[music] Salman Rushdie: And there's probably a Christopher
Hitchens channel on YouTube, I don't know, but there's zillions of hits on Christopher
saying outrageous things about everything. And I think made him a star, and I think he
really liked it. Martin Amis told this very funny story about
how Christopher was really happy in the later years of his life that he couldn't walk down
the street without being recognized. So Martin and Christopher were in Southampton,
Long Island, and they were walking around and Martin noticed that nobody had come up,
so Martin said, "What's going on? Nobody's coming up to say hello to the Hitch,
it must have been 10 minutes." And Christopher said, "No, it's been longer." [laughter] [music] [applause] Yvonne Hunter: Good evening everyone. It's very exciting to see all of you, my name
is Yvonne Hunter and I'm the Head of Programming here at the Appel Salon at the Toronto Public
Library. Yay for me. [applause] YH: Tonight it is my great pleasure to welcome
Sir Salman Rushdie to the Appel Salon stage. [applause] YH: In conversation with CBC's Brent Bambury. If you read Marsha Lederman's wonderful profile
in The Globe and Mail on the weekend, you know that Mr. Rushdie comes with a long list
of accolades. He is famous and prolific, a Booker Prize
winner, the founder of PEN's World Voices Festival, and many times over a best selling
author. In the world of literature and film, and far
beyond, he is a very big deal. Mr. Rushdie is the author of 12 novels, including
"Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses," a collection of short stories, several anthologies,
and four works of non-fiction, including "Joseph Anton," which deals with his years in seclusion
after the infamous fatwa was placed on his head by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. YH: Mr. Rushdie is here tonight on the occasion
of the publication of his new novel, the apocalyptic supernatural "Two Years Eight Months and 28
Nights". That's the equivalent of a 1001 nights, if
you're doing the math. And the book indeed takes it's spirit from
the traditional wonder tales of the east. In this novel, according to Publishers Weekly,
Rushdie invents his own cultural narrative, blending elements of Arabic storytelling,
Homeric epics, sci-fi, and action adventure comic books. Referencing characters that range from Henry
James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Donald Trump, and Aristotle, to one Ibn Rushd, the real
life philosopher for whom the Rushdie family is named. YH: What is more striking, and confirmed by
Sharon Klein, his book publicist at Random House in Toronto, is that Mr. Rushdie is warm,
funny, kind, and engaged, despite as The Globe notes being knighted and hobnobbing with the
likes of U2, Jimmy Fallon, and Bill Maher. And I should note, playing ping-pong with
Paul Holdengräber, my colleague at the New York Public Library. Books are available in the Salon tonight,
courtesy of Ben Mcnally Books, and I am delighted to let you know that Mr. Rushdie will be signing
books after this evening's event. Even more delighted to let you know that we
will begin the evening with his reading. Brent Bambury interviewing Mr. Rushdie on
stage following the reading is the host of CBC Radio's Day 6. He launched his career with the CBC and has
hosted numerous programs, including Midday, with my predecessor Tina Srebotnjak from 1995-2000. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming
Brent Bambury and Salman Rushdie. [applause] Salman Rushdie: Thank you. Thank you for that wonderful introduction,
I have to say that the knighthood thing always kind of embarrasses me. I can remember there's a friend of mine in
New York who has a very precocious young daughter, and when the knighthood thing was announced
the precocious young daughter got very, very excited at the pictures in her head of what
that might involve. [chuckle] And then some months later, after
I had actually been to see the Queen and had the strange thing with the sword, she saw
me again on Union Square and I looked sort of much the same as before. [chuckle] And her face fell. And she struggled for words to express what
she was thinking and she said, "So, Salman, how's the whole knight thing going?" By which she meant, where is Excalibur, dude? Where's your horse? You don't get any of that. Anyway, this book, yes, the math adds up to
1001 nights, except of course as the internet has been eager to tell me, it doesn't work
if there's a leap year. [chuckle] To which all I can say is, there's
no fucking leap year. [laughter] [applause] SR: So, I'm just gonna read a couple of sort
of early passages just to introduce the idea of the thing and then we'll go on and talk
from there. So this is actually the beginning of the novel. "Very little is known, though much has been
written, about the true nature of the jinn, the creatures made of smokeless fire. Whether they are good or bad, devilish or
benign, such questions are hotly disputed. These qualities are broadly accepted: That
they are whimsical, capricious, wanton; that they can move at high speed, alter their size
and form, and grant many of the wishes of mortal men and women should they so choose,
or if by coercion they are obliged to do so; and that their sense of time differs radically
from that of human beings. SR: They are not to be confused with angels,
even though some of the old stories erroneously state that the Devil himself, the fallen angel
Lucifer, son of the morning, was the greatest of the jinn. For a long time their dwelling places were
also in dispute. Some ancient stories said, slanderously, that
the jinn lived among us here on earth, the so-called 'lower world,' in ruined buildings
and many insalubrious zones; garbage dumps, graveyards, outdoor latrines, sewers, and,
wherever possible, in dunghills. According to these defamatory tales we would
do well to wash ourselves thoroughly after any contact with the jinn. They are malodorous and carry disease. However, the most eminent commentators long
asserted what we now know to be true: That the jinn live in their own world, separated
from ours by a veil, and that this upper world, sometimes called Peristan or Fairyland, is
very extensive, though its nature is concealed from us. SR: To say that the jinn are inhuman may seem
to be stating the obvious, but human beings share some qualities at least with their fantastical
counterparts. In the matter of faith, for example, there
are adherence among the jinn of every belief system on earth, and there are jinn who do
not believe. For whom the notion of Gods and angels is
strange in the same way that the jinn themselves are strange to us. And though many jinn are amoral, at least
some of them do know the difference between good and evil; between the right-hand and
