SOURCE: Taylor, D. J. “Exiles.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 144 (29 March 1991): 32.

In the following review, Taylor surveys the wide range of essays in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1990.

Nostalgia is a fatal reviewer's trick, but it must be ten years almost to the month since I first found out about Salman Rushdie, when the TLS printed a review of Midnight's Children. Later, in the autumn of 1981, I can remember sitting in a gloomy, panelled room in Oxford reading the account of Saleem Sinai's custody of the pickled eggs with a sort of astonished fascination, initial wariness quickly replaced by complete awe. At a distance of a decade, it is impossible to convey the effect that a book like Midnight's Children had on someone brought up on a diet of good/bad Amis-and-water English novels, the excitement that one felt at this whiff of dense exoticism blowing over...