Rushdie, born in India, moved first to Pakistan and then to England. In life he is a migrant and exile, in fiction a fantasist and historian. He's a wonderful writer. Midnight's Children, published in 1981, is dense with passion, intelligence, excitement, and every vocal and literary effect conceivable. Shame, his new novel, is also brilliant and risky—not so steadily dazzling, more raw in parts, but just as daring. The rawness is there because Rushdie is always testing the tenets of history, politics, and art; for him, composition is inseparable from intellectual improvisation.

He was born, like Saleem Sinai, narrator of Midnight's Children, in 1947, the year India gained independence from the British and emerged as a new myth—"a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the other mighty fantasies: money and God." Pakistan, Land of the Pure, was born the same year, from...