the left-hand path. Some of the jinn can fly, but some slither
on the ground in the form of snakes or run about barking and bearing their fangs in the
shape of giant dogs. In the sea and sometimes in the air as well,
they assume the outward appearance of dragons. SR: Some of the lesser jinn are unable, when
on earth, to maintain their form for long periods. These amorphous creatures sometimes slide
into human beings through the ears, nose, or eyes, and occupy those bodies for awhile,
discarding them when they tire of them. The occupied human beings, regrettably, do
not survive. The female jinn, the jinias or jiniri, are
even more mysterious, even subtler and harder to grasp, being shadow women made of fire-less
smoke. There are savage jiniri and jiniria of love,
but it may be that these two different kinds are actually one and the same, that a savage
spirit may be soothed by love, or a loving creature roused by maltreatment to a savagery
beyond the comprehension of mortal men. [pause] SR: This is the story of a jinia. A great princess of the jinn. Known as the lightning princess on account
of her mastery over the thunderbolt. Who loved a mortal man long ago, in the 12th
century as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world after a long
absence to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male
and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality, and at the time
of crisis. The time out of joint, which we call the time
of the strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months, and 28 nights, which
is to say 1,000 nights and one night more. And yet, we have lived another thousand years
since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time, whether for better or worse
that is for our future to decide." So, that's the prologue, and then, the story... [applause] SR: The story begins more or less nowish,
and I think of it as the day after tomorrow, and in a very contemporary world, a very contemporary
New York City, which has certain local differences and for instance, the mayor of New York at
this time is a woman. A big improvement... [laughter] SR: On actually existing persons, but that's
normally the case when you invent politicians. They're big improvements. And what happens is that there's this series
of colossal meteorological events, storms, around the world, and the idea is that these
storms break open the doorways between the worlds and the jinn are able to return, so
this is the storm in New York. SR: "The storm fell upon our ancestor's city
like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and
were lost. The piers built of memories on which they
once ate candy and pizza. The boardwalks of desire under which they
hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night
sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed
to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory
sky. SR: Their secrets drowned in flooded basements
and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell. Before the power died the TV showed images
taken from the sky of an immense white spiral wheeling overhead like an invading alien spaceship. Then the river poured into the power stations
and trees fell on the power cables and crushed the sheds where the emergency generators were
housed and the apocalypse began. SR: Some rope that moored our ancestors to
reality snapped and as the elements screamed in their ears it was easy for them to believe
that the slits in the world had reopened. The seals had been broken and there were laughing
sorcerers in the sky, satanic horsemen riding the galloping clouds. For three days and nights nobody spoke because
only the language of the storm existed and we did not know how to speak that awful tongue. Then at last it passed and like children,
refusing to believe in childhood's end, we wanted everything to be as it was. But when the light returned it felt different. This was a white light that had not been seen
before. Harsh as an interrogator's lamp, casting no
shadows, merciless, leaving no place to hide. "Beware," the light seemed to say, "For I
come to burn and judge." SR: Then the strangenesses began. They would continue for two years, eight months
and 28 nights. This is how it has come down to us, a millennium
later, as history infused with and perhaps overwhelmed by legend. This is how we think of it now, as if it were
a fallible memory, or a dream of the remote past. If it's untrue, or partly untrue, if made-up
stories have been introduced into the record, it's too late to do anything about it. This is the story of our ancestors as we choose
to tell it. And so, of course, it's our story too." [applause] Brent Bambury: Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Let's talk about the jinn. What drew you to these mythical creatures? SR: Oh, I mean they're great. They're so evil. [laughter] SR: What really started it off is these are
children's stories that I heard all my childhood. These supernatural beings. Some good, some bad, some indifferent. But they're great and they can change shape,
and they can grant wishes. What's not to like? What I found I was trying to do was to write
a story about a world gone wrong someway. A world in which the ordinary rules of things
had randomly ceased to apply. And that's a sense of bewilderment that I
think I certainly have felt of late and I think that many people feel that the world
is metamorphosing daily. That the things we took for granted are gone
and new things are in their place. The rate of change is so colossal that it's
easy to feel that you don't get it. BB: But the change in this book comes from
these beings? SR: Yes. BB: You're in control of so... SR: Me, in control? BB: Well, you're the writer, you're pulling
the strings. So if I find a bottle with a jinn in it, what
do I need to know before I pull the cork on the bottle? SR: There's a ritual that you have to observe. [laughter] SR: Well, actually there's a ritual incantation
and if you get it wrong you're in really bad trouble. [laughter] SR: Because the jinn are tricksy and they
constantly try to lead you astray. This is what you're supposed to say, alright? If you find a bottle that you suspect of containing
a colossally powerful supernatural being. [laughter] SR: The bottle will probably be blue. Actually, there's this wonderful story that
AS Byatt wrote called, "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" which is about a jinn caught in a bottle. The 'Nightingale's Eye' is a translation of
the phrase cesm-I bulbul, which literally means the eye of the nightingale. It's a particular kind of blue bottle that
is considered to be the color of the eye of a nightingale. That's a useful bottle to trap jinn in. As Antonio Byatt told us. But if you find such a bottle you have to
