Book Festival reviews: a new side to Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie will be part of this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival line-up. Picture: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images

To be honest, I can't remember which of his books Salman Rushdie was talking about the first time I saw him at the Edinburgh International Book Festival or the last time he came here five years ago. But I doubt whether I - or anyone else who was there - will forget his event at the McEwan Hall on Saturday in a hurry.

Strange, that. Because Rushdie was at home in New York at the time, so the link with his audience was only virtual. You might have thought the miles between him and his huge head filling the hall’s giant screen would have distanced or diminished the event. Or  perhaps you felt you already knew about the appalling attack on him at Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York on 12 August 2022 and were squeamish about finding out more.

You’d be wrong. Because the event (online at edbookfest.co.uk until 1 January: check it out), chaired with steely charm by Fiammetta Rocco, with two excellent readings by Adjoa Andoh from Rushdie’s book Knife and not a single duff question from the audience, was revelatory, witty, and engrossing.

Here was a Rushdie I hadn’t seen before. The eloquence, courtesy and knowledge I knew about, but I’d never heard him talk about the depth of love for his wife (his fifth), and had forgotten the coruscating irony of the fact that the event at which he was stabbed was to raise money for a charity keeping writers safe from harm. Certainly I couldn’t imagine him saying that filming a scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm “was the best two days of my life” any more than I could picture him driving from England to India in a Mini, which he did when he was 21. I can now.

For a while, when it looked as though he might have been blinded, he was in despair: he’d always been terrified of going blind and had already suffered macular degeneration. But even though the date of his attacker Hadi Matar’s trial for attempted murder (jury selection begins on 13 October) is fast approaching, he seemed remarkably upbeat. Indeed, when it comes to detecting the mood shift Kamala Harris’s campaign is making right now in America, he’s positively optimistic.

Like all the best book festival events, this one cast light on others all around it. Asked about his legacy, Rushdie mentioned that he was 26 when he started writing Midnight’s Children in 1977 and the fact that it already seems to have been loved by a couple of generations is a source of particular satisfaction. And sure enough, in Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma’s event, there it was again, this time being singled out as the key book in opening up stories from the global south to new readers - the very readers who might have read Obioma’s two novels shortlisted for the Booker in the last decade or his latest novel, The Road to the Country, set in the Biafra War.

Or again - an even better example - the whole of the event with Richard Holloway chaired by Allan Little which took place at the very moment Rushdie was talking. Because what was Rushdie’s fatwah, after all, but the ultimate expression of the blind certainties of the Abrahamic faiths from which Holloway has spent the last quarter of a century retreating? In Holloway’s mantra, “the opposite of faith isn’t doubt but certainty”: the God who wanted to test Abraham’s own certainty by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac isn’t one in which Holloway could possibly believe. (Knives, again.)

Art, though, is a different matter. “Art is a kind of a knife,” said Rushdie, in words that could have come straight from Holloway’s latest book, On Reflection, “a way of cutting into the world and revealing its inside. I don’t have any other weapons, but I do have language, and that is my knife with which I fight back”.    

All of this takes us a long way from the peaceful (fictional) Perthshire village of Glencluther, where Chris Brookmyre has set his latest novel The Cracked Mirror. The homage to Agatha Christie isn’t only in the title for a book which he says is “a love letter to crime fiction” by bringing together two of its opposite strands - cosy and action. “The elevator pitch,” he said, is “what would happen is Miss Marple and Harry Bosch had to work together”, but the plot is so fiendishly complicated - and with a twist in the very last line - that he couldn’t possibly imagine a sequel.

Lorraine Kelly seems all set for a second career as a novelist and is already working on a follow-up to The Island Swimmer - set in Orkney, where she and her husband go on holiday each year -  “because I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to the characters”. As her interviewer pointed out, these were particularly well drawn, and the novel’s time-lapse structure was impressively confident for a first-time writer. And as her interviewer was Ian Rankin, this is praise indeed. 

Nowhere are ideologies more entrenched than they are right now in Gaza, so I approached the event in which Palestinian writer and memoirist Rajah Shehadeh appeared alongside Arab-Jewish historian Avi Shlaim more in hope than expectation. 

Both men have swapped their usual roles, so while Shehadeh’s latest book is a backgrounder to the current conflict in Israel/Palestine, Shlaim has written his first memoir, Three Worlds - “not because I am interesting but because I have lived in interesting times”.  The three worlds are Baghdad, where he was born and lived until five, Israel (from five to 15) and London (15 to 18, when the book ends). 

“I gave the book to my wife. When she got to chapter five she said, ‘Look, I’m worried.’ I’ve got to chapter five and you’re not even born yet!” That didn’t matter, he told her. The whole point was to show just how interwoven the story of the Jews in the Arab world was - “something any Arab born after 1948 wouldn’t have a clue about.” When he was a boy, he said, Jews and Arabs lived cheek by jowl in Lebanon, Syria and in Iraq. In 1950 there were 135,000 Jews in Iraq alone, and their ancestors had lived peaceably there for millennia. His aim in writing “was to reanimate awareness of this co-existence which has been blown apart by the cold winds of nationalism”.

I knew nothing of this history, nor of the Mossad bombs he claims were planted in Baghdad and Cairo in the following years to encourage immigration to Israel. But I was fascinated to hear a Jewish anti-Zionist historian arguing for a one-state solution (Shehadeh is sticking to two) based on demolishing settler settlements and justice for Palestinians. “Yes, Shlaim admits, it is unrealistic and I don’t think it will come about. But what is the choice? More carnage? More genocide?”

I’ll give the last word to Rushdie, because (again) it’s linked. Asked what he made of the stushie over Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of book festivals, he was as pithy as you might expect. “I don’t see how an attack on the funding of cultural events in the UK saves a single Palestinian life. What it does do is enormous damage to the cultural life of the UK.” Spot on, Sir Salman.