Edinburgh International Book Festival

Howard Jacobson

John Burnside

Richard Holloway, Elif Shafak, Andrew O'Hagan

IT is the Donald Trump question that many of us would dearly love an answer to. What will it take, an audience member asked, to get him out, given his litany of lies?

“You’re asking the wrong person”, Howard Jacobson began. “I sit there in front of the television, night after night, and say, ‘How much more’? I would have thought that the last press conference he gave [on the violence in Virginia]… should be the end of the presidency. How can any member of the Republican Party say, ‘I’m prepared to serve under a President who has more or less said, ‘I am a racist. Look at me, I'm a proud racist' '?"

Jacobson was being interviewed by Ricky Ross about his most recent novel, Pussy, a comic fairytale begun on the night of Trump’s election victory last November and subsequently published in double-quick time. “The consolation of savage satire”, were Ross’s opening words on the book, quoting Jacobson’s own description.

Jacobson, winner of the Man Booker for The Finkler Question, was, as ever, amusing and self-deprecating. He told how at the Hay-on-Wye festival this summer, he sought to give a signed copy of Pussy to the “arch Trump enemy”, Bernie Sanders.

“I was polite and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I thought you might be interested in this …’ He looked at it, and he looked at me, and I have never been looked at with more disgust”.

John Burnside, poet and author, spoke about his latest novel, Ashland & Vine, which, in the words of chair Stuart Kelly, goes through “this countercultural history of resistance [in America] and then, come November, we suddenly get a President who seems to think that the whole of the country is to be managed like a bad gameshow”.

As ever, the literary and historical backgrounds to the writing of the book were fascinating. Burnside urged us to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and, especially, his essay, The Bomb. We learned that napalm was used for the first time, not in Vietnam, as we have long thought, but on civilian French people in 1945, at the end of the Second World War.

Nick Barley, the book festival director, was a late addition as informal chair of a discussion involving Andrew O’Hagan, Richard Holloway and Elif Shafak. His instinct was that it would be an “incredibly interesting conversation”. He was not wrong.

Shafak, a guest selector this year, has opted for a series of discussions, of which this was the first, on the ways in which people can occupy public lives. This hour-long discussion ranged across the difficulties of running a liberal democracy “in a digitised culture in which everyone is on show all the time”; the death of distance; the perils of having too many referenda and votes at uncertain times such as these; Barack Obama; the narratives used by strongmen such as Vladimir Putin; and the dualistic, nuance-free form of debates, on TV and university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic, on subjects such as Islam.