say this; "Genie great and Genie grand, now I hold you in my hand. Tell me ere I set you free, what reward you'll
offer me." BB: Are you writing this down? [laughter] SR: Just buy the book. [applause] SR: The jinn will then try and trick you. You see, because the jinn doesn't want to
be beholden to you, so it will try and deceive you. And the jinn will say something like this,
the jinn will say, "Never bargain. Let me go. Weak men bargain, strong men know those who
freely set me free, evermore will blessed be." This is a trick, but this is what you say
if the jinn tries that trick, you say, "Well, I know your tribe and kin make your promise
while you're in. Without a sacred vow to keep, only fool lets
genie leap." BB: And then you're in control? SR: At that point the three wishes contract
has to be offered. [laughter] BB: Then it gets really interesting. So how much sex do the jinn have? SR: Lots. No, lots. I'm glad you raised that point because actually,
there are stories in the literature about the jinn being quite lecherous, but they're
much more lecherous in this book. And actually in my books I've been always
quite shy about sex. There's really... If you read all of them, there's really very
few, like full-on sex scenes, most acts of love happen offstage. But all the missing acts, they're all in here. But truthfully I wanted the jinn to have one
quality which was first of all superhuman, and second of all funny. And that turned out to be sex. Because I think the only real way of writing
about sex is to treat it as absurdist and hilarious. And the jinn have just colossal amounts, they
have sex all the time. SR: And the point about this is to say that
there's not much else to do in fairyland, there's no books in fairyland, there's no
movies to go and see, there's no art galleries, all they can do is have sex. And after tens of thousands of years, that
kind of gets old. And one of the reasons they like coming to
meddle with the affairs of human beings is that we're more interesting than them, because
we do lots of things other than... Actually most of us don't have sex much at
all. [laughter] SR: But we do lots of other things. And so they find that their curiosity is aroused,
and they think we're interesting. Because all they can do is that one thing. BB: You're a rationalist. You're a famous rationalist. What pulls you toward the magical in your
books? SR: Well, just 'cause it's the storytelling
tradition I grew up surrounded by. And if you grow up in India, those are the
stories you hear before you hear any other stories. You hear these fabulous wonder-tales of the
east, and so for me, that was normal. That was the normal way of telling stories,
that the stories should be fantastically, beautifully untrue. BB: But people could say the same thing about
religion. That stories of religion have the same qualities. SR: No, they don't. BB: Why not? Why do these stories... Why are they resonant for you, whereas... SR: Well, because religion is trying to tell
you to behave in a certain way. These stories aren't trying to tell you to
behave in any kind of way. They're just trying to seduce you. And that's a much better quality in a story,
than to be instructional. And again, I think I make a distinction between
monotheistic and polytheistic religions. Because I think one of the things that's very
attractive about polytheistic religions is that the gods are not moral arbiters. The gods are not good. The gods are greedy, lecherous, petty... BB: Jealous, yes. SR: Spiteful, jealous. They're like us only on a much bigger scale,
and they don't say to us, "Be like us." They don't say "Do as we do." They're just... The stories are better because of that. Monotheistic gods, unfortunately, get virtuous,
and that makes them a lot less interesting. Like people, really, how many virtuous people
do you like? [laughter] BB: Well, the hero of this book, the human
hero in your book is not necessarily virtuous, but he's an everyman. He's a gardener. And the world changes, as you just told us,
after a tremendous storm happens in the book and pretty much everyone gets struck by lightning
at some point. So is it too literal to look at the story
you're telling and say that this is something to do with global warming, this is something
to do with climate change? SR: There's an element of the story which
is certainly environmental, and I am trying to say the world is out of control, and there's
even a kind of, more-or-less explicit idea that the planet is trying to punish us for
our behaviour. But it's not only about that, it's just about
a world completely out of control in all sorts of ways. BB: Right. SR: And my Mr. Geronimo, my gardener, he was
really the first thing I had, before I even knew what the book was. In fact for awhile I thought it might just
be a story about him. And I thought it could be a little Kafkaesque
story about a man who wakes up one day and something inexplicable has happened to him. Like Gregor Samsa turning into a giant dung
beetle. What happens to Mr. Geronimo is that he wakes
up one day and he finds that his feet can't touch the ground. He's this far off the ground, so you could
pass sheets of paper underneath his shoes, which is as great a disruption of the law
of gravity as if he was 20 feet in the sky, but it's funnier. [laughter] SR: And I thought maybe it will just be a
story, because there's something poignant, I thought, about a man who has spent his life
working with the earth, nurturing the earth and the things that grow in it and that that
man should find himself suddenly detached from the ground, detached from the earth,
so the ground is literally no longer under his feet. And I just thought it could be his story and
the book kind of... Then I thought, "Why? How did that happen? Who did that to him? What did that to him?" And the book kind of exfoliated outwards from
him like a kind of jungle. BB: But he does become a kind of conduit,
he does become the connection between the world that's opened up when this giant storm
hits and the jinn, and he ends up actually... It was one of the human characters who ends
up having sex with the jinn. SR: Yes, he has a love affair with the fairy... Well he's the male, let's put into theatrical
terms, the male lead, and the female lead is this jinn princess that I read a little
bit about who had come to the earth in the 12th century and had a gigantic number of
children, one of whose descendants he is. So when he has sex with her, he's actually
having sex with his great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother. [laughter] BB: How does he feel about... Does he? SR: He doesn't care. BB: He doesn't care. [laughter] SR: Well, one of the other characteristics
of the jinn I actually stole from the sexual behaviour of camels. Camels have no incest taboo. They just don't. A camel will have sex with his mother and
