Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: review In another era, it would be easier to champion Salman Rushdie for what he is, a writer of prodigious if uneven talent who deserves his international reputation; if, for example, Midnight's Children or Shame had been the novel called upon to test "the mighty principle" of free speech. Instead, that role fell to The Satanic Verses, which in Rushdie's harshest self-assessment was "a little gawky," and in the opinion of other critics (among them Hermione Lee, Claire Tomalin, George Steiner, John Berger, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, Bernard Levin, Roald Dahl) was perhaps less wonderful than his earlier work. "The Satanic Verses is not your Lear," the Indian writer Gita Mehta told him. Shame is your Lear. The unfortunate result is that Rushdie has become the Dreyfus of literature, a writer more written and talked about than read. He amusingly quotes the newly elected Playmate of the Year respectfully saying to him, at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles: "I'm sorry, sir, I haven't read any of your books." A danger for the reader, of course, is that what Rushdie finds it obligatory to recall may not in every case be so scintillating. At times, Joseph Anton resembles a road movie - or motorcade - to the presidential palaces of those who have pledged their support, on the way stopping at Liège or Toronto to collect an honorary doctorate, or to take dinner with John Irving or Harold Pinter or, increasingly, with luminaries from the film world for which Rushdie still holds a child's susceptibility. He has a cartoonist's tic of describing those who defend him as "great" or "legendary," those who do not as "malevolent gnomes" or, in the case of Roald Dahl, "a long, unpleasant man with huge strangler's hands"; and those who sleep with him as "beautiful." Much more affecting is Rushdie's grapple with his childhood. He was the product of a male-child-obsessed culture in Bombay: the only son of a nuclear gossip and an alcoholic, godless father who died bankrupt after trying to restructure the Koran to make it more readable. Proudly irreligious like him, from the age of 13 Rushdie had to fill his god-shaped hole in the alien culture of England, first at Rugby where he was wretched, then at Cambridge, which he loved, particularly for the Footlights, then in various London advertising agencies, after his itch to act remained unscratched, and then as the author of two mesmerising novels in which he resurrected his beloved Indian homeland - a homeland from which the fatwa promptly banished him. His home was now a series of safe houses in England which, incredibly and wrongly, he had to find and pay for. Condemned to hell by a dying imam, he swiftly found himself already there - locked up with a wife about to leave him, who seemed to incarnate the horrors of the outside world. "You don't own the franchise on genius," she would say. He had become an "ugly drunk" obsessed by what was happening to him. She slept with his best friend, Bill Buford, rented a house in America without telling him and, like a true assassin, gave an interview to the Sunday Times about his vanity and arrogance. Rushdie's portrait of Marianne Wiggins is a masterpiece. Rushdie's fundamental belief in free speech is a faith like any other; as is his belief in women. For instance, his belief in "The Illusion" who became his fourth wife, the model and television chef Padma Lakshmi, whom he met beneath the Statue of Liberty ("everyone was dazzled by her beauty") ­- and who soon after, no doubt because of her association with him, made the cover of French Playboy in the nude. "You saw an illusion and you destroyed your family for it," his third wife told him bitterly. It is to Rushdie's infinite credit that he can be candid and searing about his weaknesses and destructive appetites, that he can see how his life "sometimes resembled a bad novel by himself." Outside the ring of steel formed by his close friends, many find it easy to misrepresent Rushdie as a once-great writer who has allowed the mercury of fame to spread into his prose, a "party monster" and celebrity victim who has immatured with age, like his fellow British-Indian literary knight V S Naipaul, and whose greatest thrill these days is to swap sunglasses with Bono on stage at Wembley. Joseph Anton will not automatically convert them. Happily, the book narrates a truth far greater, far more relevant. Sentenced to death by a turban in Qom, Rushdie has done his utmost to keep a drowsy world awake. Like the heroine of his cherished One Thousand and One Nights, he has not stopped telling his story: of who he is, where he came from, why he wrote The Satanic Verses. He has dared to go on and on, ceaselessly reminding us of the barbaric and unacceptable response to that imaginative fiction, and to convince the progressive world, whatever it might think of Rushdie and his work, that it really has no choice but to join his friends" protective ring. As Tony Blair of all people put it: "You can't muck around with something like this." While working on The Satanic Verses, Rushdie wrote all-too-presciently in his diary that if he ever finished the novel, "there will be nothing left to write about, except of course, the whole of human life." Under the threat of death, Rushdie has written the sentences of his life, "literature being made up of sentences." Though awfully long, solipsistic and of necessity self-serving, Joseph Anton is also funny, painfully moving and absolutely necessary to read. Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie 636pp, Cape, t £23 (plus £1.35 P&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £25, ebook, £22.39)