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.