produce a child and not give a damn, and nor will the mother. So I thought, that's a very interesting suggestion. Remove that taboo because it's such a powerful
thing amongst human beings, so as a way of differentiating the jinn from us, to remove
the incest taboo is a very powerful way of doing it. So yes, he has sex with his great, great,
great, whatever and enjoys it. BB: And Mr. Geronimo is a citizen of New York
City although he's an immigrant, he was born, like you were, in Bombay. SR: In Bombay, but in a different part. He comes from a part of Bombay called Bandra,
which is famously a very christian neighbourhood, and still is to this day. And he is the illegitimate child, I'm sorry
to say this on the day that the Pope is in town... [laughter] SR: He's the illegitimate child of a Catholic
priest. This is something which never happens in real
life. [laughter] BB: So when you bring the storm to New York,
it does have the resonance of super storm Sandy, of Hurricane Sandy. Were you in New York City when? SR: Yes, yes I was there. BB: What happened to you during that? SR: When I was in the dark part, the lower
part of Manhattan. 46th Street was the division. 46th street was really strange because the
south side of 46th Street was plunged in blackness and the uptown side was blazing with light. So in that downtown darkness where there was
no power, there was no heat, there was no light for about four and half days, there's
one building in downtown in the financial district, one building, that was blazing with
light, in the midst of pitch darkness and that was Goldman Sachs. [laughter] SR: And I thought, "You can't make this stuff
up." [laughter] BB: That's funny, and Hurricane Sandy was
a terrible thing that happened and when you write about it, it's a horrible... It's a blight on the world. When you write about the war of the worlds
that follows, the darkness, that follows, it's a terrible thing and yet there's something
very humorous about the way that you present these cataclysms, these things that are basically
threatening the earth to the point of destruction in your book. So I just wanna talk a little bit about humour
and how you approach that. When you're writing, do you feel the need
to put in a joke every so often, does it feel like that to you, do you think it needs to
be funny at this point? SR: No, there aren't exactly jokes. There aren't gag lines, but I like black comedy. I like the idea of talking about dreadful
things amusingly. I think it does something very strange to
the material, because it doesn't lose its horrifying aspect, but by getting this other
dimension... I don't know, it seems to me it somehow humanizes
it. It makes it easier for us to think our way
into it. BB: And one of the vivid parts of the book,
where you're describing the attack on New York City, there's a giant snake climbing
the Chrysler building. SR: Coiled around it, yeah. BB: There's a sea monster that swallows the
Staten Island Ferry. SR: Yes. BB: It seems you're a fan of disaster movies. SR: I really think there's a saying in New
York that Hollywood attacks New York every summer. [laughter] SR: And people say that it's Los Angeles'
way of showing it cares. [laughter] BB: But it's inevitable, when you think of
these images. You described somebody falling. It's inevitable that people will connect that
to descriptions of 9/11. Was that something you... SR: Well, actually, yes. I think maybe that was a little near the edge,
that somebody jumping out of the window of the Chrysler Building. Except that what happens to him is that he
slides down the snake like a roller coaster [laughter] and gets up at the bottom and walks
away. So that's not exactly the same thing. And I'm sorry about the Staten Island Ferry. [laughter] SR: No, I'm not. BB: But you clearly... Just back to disaster movies for a moment,
because you clearly enjoy popular culture and you mix it with... SR: Yes, there's quite deliberately an echo
of disaster movies. Given that there's in the novel, the novel
as it boils up, proposes that there's going to be this colossal conflict between supernatural
beings. And that's actually not even a conflict between
them and us, it's more like a civil war where members of the human race are on both sides. But it's a war between the bright and the
dark jinn. And there's a moment at which you have to
take a deep breath and think, "Well, if I'm gonna propose that this war is happening,
you have to go for it. You actually have to describe it." And at that point, it can't help but feel
like a $200 million movie, which I hope it will be. [laughter] BB: One of the films that you reference is
a B-movie, it's a kung fu movie, "The Sorcerer and the White Snake." It's a Jet Li movie. When you think of a film like that, does it
influence your imagination? SR: Yeah. No listen, I've always been very, very influenced
by the movies, from the youngest days. When I was at university there was this movie
theatre in Cambridge, England. Real Cambridge, [laughter] the one that's
900 years old. But there was this movie theatre called the
Arts Cinema which is now, like everything else, is a coffee shop. But I felt that I really got my education
as much in that movie theatre as in any university library. Because they were showing European art movies. Not just European art movies but Japanese,
and Indian, and the American art movies in the kind of Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, that
kind of type movie. SR: And several of the filmmakers' visions
profoundly influenced mine. I think, for example, seeing some of the childhood
films of Fellini, films like "Amarcord." I thought, "He's doing this extraordinary
thing. He's taking the stuff of a very ordinary life,
a simple, poor, working-class boyhood in a small, not even a big city... Some little town, Rimini. And he's exaggerating it and enlarging it
and making this kind of mythical." BB: Yes, finding the magic. SR: Yeah. And I thought, "That's such a brilliant thing
to do." And it made me think that I wanted to try
and do things like that. And then, the other filmmaker who influenced
me colossally was the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. And I think everybody... I think writers are not only influenced by
books you can read, and I was influenced by movies, I was influenced a lot by surrealist
painting. BB: The image of "Mr. Geronimo Rising Up"
is a surrealist image. SR: Yes. Imagine, if you see the famous Magritte paintings
where they're raining men in bowler hats with umbrellas, it's easy to imagine that they're
not raining, that they're actually going the other way... Up, rather than down. So I, from the earliest times, was enormously
influenced by the cinema. You know how it is. When you become a writer, the things that
