When S.M. Arthur, an honorary fellow of the University of Cambridge, wakes up to the realisation that he’s dead, as he does in “Late,” one of five stories collected in Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour, he takes it rather well. True enough, having only just entered his seventh decade he “had not envisaged this turn of events,” in fact he “had been expecting several more years, twilight years, golden years, whatever people said these days,” with lots of things to do that ghosts don’t normally (or so I suppose) do: “meals to eat, galleries to visit, music to listen to, books to read,” and so on. 

Still, being a ghost “at first didn’t seem to change anything,” or not for the worse, “in fact, he felt unusually healthy, well rested, and eager for the day.” Christian theologians have long wondered what kind of bodies people have in heaven: the old sacks they had when they died, or the spry bodies of their 20s, or perhaps (why not?) they’re forever 33, much like Christ himself. Arthur finds his ghostly body in much the same state as ever, except that the “side effects of his various medications had disappeared, the sluggishness he was used to was absent, his eyes felt good.” 

It’s never been entirely clear to me why Rushdie is thought of as such a forbiddingly serious novelist, seeing as he is so often so very funny. The imbroglio S.M. Arthur finds himself in — that of the unenterprising chap trying to do the done thing even when plumped straight into confusing new circumstances — is the type of comic scenario of which Waugh and Wodehouse made whole careers. Befitting a Cambridge fellow, Arthur proceeds to grade the various philosophers who’ve tackled the mind-body problem. Descartes, he concludes, seems to have been on to something (“Guess what, René? Mostly right”) while “the old fellow Gautama’s idea turned out to be interesting.” 

But how is a ghost to behave? Arthur is clearly facing a situation without........

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