Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly, review: testament to the author’s staggering strength

Salman Rushdie, having lived under a death sentence since 1989, has developed a nice line in gallows humour. Here he is, describing the sensation of being put on a ventilator after being stabbed more than a dozen times: “It’s like having an armadillo’s tail shoved down your throat. And when they remove it, it’s like having an armadillo’s tail pulled out of your throat. So, if you could avoid it, I would.” Followed by a wry smile.

The author has written a memoir, Knife, about his 2022 ordeal, and spoke about it in a Telegraph interview. But to watch him discussing it in Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly (BBC Two) is to truly understand how remarkably he is dealing with it. The BBC interview, with his old friend Alan Yentob, is a straight recollection of what happened.

Yentob can only sit in horrified silence as Rushdie points to all of the places on his body where he was stabbed, and to describe his right eye “sitting on my cheek like a soft boiled egg”. There is wincing detail too about the doctors stitching his eye shut: “They said to me it would not be painful because of the anaesthetic and, you know, they lied.”

This account was interspersed with footage of Rushdie’s younger days, news reports of the fatwa issued over The Satanic Verses, and clips of the film, TV and literary references that went through his mind during his recovery. Then, an odd sequence: Rushdie’s imagined conversation with his attacker, included in Knife, is brought to life via a mix of rudimentary AI and CGI. This device adds nothing to our understanding.

For Rushdie, though, you can see its importance in giving him back a sense of control. “This conversation is over,” his interviewee says at one point, but Rushdie replies: “No, no. The point about this is, it’s happening in my head so it’s not over until my head says it is.” Rushdie’s fifth wife, Eliza, is also interviewed about what was clearly a traumatic experience. This is, Rushdie says, a love story. More than anything, it’s a testament to his refusal to be cowed. As he said last year: “Terrorism must not terrorise us.”