The metaphor is apt for Rushdie's own work. First, the clowning. News for the uninitiated: the author can be laugh-out-loud funny. Don't let the fatwa fool you — a punning, slapstick-y wit leavens even his most "serious" fiction. Meanwhile, the tightrope element. Thirty years and nine novels along, Rushdie remains a risk-taker, playing with forms and styles, restlessly evolving, surprising readers with each new book.

In September of 2002, Rushdie spent an hour at Powells.com reflecting on the arc of his career, from the early, attention-grabbing novels to the nonfiction collected in Step Across this Line. Three years later, he returned to talk about Shalimar the Clown.

Dave: Last time we talked, I think you'd already started Shalimar the Clown.

Salman Rushdie: I actually did start it long before I wrote Fury. I probably had the germ of it around the time I finished The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in '98 or '99, but I couldn't make it work.

I think the reason I couldn't is that I'd conceived it on too small a scale. You know that murder scene at the beginning? Originally, I had thought the book would stay in the present moment of that crime. After he gets captured, there would even be a long epistolary section where the daughter writes him letters, et cetera. I thought it would be like that, this intense threesome: Shalimar, India, and Max.

Maybe another writer could have made that work. I still think it wasn't a bad idea to do it that way, as a very taut, extreme close-up novel, sort of like an Ingmar Bergman movie. But it just stalled. And then along came the idea of Fury, which seemed much more ready to go.

Of course, you always have a feeling when you set a book aside that you'll never go back to it. What happened is that in the interim I came to understand very, very clearly what I'd misconceived: I couldn't do it with that narrow focus; in fact it would be unfair to the characters not to let them have their full story.

There's a moment when you realize that means the book is going to be much bigger, and therefore require much more work, including research — that it's going to take much longer to write, but if you don't do that it's not going to be any good.

At that point the canvas got much bigger and took in all this stuff that wasn't originally part of the design, like Nazi-occupied Strasbourg. Even the Kashmir material I had originally thought would be back-story; it would be alluded to rather than fully dramatized. Then I thought, No, you're being stupid because that's the heart of the story, and you can't write the book without its heart. So I went for that, too, and it became a huge part of the book.

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