people like about your writing are exactly the things which other people don't like about
your writing. Sp the people who like my writing have always
said that it's very pictorial and the people who don't like my writing have always said
that it's very pictorial. [laughter] And so, I guess, it must be pictorial. [laughter] BB: Speaking of surrealism, Donald Trump is
in this book. SR: I'm so proud of that. [laughter] BB: Explain to us how he comes up, because
it's in a discussion of two types of crazy. So explain that. Explain what type of crazy he comes up in
the context. SR: Well, there's a woman in the story who
feels that the world has become crazy. And she says there are certain kinds of crazy
that she can understand. She can understand Westborough Baptist Church
crazy or Trump crazy or Second Amendment crazy or all the other normal American kinds of
crazy. But this feels like foreign crazy. [laughter] SR: This feels like post-9/11 crazy and therefore
evil and dangerous. America has much craziness, and Donald Trump
is a part of that. BB: Donald Trump wants to build a wall between
the US and Mexico. SR: Who is gonna build it? BB: He says the Mexicans are gonna build it. [laughter] 0:35:44 BB: But I wanna connect this with
what's happening in Europe right now, because there's an immigration crisis in Europe. And immigration has been a theme that you've
dealt with in many of your books. "The Satanic Verses" was about immigration. SR: Yep. Yep, lots of them. S2: You're an immigrant yourself. Do you think that people's attitudes are moving
backwards when it comes to immigration. SR: I think there's a fear about the scale
of it, which is... What everyone may think about the humanitarian
issues, you could also understand that there's a fear about the scale of it. Especially when, as was said today by somebody,
the big flood hasn't even started coming yet. That if it starts off... Becomes millions of people showing up, there's
a real problem. I think, clearly... I was pleased to hear a couple of days ago,
the United States saying that they were increasing the amounts of people they were gonna take. I think that's good. Some European countries, more than others,
are beginning to do that. There clearly needs to be a Europe-wide policy
for how to distribute people, rather than have some countries putting up barbed wire
fences and other countries opening their doors. That's going to create all kinds... That could break the European union... Just that. BB: We see those tensions now. But there's also a fear about where these
people are coming from. The fact that they're coming from Syria and
there's fear that it will bring violence and the insanity of Syria to our lives. SR: Well, I suppose it is just possible that
there's a few Jihadist among them. It wouldn't be impossible to believe that. BB: But I wanna talk about that fear because
it's one of the themes in your book. When Mr. Geronimo starts to rise into the
air, there's a contagion of fear, people say to him, "You're patient zero. We could catch this." There's this idea that fear is contagious. Do you understand that reaction? SR: Yeah, I think you have to understand it. Even if you disagree with it, you have to
understand it because there it is. I've said repeatedly that... First of all I think it's kind of disgraceful
that the countries would share a language and religion and culture with the people running
for their lives, are the countries not taking them in. That's to say the Gulf States. [applause] SR: It would be so much easier for these refugees
to assimilate themselves into countries where they speak the same language and they have
the same culture. Which are very wealthy countries, by the way. Immensely wealthy countries, and well able
to receive them. Saudi Arabia, zero, Gulf States, zero... I'm so sorry to say that the King of Saudi
Arabia has the same name as me. But the King, Salman, arrives in Washington
and rents an entire five star hotel. All of it for himself but refugees, not one. I think that's just disgusting. So there is that issue about where they should
go and where it would be more natural for them to go. SR: Then there's the issue... Why are they running? Because these are essentially people running
for their lives. That's what's happening. And the reason they're running is because
in some very specific places, obviously Syria, but also Eritrea, there have been long, bloody,
intractable, violent civil wars where there's enormous collateral damage. Everybody's been killed, not just combatants. So if you're gonna solve the problem, you
gotta solve that problem. You've gotta apply yourself really to the
question of how to stop those wars. Because, until you stop those wars, people
are gonna keep running. Don't ask me how, I'm a novelist. [laughter] SR: I don't have to solve the problem but
I had... I think seriously, I'm not in the business
of saying, "Here's how to solve all the problems of the world." But, I do think that one of the things that
writers can do, is to point to where the problem is and to say, "Let's talk about this because
this is what we should be talking about." BB: But you do. In this book, the idea of fear as a motivation. Fear is what is being used by the jinn to
drive people towards religion, in service of one of the human characters in the book. So there is this idea of how powerful fear
is and how it works in service of the negative force. SR: Yeah. There's a dispute in the book between two
philosophers, both dead. The ghosts of two philosophers. BB: Still arguing. SR: Still arguing. There's a dispute about the nature of God. About whether, as one of them says, "Fear
is the echo of God," because it's human beings natural response to the ferociousness and
the punitive nature of God. There's another belief, which is that "God
is love," and those beliefs are in conflict in the book. There's simply an argument about what God
can do. For instance, there's a... These two philosophers, Islamic philosophers,
Al-Ghazali, who was a 11th century Persian philosopher and Ibn Rushd, who was a 12th
century Moorish philosopher in Spain. Genuinely, really had a dispute. Well, it's a dispute spread over a hundred
years. But Ghazali, who was what we would now call
a religious conservative or extremist, believed that God was omnipotent and was not bound
by natural laws. And Ibn Rushd, who was Aristotelian and believed
in reason and science and logic. Believed that God would be bound. SR: The question is this: If God makes the
world, is He then bound by the laws by which the world works or not? The image that's used in Ghazali's philosophy
is the image of a flame, which is also in the book. A flame being applied to a bowl of cotton. Now, if you apply a flame to a bowl of cotton,
