This is, as the narrator says, “the Age of Anything-Can-Happen”, an age in which “nothing was reliable, treachery was everywhere, identities were slippery and mutable, democracy was corruptible”. Billionaire Evel Cent, a florid futurologist presumably based on Elon Musk, bangs on about parallel space-time continuums and the need to create new homes for mankind. There’s RK Smile, Ismail’s wealthy cousin and an Indian community philanthropist who makes his fortune by flooding the US with opioids. This was the kind of remark you didn’t make too often in white society in London for fear of sounding self-righteous, ‘preachy.’ It was also a remark which, if made in brown or black circles, might elicit a loud series of disbelieving horse-laughs. She believes in free expression and the rule of law as foundations for free society: Now, faced with cancer, she is increasingly falling foul of community leaders and spokespeople. She escaped India and set about becoming a prominent radical lawyer in London. Sam, or Brother, fell out with his sister, known as Sister, years earlier, after he learned she was having a secret affair with the Sad-Faced Older Painter. For both Smile and Sancho are fictional, the inventions of Sam DuChamp, an Indian-born author of unsuccessful spy thrillers who is also struggling to deal with a lot of what might best be summarised as “family shit”. Smile is accompanied by a son named Sancho who describes himself as “black-and-white in a full-colour universe”. She’s a bipolar former Bollywood star who has decamped to New York where she has reinvented herself as a daytime TV presenter. Foremost among them is Ismail Smile, a travelling salesman “of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers”, who journeys across the US to meet his beloved Salma R. Quichotte, which has been longlisted for the Booker prize, abounds with exuberantly broad-brush characters.

And now? What happens when much of modern life seems like a grotesque noisescape? They were populated by absurd, hysterical, grotesque characters. They dramatised hybridity, interconnection and cultural convergence.

They slalomed through history, philosophy, imperial politics. Rushdie’s earlier novels, among them Midnight’s Children and Shame, were heralded as antidotes to the beige provincialism of much British fiction in the 1970s and early 80s.

Quichotte salman rushdie