i have to make people come alive on the page and make them people that you would care about. and that so happens-- with me. >> and we begun with stanley fish and roger rosenblatt. >> writing has four purposes, at least to my mind. to make suffering endureable, to make evil intelligible, to make justice desirable, and love-- and so when he talks about what words can do to reality, i think there's no more important thing in the world. >> rose: and we conclude with nicole krause. >> i always thought that memory is a kind of imaginative act, that is a willful act. when you think about how we look back on our lives, we willfully cancel vast portions of it and choose to illuminate singular moments in order to create a narrative. but it is something of a fictional narrative and i think something of that will, something of that inventiveness of memory has always moved and interested me. so if pie books, all three of them have been about memories, in that particular interest. >> rose: writers on writing, when we continue. >> funding for charlie rose was provided by the following . >> additional funding provided by these funders. and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> from our studios in new captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: salman rushdie is here, he is as you know the critically a claimed author of books that include midnight's children. his latest a children a book called luka and the fire of life it was written for one of his sons, like his first children's book haroon and the sea of stories. i'm pleased to have him here at this table again. welcome. >> it's always great to be back. i thought when you were coming, this is going to be a conversation about writing novels, about the memoir that you are working on, but we'll save that. because all of a sudden i got fascinated by children's books. >> well, it's a great age of children's books for a start. there's an enormous amount of wonderfulfully gifted writers working in the field. but in my case it was just simply the consequence of having children. and until hi children i wasn't that interested in them. and my older son whose middle name is haroon. >> rose: who is now like 31. >> who is now 3 -- but when he was a kid he said to me y don't you ever write books that i want to read. what do you say to that. and i thought, you know, there's so much in other forms of people write for their children. and i thought about, you know, john lennon's wonderful song, beautiful boy that he wrote for his son. and paul simon wrote a song for his son, and so on. and i thought if i'm any kind of a writer you should be able to write a story to please your own child, for goodness sake. and out of that came haroon and the sea of stories. which he actually helped me with. and i got one of the best pieces of literary-- that i ever had, where i showed him the first few chapters. i thought i better check that this was going to take. >> rose: he was about 9. >> he was about 11. and i said what do you think of it. he said yeah, it's good, dad. and there was a little unenthusiastic. i said good, it's good. he said yeah. some people might be bored. >> rose: and de like-- which character de like? >> he liked-- he liked, well, he liked the relationship between the father and son. >> rose: in fact this was a story of a boy who travels to the magic realm to find his father. >> well, that's in the first one he's trying to, his father has lost the gift of telling stories. >> rose: right. >> and he has to go back to the source, the sea of stories to try to restore it. in this one, the younger brother, in both cases the children have to save the father. the father is pretty useless. >> rose: that's true of both books. >> true of both books. >> rose: the theory of children trying to save their parents. >> yes. that sense is preed pal, not trying to kill their father, maybe if they were 15 it would be a different story. but in this one the father is older, because this is a child of his old age. and at a certain point he's fading out so it is the fire of life so to speak. and his son knows because his father has always told them that just like one step to the right of the world we live in is this other world world of magic and enchantment, and if you can get into that rld without, one of the great treasures in that world is the fire of life itself. and if you can steal it, an ancient story, the story of the fire, you can save your father's life so he is trying it do that. while being plagued by an attendant spirit who looks exactly like his father but is actually the angel of death. you know, death coming to suck the life out of his father, is literally filling up with his father's life. and thus becoming a measure of how great the urgency is. >> what was his name. >> nobo daddy. which i have to confess is not a name made up by me it was used by william blake, in fact, who used it as a name for god. blake wrote poems in which he complains about god, the absent father who is never there. what help are you. and i used it as more a figure of death. >> now what did your son think of that character. >> that's the best bit. i thought that it might be too scary. i was worried. but in fact it turned out to be his favorite character. and it made me think, maybe this kid has a little bit of a dark side and coy sort of push it. >> yeah. >> so, it ended up that this anti-father, you know-- . >> rose: was his favorite character. >> was his favorite character. >> rose: so your second son is milan. >> yes. >> rose: so milan comes along and says okay, dad, he has a book, where is my book. >> yeah, he read the first book. he must have been nine and a half, ten, something like that. and immediately began the campaign. you know, about the injustice of his life. about his brother had this treasure. and he didn't have anything. so where was his book. and what he didn't know is that when i wrote the first book i actually enjoyed the experience of writing it so much that the moment he was born, hi it in my mind. i thought let him just grow up a bit and maybe i'll write a book for him. so i already had the form, but i allowed him to feel that he pushed me into it. >> rose: why did you enjoy the form? >> there's something very liberating about the pureness of storytelling. if you can reduce everything you're doing to the pure line of the narrative, it's a wonderful freedom for a writer. and you know one of the things that happens is that whereas in an adult novel, an enormous amount of what happens can be interior to do with what happens inside, in this kind of book, you have to show