what happens? Catches fire. Why does it catch fire? The rationalist would say, "Well, because
those are the laws of science, that you apply the heat to the flammable substance and it
burns." The literalist, the blind faithist would say
that's diminishing the power of God to say that and that actually the only reason the
fire burns the cotton is because God at that moment decides that it's okay for the fire
to burn the cotton. And if God wanted the cotton to extinguish
the flame, he could make that happen because he's God. BB: You think you could test that scientifically,
though? SR: Yeah, but the scientific test is irrelevant
to the person of faith as in so many things. BB: I wanna talk about another kind of fear. You were an ad man at one point. SR: I was. BB: You're a storyteller now. What do you think ISIS is doing that makes
its propaganda so effective? SR: Well, they're very good at using social
media is one thing. And the thing is... I can't watch a lot of that stuff because
I'm deeply squeamish, but part of it is supposed to scare us. There's many ways to kill people, but if you
choose this particular way, decapitation, and not just decapitation with an axe in the
way that the Tudors used to do it, but with a knife that's this long. So, you actually have to hack away at somebody's
head in order to remove it and it's as messy and ugly as it could possibly be. The purpose of that is to scare us. Not just to scare us, but as quite effectively
did for a time to scare soldiers who were said to fight them. BB: So, it's working? SR: So, it certainly has worked. And then, they make these other very seductive
films. I have to say the things... I can sort of understand why a certain kind
of deprived, psychopathic young man might want to go and kill people. What I don't understand is why the women go. Given that women in Raqqa are treated more
or less entirely as property and as kind of sex slaves and passed from... If they grow they're handed off to one warrior
and he dies, they're handed off to another person and so on. It's an appalling thing to go from a western
country into that situation. BB: But as you say it's been successful on
so many levels, so how do you feel about that success? Does it scare you? Does it make you feel unsafe? SR: I think it isn't about me personally,
I think it makes everybody feel unsafe. I think it's something new in the world, 'cause
Al-Qaeda was a number of small groups who were occasionally able to make particular
acts of violence work here and there. But this is an army. This is an army and it's very well funded
and the question is where is the money coming from. And I think, yes, they have captured oil wells
and they're selling oil on the black market and so on, but I have a strong suspicion that
the money is also coming from places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and places which claim
to be our allies. And one of these days we'll wake up and realize
they're not, that they're actually our enemies. I think it's not going to be defeated by airstrikes,
that's for sure. And whether we have the will to do the other
thing which will be bloody, which will be a war and a very big war, whether we have
the will to do that, I don't know. BB: Are you optimistic about the world? We're talking about a giant war in your book,
but this is obviously an allegory. SR: Well, what I think is this that history
doesn't go on tramlines. It's not inevitable. The fact that the world looks to be going
through a dark moment right now doesn't mean that that's what will inevitably happen, because
things change very fast. If I had said to you in January 1989, if I
had said to you that the Soviet Union will not exist at Christmas time, you would have
thought I was nuts because it seemed absolutely solid and there, and then it just sort of
blew away. And yes, now somebody's trying to put it back
together, but that's... [laughter] SR: That's another story. What I'm saying is that we live in an age
of incredibly sudden rapid transformations. When I was studying history, one of the things
I was told, which I thought was wise advise, was never speculate about the future. Never ask yourself... Two questions you don't ask yourself. One is, "What's gonna happen?" And the other is, "What if?" You know, "What if the Nazis had won World
War II?" Etcetera. You know, those what if questions which are
beloved by fantasy writers. I was told it's hard enough to work out why
what happened happened without asking the question about what would have happened if
something else had happened because that thing didn't happen. BB: President Obama is a character in your
book. He makes a brief appearance. You describe him as being Sinatra like, which
is pretty nice comparison, but he's ineffectual. He cannot meet the challenge of the war of
the worlds. Is that a comment on his performance in real
life? SR: He's not named. [laughter] BB: True. SR: And the date of the book is a little indeterminate,
so it may not be him. His race is not specified, either. BB: It's true. SR: The only reason you're saying it's him
is because he's described as having big ears. BB: That's right. [laughter] SR: And ears, as you know, in this book are
an important identifier. BB: Yes. SR: Of all kinds of things. The Sinatra thing, actually, is to do with... I remember watching one of the debates way
back in the first presidential campaign, the debate between Obama and McCain. And there was a point at which I turned the
sound down, and just watched the body language. And McCain was this little red guy, kind of
strutting angrily about, like that, bright red in the face, and Obama was on this like
bar stool, sort of lounging. [laughter] SR: He was so at ease in his body and if he
had started singing, "Come Fly With Me," who would not have agreed? So I thought, "I like that guy." That's where the Sinatra thing came from. BB: But do you think he's been effectual or
ineffectual? SR: I have to say I was, like many people,
filled with hope at the election of President Obama and somewhat disappointed, more than
somewhat disappointed, by the first term. I think the second term has been triumphant. I think the things that he's achieved in the
last three years, I think mean that this will go down as one of the great presidencies. He's done a great deal to change America and,
yes, the economic performance is much better, then there's the trade deal in the Pacific,
and then there's the gay rights issues, and then there's... Every week, there's a major achievement. And ObamaCare, which now has been... The attempts to defeat it have been defeated
themselves in the Supreme Court, what, five times, so I think it's probably there to stay
and it's really working. So I think now, this is the guy we thought
we were getting, I think, and I'm overjoyed to see it. BB: I want to give the audience a chance to
