Book Festival - When a little knowledge is dangerous

THE latest satellite technology came together with the rich historical contexts of Renaissance Italy and the court of the Mughal emperors at the Book Festival on Sunday morning as Salman Rushdie read from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, to an audience in Edinburgh and – simultaneously – Melbourne.

One of modern literature's great storytellers, Rushdie took us on a sweeping journey through the worlds of his novel, from the court of Akbar the Great to the Florence of the Medicis and Machiavelli, displaying an encyclopaedic knowledge of the trivia of the period. "All the weirdest things in this book are true," he said.

He "had a really good time writing it", largely because of its absorbing story, which he described as "part made up, part stumbled across". And he took us back into his own beginnings as a storyteller, under the twin influences of his father, who told him the great stories of India, and his mother, "a world-class gossip". "She had in her head a great architecture of misdeeds and, like all good gossips, she couldn't keep her mouth shut," Rushdie said.

The Edinburgh audience could have made better use of the opportunity to ask questions: the first, a comment about wheelchair access at historic sites in India, was later followed by a student fishing for a quote for his dissertation on magic realism. However, a couple of astute questioners from Melbourne managed to draw Rushdie out on the relationship between historical fiction and contemporary society, and the extent to which his writing draws on life experiences.

This is clearly a thorny issue for the writer, whose personal life seems to make almost as many headlines as his books. "Every time I write a book, people tell me it's autobiographical, which means I must have had one hell of a life," he said. "I feel that people know too much about me, more than most writers."

Rushdie said that in his most recent books he has deliberately avoided including any character who could be seen as an "author figure" to avoid comparisons being drawn between his books and his private life. "It gets in the way. People don't read the books like fiction, they read them like gossip."

This attitude was in marked contrast to that of Will Self, next up in the main tent, who invited questions on "anything, from the philosophical, religious and political to the puerile and frankly prurient," after a short reading from his latest novel, The Butt.

After the reading there followed 40 minutes of good-humoured anarchy, in which Self chaired his own event and parried with the audience with sardonic, deadpan wit. Topics ranged from ID cards and freedom of speech to Hunter S Thompson and whether the Bible was metaphorical.

A three-way discussion opened up on the subject of prescribing methadone, involving Self, a GP and a Church of Scotland minister. Even if the author hadn't sent us off into the sunshine "be-knighted" for the day, it would have been well worth the visit.