who people are, what they're feeling w what they're thinking, and why. and you have to show it entirely through what they say and what they do. so everything is eck terrie terrierized. everything becomes outside. >> rose: but wluka and the fire of light is also about mortality. >> yes. i think that's the engine. the engine is this question about what happens if you are in danger of losing your father, you know. and so i mean i think these days kids are much more grown-up in some way, certainly than i was when i was 13 years old. and they can face all kinds of very tough questions. >> and that's an interesting period between 13, 14, between sort of childhood and something else. >> i agree. i think that's very interesting. this period between yes, it's borderline. and i think some of the most interesting writing now is set in that borderline. obviously there's-- but there is sara pullman's books which i think adults read with just as much pleasure as children. there's books like mark haden's book, the curious incident of the dog-- and then there are some interesting journeys the other way, books that started out as adult books that require a second readership amongst younger readers. and so i've been very interested in how blurred that borderline is beginning to be and how much interesting work there is in it. >> make one other comparison, haroon, wluka is haroon younger brother. >> yeah. >> they are linked. >> they are linked. it is the same little family at the centre. same father, the story teller rashid and his wife who have this relationship where the father is all head in the clouds and airy fairy and unrealistic. and the mother is sort of, the mother is the one that says that life is real. and you have to save it she's-- i mean she's-- what was rashid known as, the shaw what because he is an oral storyteller. if people like him they call him the ocean of notion. but if they don't he is the shaw of blah. >> so luka, he encounters the father's ghost. >> yeah, and then he has to set off on this quest through the magic world, in the same way as the classical quest narratives, facing different adversaries, having to overcome a whole series of obstacles and trying to final hae get to the center, the inner sank tomb of where the fire is. >> you want people to say this is not a sequel to this. these are companions. >> i think that they stand alone. i very much wanted to write it as a stand alone book but they're related, yes. i mean in the way that this is a-- maybe an arrogant comparison but in the way that through the looking glass and allison's adventures in wonderland are not, one is not a sequel to the other. but you know, you can read through the looking glass without reading wonderland. but they're related. and so in that way, i think they're related. >> there's also a video game. >> yeah. because you know, the video game in our time has used many of the techniques of the classical quest narrative. the wol business of levels, you know, and saving and proceeding to the next, is very like what happened, for example, you take myths like weio wonderful, the hero arrives in a village to killed monster. he kills the monster grendel and immediately is faced with a bigger monster which is grendel's mother. so having, you know, as it were, having destroyed one level, he has to go up to another level. >> to a bigger challenge. >> to a bigger challenge and video games, i think the people who device them have carefully studied the quest narrative and they know that you use this structure, and because the structure is not only about killing dragons and overcoming obstacles, it's also about personal growth. the boy grows up, as he overcomes the obstacles. >> rose: but back to this, it is always, always about storytelling. >> yeah, yeah, i mean i think there's a moment in luka where he, in a kind of slip of the tongue refers to something as the only a story. and actually this demon figure tells him off and says you of all people, the son of a story teller, you should know that there is no such thing as only a story. and he says man alone, man alone is the storytelling animal. he says do rats telltales. do porpoises have narrative purposes, do elephants elephantasize, no, they don't. man alone burns with books. >> rose: it's always about children saving the parents. it's always about that. >> first of all, it's more fun, isn't it. parents say to the child, boring story. other way around, more interesting. but also i think it's because there is a sense, adult sense i think in which we feel that our children are in some way our salvation. >> the writing of these backs in the end was about the joy of your life. >> yes. >> absolutely. and i would hope -- >> the thing that brought you the most joy at the end of the day when push comes to shove, whatever your -- >> no question. as a result they were the two most voyful books that i've ever written. they were the most fun to write because, you know, because they are written out of love. they are acts of love. >> i understand that milan got first look. >> yeah, yeah, no, nobody was allowed to see it until he approved it. yeah. so if he said this doesn't work, i don't like this. >> i would have-- i would have been in bad trouble. >> did he ever say it. >> no, he didn't, no, he was very-- as i said, i needed him to reassure me on certain points along the way. and i fortunately got the reassurance. and though one or two things which are in the back because he more or less forced me to do t he has a dog called-- and in the book, in the book, in the book the boy luka has two pets. he has a dog called bear and a bear called dog. and -- >> a bear called dog. >> that was a family joke. >> and we got, he got a labrador. it was his decision to call the dog bear. and so i used to say obviously your next pet has to be a bear, you have to call it dog. so every time you say bear, the dog comes. so from a family joke, it is something that got into the book. >> so is rashid you. >> you know, he's two people. he comes from two people. i mean yes, of course he's a comedy version of mean,-- me, you know, but he's also a kind of comedy version of my dad. because my father was the first story teller in my life. an when my three sisters and i, when we were little, he would tell bedtime stories. he was very good at it. and the way that i first heard some of the famous stories of the east, you know, sin bad the sailor a ladin, ali baba, was in his versions of them so he was my shaw of blah, if you like. and so rashid in the story is both of us. is a little bit both of us. >> do you fear growing old? >> the