ask some questions. We have a microphone set up, I just have a
couple more questions and then it'll be your turn, audience, so please take your place
at the microphone if you'd like to ask a brief question. And I'm going to ask that you keep the questions
in the form of a question, just so that we can talk to as many people as possible. But before that, you credited Michael Ondaatje
as being an inspiration for the form that you took for this book, but would you like
to tell us what you said about him on Twitter last year? SR: What did I say? What did I say? BB: You called him a name. SR: Did I? Michael? Oh, you mean about Charlie Hebdo? BB: Yes. SR: Yeah, I called him a pussy. [laughter] BB: Do you regret that? SR: No. [laughter] BB: What was your conflict? SR: Look, it was a very harsh fight, and I
felt that many of my good friends were on the wrong side of it and I thought, these
people were executed for drawing pictures, and if we can't defend and celebrate their
courage, then we have no right to call ourselves a free speech organization. That's my view. [applause] SR: I also felt that the people opposing their
award, and PEN, were misrepresenting them, that they were calling them all kinds of names,
they were calling them racist and so on, and they were the exact opposite of that. Many of the people who signed up to that I
think knew very little about the people they were criticizing and I thought, to wrongly
malign the dead, who are our colleagues, is a crime, to me, a crime against the dead. And I felt very strongly about it. SR: So yeah, feelings ran very high, but Michael
is somebody I love. He's a very old friend of mine and I remember
the case of Hitchens. Hitchens and I disagreed violently about politics
very often, when he was a supporter of the Iraq war, which I wasn't, and many of Christophers'
friends were not in line with him politically on that issue, so we would just yell at each
other, but it didn't stop us being friends. And so, yeah, we yelled at each other a bit,
but it doesn't stop us being friends. BB: The last four words of this book, "We
long for nightmares," if religion... SR: Thanks for giving away the ending. [laughter] BB: We can cut that part out. But if religion was eradicated, if people
became creatures of pure reason, do you think that we would still be violent and crazy? SR: I don't know, maybe not. It would be like the planet Vulcan, wouldn't
it? We'd be like Spock's relatives. And I just wanted to say, because the book
does end in this almost optimistic moment, but I wanted to suggest that... Well, I didn't want just have just a sentimentally
happy ending because that's kind of sappy, so I wanted to throw some vinegar into it. And I think one of the great lessons of fairy
tales is, "Be careful what you wish for." Because if you get it you might discover it's
not what you wish for. BB: Salman Rushdie, ladies and gentleman. SR: Thank you. Thank you. [applause] S?: Hello. Speaker 4: Two of the writers you write about
in your first book of essays in 1991, one of them is VS Naipaul, the other one is Ruth
Jhabvala. With the two of them, with the first one with
the fairly recent biography of VS Naipaul, has it changed your views of him as a writer
or as a person? And with Ruth Jhabvala, she passed away two
years ago, what would be your evaluation of her and her achievement as a writer? SR: Well, I think Ruth was a very remarkable
screenwriter. Let's say that first of all. Her long collaboration with merchant ivory
resulted in a number of exceptional screenplays. I can't remember, did she win two or three
Academy awards? S4: Two. SR: Two. That's two more than most of us. [laughter] SR: I think she really had a gift for the
literary adaptation which is actually a very, very difficult thing to do. As a writer, she is very interesting because
there are very few writers whose life has been a migration from the west into the east
and then back again. So, she starts off as polish like Conrad,
but unlike Conrad she doesn't move west into England, but she moves east into India and
spends a lot of her life there and writes some very good books. She got fed up with India, she herself said,
because nobody in India was willing to take her seriously as a writer because she was
a woman. She said people would ask her what she did,
and she said she was a... This was after she won the Booker Prize. People would ask her what she did and she
said she wrote novels, and they would say, "How nice for you to have a hobby." And so, she moved to New York and spent the
rest of her life there. I think it's a very interesting life and a
really interesting and valuable body of work is what I think. Naipaul... How long have you got? [laughter] SR: Naipaul and I have been not seeing eye
to eye for a very long time, but now he's old and he's not well and he made a big attempt
when I last saw him to make peace. And so, my view is it's fine. He's a frail old gentleman and I've disagreed
with him about many things but so what. I admire very much his early work. I admire everything up to and including "A
House for Mr. Biswas," which I think is a great masterpiece. A great masterpiece that is filled with love
which is something which seemed to leach out of his work in later life. It seemed to become a little bitter and judgemental,
his writing. I think "A Bend in the River" is a very good
book, but it's a very cold book. And I think "The Enigma of Arrival" is a very
good book, but it's also a very dispassionate book. It like the early Trinidadian stuff. He's a fine writer. He's the only writer I know who described
himself as not being a big reader. [chuckle] SR: I was at a conversation he was having
at the Hay Festival in Britain, and the moderators asked him, you know, one of those kind of
what writers do you like questions. And he said, "I'm not a reader. I'm a writer." [laughter] SR: And I thought, "I don't know any other
writer who would say that," literally I don't know. So yet again, Naipaul stands alone. BB: Thank you. Hello. Speaker 5: Hello. I sort of discovered your work and your writing
through your friend Christopher Hitchens and a lot of his writing. I was wondering what you think he would view
about the world today and what he would think about the present state of things, I guess. SR: You know what Christopher thought? Christopher thought religion was the worse
thing in the world. And he would feel everything he'd every thought
had been confirmed. Christopher would just go on being Christopher. I think we've got enough evidence... One of things I wanna say about Christopher
is I think he was the first person who became a superstar because of YouTube. I think more than his books, more than his
essays, etcetera, he was such an amazing speaker that... And now, of course, everything's captured,
