Edinburgh International Book Festival -- 25 August, 2010

By Alan Taylor

Naomi Alderman
Story Machines: Movies
John Lister-Kaye


SET a novel in Oxford and inevitably it draws comparisons with Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Evelyn  Waugh's Brideshead Revisited or Morse.
Naomi Alderman's The Lessons has been touted as an updating of Waugh's hedonistic classic which has encouraged generations of students to flock there,  teddy bears tucked under their arms, in the hope of replicating the experiences of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder.
On a fatuous level, then, Alderman's novel may be linked to Waugh's. On a more meaningful one, however, it was soon apparent that the comparison was glib.  Alexander read three passages. The last one, involving her Flyte and Ryder,  offered a choice between bacon butties or gay sex. Call me a prude but it was a no brainer.
As an alumna of Oxford, Alderman had a firsthand opportunity to gather material. Many of her fellow students, she said, were stinking rich, privileged and screwed up, as coincidentally were Waugh's. There, alas, the parallels stopped.
Producing what she described as page turners that are "a bit literary", she also admitted to writing computer games which she said those under twenty are  more interested in playing than watching television or going to the cinema or, indeed, reading books. Suddenly I had a uncontrollable urge to re-read Pride and  Prejudice.

Charlie Fletcher, Don Boyd and William Nicholson, all of whom in their time have made obscene amounts of money in the movie business and have since written  novels, which makes them happy if not their bank managers, provided feisty entertainment in a session which pitted the one form against the other.
With Fletcher, as chair, caught in the crossfire, Boyd and Nicholson vied to prove whether a movie could do what a novel can do, which is tell us what's  going in a character's head. Boyd suggested immersion in the movies of Ingmar  Bergman, which not everyone in the audience received rapturously.
Nicholson,  meanwhile, challenged him to name a Hollywood film that could compare with War  and Peace. 
What all three agreed on is that when a writer goes to Hollywood he must sell part  if not all  of his soul. The compensation was the pay, which was  handsome and which, said Fletcher, had to be because of the aggro and interference you have to cope with. A writer, he added, is not welcome on the set of a movie lest their screams of horror at what's been done to their script  find their way on to the soundtrack.

John Lister-Kaye, the nature writer and founder of the Aigas Field Centre in Inverness-shire, was gloomy about the way human beings treat what goes for wilderness these days. By turns evangelical, syrupy, hard-headed and lyrical, he  offered a patrician view of the world beyond the asphalt jungle. He was at his  best when describing animals and birds, as he does very well in his most recent  book, At the Water's Edge. As a propagandist,however, he sounded suspiciously,  if perhaps justifiably, misanthropic.

Edinburgh International Book Festival Despatch 7

Reviewer: Alan Taylor

Lydia Davis
Martin Rowson in Conversation with Steve Bell
William Dalrymple

* * * *

THE American writer Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories have recently been published here to hosannas from critics, took part in a programme strand concerned with The Future of Fiction.
Whether it has one is difficult to say since the subject was never overtly broached. Davis's work, we learned, has been described as "minimalist", "avant  garde" and "experimental", none of which terms she was comfortable with.
Nor did her work, which she read in a dull New York drawl, suggest there was much substance in them. One story called Grammar Questions felt like an exercise, while others provoked by dreams were potentially interesting if, that  is, you're interested in other people's dreams.
Davis ended by reading a story based on the ways she's been misnamed and misrepresented in official correspondence and other documents, including reviews. None, curiously, mentioned that her first husband was fellow writer Paul Auster.
The story, however, was reminiscent of an essay by E.B. White, first published decades ago, in which he laid out his life in numbers. Which rather suggests that fiction's future  if it has one  may be found in its past.

What the short story is to literature the political cartoon is to newspapers: in dire need of champions. Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, who both  draw for the Guardian, are two of the finest contemporary cartoonists. Bell, as a Book Festival guest selector, played interviewer, which he did with gruff aplomb.
In a welcome spirit of rebelliousness Rowson started by showing a cartoon of  Rupert Murdoch  "the most evil man on the planet"  peering into a toilet bowl. "Not now," the cartoonist has him saying, "I'm watching Fox News!" Gleefully, Rowson pointed out that the Times, which is owned by Murdoch's News  Corporation, is the media sponsor of the Festival.
As an example of biting the hand that feeds you it could hardly have been more sublime. Rowson's real spleen, however, was vented on politicians, and in  particular the coalition government, depicting David Cameron as Little Lord  Fauntleroy, George Osborne as "a fat man who is currently thin", and Nick Clegg as Pinocchio who, being made of wood, can be endlessly adapted. "It's a  government of children and puppets," said Rowson.

With an hour to go before he was due to appear William Dalrymple, the travel writer and historian of the Far East, was sitting sipping tea in North Berwick. But, having journeyed in the footsteps of Marco Polo when he was 21, he  leapt unfazed on to the stage and launched into a series readings.
In the first he described a visit to a primitive cinema in Kashgar in China where Dr No was showing. Alas, the projector was not  in sync with the screen and the scene in which Ursula Andress emerges from the sea cut off vital parts of her anatomy and magnified others. Suffice it to say Dalrymple made the most of the gift.

