We live in unstable times. The truth shifts and eludes us. Reality is under assault. Even fiction is in a state of bewildering flux. In a fascinating interview last week, the novelist Attica Locke said: “When Trump was elected, I remember feeling: oh my God, overnight my book changed, and I didn’t alter a word.” Her book about murders carried out by the Aryan Brotherhood, she explained, had suddenly taken on new resonance. Meanwhile, dystopian science fiction has come to seem like a pale imitation of the Technicolor horrors of the new US regime. Classic novels, too, have taken on unexpected new shapes; I recently read Barnaby Rudge and was surprised to realise that this novel purporting to be about the Gordon riots of 1780 was actually a Brexit parable, warning against the dangers of demagogues and scapegoating outsiders. It even had stirring passages about the need for brave parliamentarians to stand up to the fury of the mob.

It’s similarly hard to read Shame without thinking about our current situation. After all, it is a book about a corrupt class of billionaires and “badmashes” hellbent on distorting reality and attacking the rule of law:

The legal system was dismantled, because the lawyers had demonstrated the fundamentally profane nature of their profession by objecting to divers activities of the state.

Impossible to read that and not think of all the recent nonsense on both sides of the Atlantic about enemies of the people. And alongside such stark parallels, Shame even contains a play within a play about the way authoritarianism disrupts both fiction and truth. In a chapter titled Stability (yes, it’s ironic), the narrator tells us he has been visited by three people who have been enjoying the freedom of productions on the London stage and are prompted to compare that to theatre in their own country, Pakistan:

They told me the story of a recent attempt to stage Julius Caesar … It seems that the authorities became very agitated when they heard that the script called for the assassination of a Head of State. What was more the production was to be in full modern dress … Extreme pressure was brought to bear on the University to scrap the production.

But for the fact that this production wasn’t staged in Central Park and that the visitors weren’t from the US, it could be an almost direct account of the controversial production of the play this June, which sparked protests against the suited, Trump-like businessman in the role of the assassinated Roman politician.

Reading that passage last week, I felt almost frightened; partly because of Rushdie’s prescience, but also because of the troubling thought that he may have been enjoying a flight of fancy, having fun with the self-evident silliness of anyone taking Shakespeare with such malicious literalism. Did part of the joke come from the presumption that that kind of absurdity could never really happen?

Shame may be set in “not quite Pakistan” and Rushdie may call the novel a fairytale, but it has solid roots in reality. “If you’re going to use non-naturalistic elements in the novel, they have to grow out of a real vision,” he says, and in Shame, he gazes directly at the regimes of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Muhammad Zia ul-Haq (with an admixture of Iskander Mirza for good measure, not least in the characters Iskander Harrapa and Little Mir Harrapa).

Back in 1983, the New York Times warned “many of the allusions to recent Pakistani history will be lost upon the average westerner”. Thirty-odd years later, I also spent plenty of my reading time worrying how much I was missing – and how much I might have missed even without the obscuring shadow of my own solipsism. But on the other hand, it didn’t feel as if that ignorance hindered my enjoyment. You don’t always have to get the point of the allegory to appreciate its power. Or indeed to be entertained and charmed by its cheerfully meandering narrator:

Listen: you could have taken the whole quantity of sisterly love inside Good News Hyder, sealed it in an envelope and posted it anywhere in the world for one rupee airmail, that’s how much it weighed … where was I?

But the really clever trick that Rushdie pulls off is to be both specific and universal. The more he talks about the specific problems of Pakistan, the more he talks about the particularities of human nature. It is easy to discern ourselves, now, as well as a distant country in the 1970s. Shame may be about a definite historical moment, but it still changes with the times – no matter how crazy they may be.