“So like punk rock — that other loud art form — Rushdie’s idiosyncratic and individual style of writing has become a genre, an industry that has lost favour to a quieter, subtler style of writing. And it’s this dilemma of how to read a great writer of our times with an out-of-fashion style — and there are plenty of bad writers of ‘loud’ writing out there — that scares many of us off from reading him with an open, playful, churning mind.”