nothing ever disappears. There's probably a Christopher Hitchens channel
on YouTube, I don't know, but that, I think, those zillion of hits where Christopher's
saying outrageous things about everything, I think made him a star and I think he really
liked it. [chuckle] SR: In the memorial service, Martin Amis told
this very funny story about how Christopher was really happy in the later years of his
life that he couldn't walk down the street without being recognized. And so, Martin and Christopher were in Southampton,
Long Island and they're walking around, and Martin noticed that nobody had come up, and
he said to Christopher, "You know Christopher, what's going on?" And Christopher sometimes referred to himself
in the third person as the Hitch. [laughter] You have to remember, the definite
article is very important. So Martin said, "What's going on? Nobody is coming up to say hello to the Hitch,
it must have been 10 minutes." And Christopher said, "No, it's been longer." [laughter] Speaker 6: Good evening, sir. Thank you so much for taking my question. You have been quite outspoken about Islamic
extremist. I'm a Muslim myself, but in your talk today,
you just somehow mentioned this toxic relationship between United States and Saudi Arabia, don't
you think, especially coming from you with such a background and all that, don't you
think you have more a sort of duty to speak up more about this toxic relationship because
that's what I believe is a main drive behind the majority of the problem that we see in
Middle East. I believe it makes a huge difference, especially
coming from you that you have been through such experience. Thank you so much. SR: What I'll tell you, [A], I agree with
you. I think Saudi Arabia is the center of the
poison, that's where it all comes from. Secondly, I talk about it all the time. And thirdly, nobody listens. [laughter] SR: These are the consequences of being a
writer. I'm doing my best, I am talking about it,
but I do have other things to talk about because really, I'm not... I don't seek what Christopher wanted to be
talking here on television, talking about the issues of the time. I don't wanna be that person. I wanna be a person who writes stories and
tells stories that has people hopefully see something about human nature and about the
world they live in through my stories. That's my way of expressing myself, but I
do shoot my mouth off about Saudi Arabia as much as I can. Ask anyone. [laughter] S6: Anyway, thanks. Thank you. [applause] Speaker 7: Hi. Behalf of my friends, I wanted to ask you
about a contentious issue here in Canada. SR: In Canada? S7: Yes. Well, I guess probably too, but specially
here. It's a contentious issue that for women, when
they wanna go take their oath for citizenship here, if they're wearing a niqāb, a veil,
lot of Canadians are against it, a lot of Canadians are for it, the feminist are up
in arms about it, what do you think about it? How do you feel about it? SR: I'm not a fan of the veil. I come from a very female family, I have three
sisters and no brothers. I have a lot of aunts, I have a lot of female
cousins, they all come from Muslim families, they all live in Muslim countries and any
of them, if you were to try to make them wear one of those things, would give you a very
hard time. So I come from a tradition in my family of
women who would not be seen dead in a veil. And what I think about it, I don't want to
talk about the law and so on because I don't know the situation, but I'll just talk generally
about the thing. SR: I understand that in Western countries
in particular, and in a younger generation of women in particular, there are people who
see it as a badge of identity and wear it thinking they're doing something proudly and
positively, if you like. This seems to me to fall into the category
of what that discredited philosopher Karl Marx would call 'false consciousness'. That's to say, they do something freely in
a society in which they are free to do it, and the thing that they are free to choose
to do is forced upon their sisters in most Muslim countries in the world. So the fact that women are seriously oppressed
in most Muslim countries and that veil seems to me to be a symbol of that oppression, when
young Muslim women in the West wear it as a symbol of pride, they are colluding to my
mind in the oppression of their sisters in other countries, to be honest... [applause] SR: And if my sisters were here, they would
say it more forcefully. [laughter] Speaker 8: Good evening. You spoke about fear earlier, do you still
fear the fatwa, and how do you think its impacted your ideas spreading throughout the Indian
subcontinent where religion is really a way of life? SR: Well, [A], I have this longing for one
day when I come up in front of an audience and nobody asks me that question. [laughter] SR: This is something that happened 26 years
ago. I've had a lot of life. I was 41, now I'm 68. I'm allowed to have other subjects. So, no, fatwa, the hell with it. S8: Thank you. SR: If somebody tried to kill me, one of us
is dead. [laughter] India, I think I have quite a lot
of readers in India who don't seem to mind the stuff I say. Nobody has everybody. Chetan Bhagat can have the others. [laughter] SR: That's fine. I'm very happy with my works' reception in
India, I'm proud of it. I know and I've said it often from the time
of "Midnight's Children" onwards that had my work been well received in the west, but
badly received in India, I would have felt colossally disappointed. And the reception of "Midnight's Children"
in India was much more important to me than winning the Booker Prize. And I've remained very proud of the fact that
all these years later that there are still people there who are interested, people which
include young writers by the way, who're interested in value whatever it is that I've had to contribute. So, there's also, obviously there's people
who don't like my stuff and so on, but that's always the case. Nobody gets everybody. And that's why there are books by many different
people in bookshops. S8: Thank you. I'm a proud Indian, I would say and I love
your work. So, thank you. SR: Well, thank you. [applause] Speaker 9: We know that the Middle East is
controlled very much by the West. We know that Egypt is controlled by the West,
we know all that. If we don't have means to influence the Western
policies then how can we hope ISIS to be defeated? SR: Sorry, I think it's just too easy to say
that everything depends on the West. I think you have to start believing that people
are responsible for their own fate. And I think the solution to Islamic radicalism
does not lie in the hands of the West. It lies in the hands of Muslim countries,
to rise up against that. [applause] BB: Salman Rushdie. Thank you.
