Salman Rushdie’s latest book, a quintet of stories, purports to be a meditation on old age – on lives ‘well into the eleventh hour’. We expect it to take in such unhappy upshots of that condition as solitude, bitterness towards youth and the ‘humiliating inevitability of dentures’. But Rushdie being Rushdie, themes fan out in all conceivable directions.

The best story is the last, ‘The Old Man in the Piazza’, first published in the New Yorker in 2020. Each day, an old man sits in a cafe overlooking a piazza where language itself, personified as a woman, presides over a noisy republic of arguments. The story recalls the ‘time of the “yes”’, an earlier dictatorship when dissent was forbidden and language was trussed up in tight clothing. She duly rebelled and words burst forth ‘like children released from single-sex boarding schools at the end of a long, dour semester’. Yet freedom proves fragile. When the old man is enthroned as an ayatollah-like figure, a one-man fatwa factory, certainty replaces nuance, and language abandons the square.

It is a resonant allegory. If only the rest of the collection rose to this pitch. Too often, Rushdie lapses into caricature, as in ‘In the South’, a desultory vignette about two bickering neighbours in Chennai, both long-named and long in the tooth. The humour is schoolboyish, the pathos forced.