diminishing power of age? >> i'm not crazy about it, you know. i have to say, there's that great line of woody allens when he was asked if he was happy that he would live on through his movies. he said no, he would prefer to live on in his apartment. (laughter) and you know, that's my opinion. i'm not in favor of-- favor of growing old. but i don't mind it either. i mean i think you just have to accept what there is. and there is a point as an artist, this point in a life when you've done a lot, where you do have to look harder for the next direction. you have to make sure you're not just repeating yourself and find fresh challenges. >> rose: so why did-- why have you come now to writing memoir? >> just t was instinct, you know. the truth is after everything that happened around satanic versus happened, those years, you know, there was a bit of me, theres with a writer bit of me that was sitting on my shoulder that kept saying you know, good story. >> rose: i'm sure, take notes. >> take notes. and but then for a long time at the end, of that period, i didn't want to write about it. i thought i would just come out of it you know, i don't want to put myself back into it. i want to go back and do the day job. i want to write novels. and i just thought there's going to come a time when you feel ready. and i'm just going to leave it to instinct. >> and instinct has spoken. >> instinct spoke earlier this year, something just said okay what do you want to do next. you know, i had finished this book. i said what dow want to do next. and i found myself thinking well, maybe it's time to tell that story. i'm doing it. i have written, i guess, my guesstimate, i have written about a quarter of it. >> rose: but it's a memoir of just that time. >> no, it's a memoir of life. >> yeah, because initially i thought maybe i just want to write about that nine year period but then i thought if i'm going to tell that truthfully, i'm going to make all these people real, including myself. and that means telling the whore story. because i think to the reader, the interest is always the same. you have to see characters on the page that are vivid and that you're interested in and you want to know what happens, that you care about what happens to them. so in a sense it's novelistic. i have to write it in the same way that i would write a novel. i have to take people and make them come alive on the page and make them people that you would care about. and that so happens was me. >> rose: right. >> but in a way one of the reasons for waiting was to feel that i would have the proper writerly distance from the material, that i could approach it like that. i can approach it like a writing task. >> rose: so therefore the question, how now do you see that incredible period, perhaps differently than you saw it, and what do you know about it that you might not have known as you were experiencing it? >> well, you know, the thing that i instinctively felt at the time that ihink nobody else really saw was that this was not an isolated incidence, you know. a lot of people treated it as if it-- even people, either people on my side or against. >> rose: i don't think people understood it until they came along with you and then said okay this is something that exists. and what is it about. >> but very few people wanted to see it as one incident amongst many. you know, it was seen as an isolated thing. and one of the things i tried to do at the time was to try to point out there was a larger problem, you know, it wasn't just me, that the attacks on other writers, on individual freedoms, and so on, inside this radical islamic world, there were very wide spread. and often using exactly the same language that was used against my book. but much less publicized because they were happening in arabic in arab countries. >> so what did you find out and without talking about a particularly individual, i know that chris hitchins has said to me that when he thinks about his life, one of the proud moments is he was there for you. >> well, the thing that i feel very moved by is the way in which pie friends moved closer to me, you know. and stood beside me and helped me through that. and christopher hitchens was one of the people who undoubtedly did that. and certainly at the point when there was a key moment when i finally was able to get the meeting with president clinton which was the first time that the american administration had ever really taken an interest, christopher was very key in pushing for that meeting, talking to people he knew inside the administration, and helping it happen. he wasn't the only person. the british government was trying. >> rose: tony blair was responsive too. >> blair was trying to make it happen too. the british ambassador, you know, et cetera. so there were a group of people but of my friends, christopher was, you know, he's very connected in washington and he used everything he had in order to try and bring about what he felt needed to happen. and i mean you notice your friends in need. your friends-- . >> rose: you have also said something very interesting. it is that your sense of respect for the brave people who stood in line to buy satanic versus that they somehow had a kind of courage. >> i think there was a, you know, a general very wide spread reaction amongst just ode people. that they didn't feel like being told what they could read and what they couldn't read by a priest, a fanatical priest in a far away country. and i think that people did stand up for that book as a point of principles, not just readers but people working in book stores, people working in publishing companies. you know, there is a collective act of principles and i feel very proud to have been involved with that. >> rose: and islam itself today. >> i know, that is a big subject. >> rose: but i think for me answering one sense i think the interesting thing is the war inside islam, not between islam and the west but if you look at what happened in iran after the last election, you could see that a whole generation of young people, you know, rejected that very conservative, repressive, inhibiting regime that they are are stuck with, you know. and i think if you look across the muslim world you will see that you see a younger generation that really doesn't want that world. you know. >> and they want a -- >> they want a modern islam. >> they want a more open society. they want a society in which they can be the people they choose to be, rather than the people, rather than being forced into the very narrow world that they -- >> there is also this thing that