Alarmingly, Salman Rushdie said he had foreshadowed the age of Donald Trump in his new novel The Golden House – set in his adopted home city of New York -- which contains a wealthy character, with a trophy wife from Eastern Europe, a property development business and a building with his name on.
Rushdie spent much of his hour on stage exploring the dangers inherent in an age when people define themselves more by their identities, than by their ideas. This drive to reduce each person to one single defining characteristics would, he said, lead to disagreement and anger, rather than to enlightenment and progress.
“What the novelist has always known is that human beings are multifarious and contradictory, 17 different things at once,” he said. “At a time like this, novels can remind us what we are really like. We are not flat, we are round. We are not coherent, we are incoherent.”
What appeared to particularly irritate him was the idea that it was professors and novelists being condemned as the out-of-touch elitists, rather than the very rich members of the US government that is whipping up the opposition to ideas and intellectuals. “We aren’t the ones with the private planes and the beachfront properties in the Hamptons. Yet somehow knowing something is classed as being elitist,” he said.
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