘Shame’, in Persian translation, also won a special foreign literature award granted by a jury appointed by the Islamic government of Iran, the same government who then issued a fatwah on his life after he published his next novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.

We often forget that to hate is very close to love. Before the Islamists of Tehran hated Rushdie, they first loved him. Perhaps the day will come when they can learn to love him again.

Matar has many decades ahead of himself in prison now to ponder his violent actions, his destructive and twisted version of faith, and his own life choices. He could do worse than read the books of the man he tried to destroy.

Posted on

Love Lies Needing

I had reason to look into the back catalogue of the Irish writer Ronan Bennett recently. Irrespective of his somewhat colourful life, he’s also an estimable writer of fiction in a range of forms. Previously, I recall being exceptionally impressed by his novel The Catastrophist, which I reviewed on publication for the Sunday Independent in Ireland.

Bennett, like Alex Garland and many others before them, has made the sensible and lucrative move into writing for the screen, and I noticed that one of his earliest forays into screenwriting was a television play called Love Lies Bleeding. It’s an unusually heavyweight production in retrospect. It was directed by Mike Winterbottom, and starred, inter alia, Mark Rylance, Brendan Gleeson and James Nesbitt. Unsurprisingly, given the author, it’s about the Northern Ireland peace process. Surprisingly, it actually predated the IRA ceasefire.

Some little bell began ringing distantly at the back of my skull at this point. Bennett has long since moved on to other themes and topics, as is wise, but it seemed to me that there was something curiously familiar nonetheless about this particular play. It was, of course, the title.

It turns out that Love Lies Bleeding is one of those titles that writers simply cannot resist. It doesn’t matter how many times it has been used for a wide range of different texts. It seems like there’s always someone, like Bennett, who simply has to have it for their latest work.

Bennett actually seems to have beaten the rush in audiovisual terms. Following his 1993 screenplay, there have been three American movies and another British television thriller all with the same title. But he didn’t originate it at all.

In fact, we can go as far back as a Jacobean tragicomedy by Beaumont and Fletcher, written while Shakespeare was still alive. Also titled Philaster, it was clearly quite popular, being performed between 1610 and 1613, including a run at court, and was published in 1620, three years before Shakespeare’s first folio.

It was also the title of a poem by William Wordsworth, of all people, dating back to the 1840s. Swinburne, about a decade later, also fancied the title for one of his own poems. Since then, it has been a song by Elton John, a stage play by Don DeLillo, the American postmodernist novelist, and a myriad of other things too. The most curious thing of all is that almost none of these works of – let’s say writing because they range across many forms – resemble one another.

In short, Love Lies Bleeding is the all-purpose title. It’s vague yet evocative, alliterative and memorable, poetic and punchy. You could call almost anything Love Lies Bleeding. The only detriment, and it’s one which some of the greats have chosen to ignore, is that it has been used so many times previously. Somehow, it seems never to become threadbare or cliched.

Personally, I’m crap at titles. It’s the kind of responsibility I’d happily hand over to others if I could. And a good title is a very important thing. It’s like a calling card for a work of art. It names it, and it provides the initial hook to the reader, the first point at which someone will decide whether to abandon interest or push on a little further. I’ve ignored some undoubtedly great literature because the title left me cold. No doubt you have too. We all have. So getting a title right, or at least getting it to work, is very important.

Which leaves me wondering, is it preferable to have a mediocre if original title, or something like Love Lies Bleeding, which has proven its worth across a range of genres and over four centuries? The marketing people presumably would say go with what you know works. And these days, there’s not a writer, or a content creator (to use modern parlance) who doesn’t have a little marketing person skulking around in the back of their heads.

Posted on

What is Fiction for?

Snide people will comment on the irony of a Marxist millionaire who writes bourgeois novels about angsty love affairs and chess speaking like this. I can confidently predict that a lot of the right will comment in that manner.

I’d rather take her at her word. What is art for? Personally, I’m with the fin-de-sieclistes who argued art for art’s sake, with perhaps a small unintended side order of educating and edifying.

There’s a well-established and flawed metaphor of one’s books being like one’s children. It holds insofar that books will make their own way in the world, becoming something else in the mind of readers just as children grow up to become adults in the lives of others.

I’m a fan of Chingiz Aitmatov, but I don’t think anyone reads him, or any Soviet realist fiction any more. I’ve met graduates in Russian literature who’d never heard of him. I think efforts to write ideologically sit uneasily within the confines of fiction itself, not merely the industry surrounding it.

One might argue that the emergence of self-publishing, albeit under the sweatshop confines of Jeff Bezos’s billions, has gone some way to addressing Rooney’s concerns. But of course it’s hardly ideal, especially for those whose skills extend as far as writing and not to other tasks like self-marketing.

If as she diagnoses it, the problem is that reading itself has become an elite pursuit, then the issue is with education itself and not with the publishing industry, which like many others including education, is on the retreat nowadays.

Thankfully research tells us the solution to this: read to your children and keep books in your home.

Posted on

Not (mis)translation but misunderstanding

For a long time now people have spoken, illogically, about ‘translating’ texts from Old English, ie Anglo Saxon, into Modern English. Such an act of linguistic modernisation is not translation, even if there are very clear lexical and grammatical differences in the two phases of the language. How so? This is best illustrated by putting the process into reverse. We can very swiftly recognise that good English prose remains good even if you take it back a thousand years:

Hwæt wæs þæt þing? Hwæt woldst þu þæt wesan?

Þær wæs ic, þæt is Alex, and mine þry freondas, þæt is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim soþlice swiðe dim, and we sæton in þære meduhealle smeagende on urum mode hwæt we don sceoldon be þære æfentide, ane deorce winterniht, þeah þe hio dryge wære.

Seo meduheall wæs stow milces, and ge magon, Eala mine gebroðra, habban forgiten hu swylce stowa wæron, þa ðing swa micclum on þissum dagum awendende and ælcman swiðe hrædlice forgietende. Wel, þæt þe hi þær sealdon wæs meolc mid sumum oðrum.

Hi næfdon nan riht ealu to sellanne, ac þær wæs gyt nan lagu ongean þæt man gemengde sume þara niwra drenca þe hi gewunodon to donne on þæt ealde meolc, swa þæt ge hit drincan mihton mid hrædnesse oððe anum twam oðrum þingum þe eow sealde ane fægere stille fiftene minutan God and Ealle His Halgan Englas and Halgan on eowrum winstran scoe behealdende mid leohtum burstande eall ofer eower ansyn. Oððe ge mihton drincan meolc mid seaxum on, swa swa we gewunodon secgan, and þis wolde eow hwettan and gearwe macian to sumere dæl fulre unclænnesse, and þæt wæs þæt we druncon on þissere æfentide þe ic þas gereccednysse mid onginne.