Edinburgh International Book Festival 6 - Friday 20 August

by Alan Taylor

Jo Shapcott and Christopher Reid
Janice Galloway
Oliver James

* * *

AT the Book Festival poets, like ospreys, are rarely sighted. Two of the best of British, Jo Shapcott and Christopher Reid, demonstrated what audiences are missing with a diverting and affecting reading in which words were weighed like carats.

Shapcott, whose latest collection is called On Mutability, read poems about baldness ("a naked scalp experience"), anti-bubbles (ask a physicist) and the  joy of urination. The last mentioned was called 'Piss Flower' and bemoaned  women's inability to emulate that "golden arc thing men do". Having said which,  Shapcott is, not least by her own admission, clearly a pee-er of renown. The winner of this year's Costa Prize, Reid read from A Scattering, which dwells on the death of his wife Lucinda. Several poems were set in Crete
where the couple spent a last holiday while others described with "as much documentary  clarity" as the poet could muster his wife's final days. Reid then read excerpts from a long and amusing poem in which a man who works in a London publishing house meets an old flame for a reunion lunch in a Soho restaurant. All, as Reid intimated, does not go according to plan, hence, doubtless, the BBC's interest which has filmed it with Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. It's scheduled to be broadcast in October.

A hot Janice Galloway opened by challenging her audience to throw ice cubes down her cleavage, an easy enough target. Ostensibly billed to talk about short  stories she was soon in lecture mode, giving advice on parenting and recommending reading matter in a tone that was half-humorous, half-scary. It is  a peculiarity of some writers to emphasise words in speech by over-articulating  them  no one quite rolls her Rs as Galloway does  as you might on the page  by printing them in italics. The result is to make you feel like an idiot. That is not to say, though, that there was not a lot in Galloway's galloping hour to enjoy. The stories from which she read, for example, produced gales of  laughter and nods of recognition. However, her reading of a poem  in honour of Edwin Morgan, who taught her at university, was toe-curling. Apropos the Book Festival, the best line came from her 18 year-old son. "Why do folk go to that kind of thing, mum?"

Perhaps he ought to have gone to hear Oliver James, the clinical psychologist, who has taken a pasting for his new book They F*** You Up. In it  he attempts to show how best to raise children to the age of three. Thanks to a  misleading newspaper story James found himself caught in the crossfire of the  "Mummy Wars", in which women who go out to work are pitted against those who  choose to stay at home. Insisting he is not against working mothers, James  who sounded as if he could do with some psychological help himself  insisted that the government should abandon Trident and pour the money it saves into helping hard-pressedfamilies. What a dreamer.

Book Festival Despatch 4 - Wednesday 18 August

by Alan Taylor

Jon McGregor
Robert Sackville-West
Alasdair Gray


IF novelist Jon McGregor had his way he would be read and not seen. This, however, is not acceptable in an environment in which high street  bookshops may soon become as obsolete as onion johnnies. Hence McGregor's  appearance to discuss his third novel, Even the Dogs, which is concerned with an alcoholic who is found dead in his flat. Unpromising, unappealing and depressing as this may sound, the manner in which its author talked about it made one want immediately to go and buy it. What interested him in Robert, the dead man, said McGregor, was the irony that  more attention was paid to him after he was dead than when he was alive.
Inverting the normal process, he described how he preferred to do his research after rather than before he switched on his laptop. He was impressed, he added, by how busy, resourceful, creative and imaginative are alcoholics and  addicts as they pursue their routine of getting money, buying drugs, using them  and coming down. If only all that energy could be channelled productively.

In contrast, in a bizarre programming juxtaposition, Robert Saville-West followed McGregor, his subject being Knole, the largest family house in England,  whose history he has written. Now owned by the National Trust, it is a "calendar" house because it has 365 rooms. Sackville-West, who is the latest  in a long line of male heirs to Knole, recently moved with his family into a  wing which he renovated by selling off a forgotten Italian painting for more  than £6 million. Illustrating his talk with slides, he said Knole was built to  induce awe and inspire, and does. His forebears were a motley bunch of lunatics, eccentrics and libertines,
who not infrequently moved their lovers into the house. One was the writer and  gardener Vita Sackville-West, his father's first cousin, whose many lovers  included Virginia Woolf and the two bridesmaids at her wedding to Harold Nicolson. In her novel Orlando, which was dedicated to Vita, Woolf used Knole as  a backdrop, rendering perfectly in labyrinthine, over-wrought prose its enduring  magic.

From one national monument to another. Alasdair Gray, the Glaswegian polymath, came not to bury Goethe but to reinvent him, turning the German's nineteenth-century play Faust into twenty-first century Fleck who, said Gray, was named after a Scottish footballer. Joined on stage by three actors  one male, who played God and Fleck, and two female (who, among other roles, were  required to play three angels)  Gray, who took the part of Auld Nick, masterminded a dramatic and rather wonderful reading of the first act of the  play. It was a bold gamble and it worked a treat with Gray, dressed devilishly in a red jumper with his trousers at half-mast, orchestrating proceedings in his inimitable fashion. At its end the author said the play had been rejected by seven London theatres and most of their Scottish counterparts. Which, when you  come to think of it, is nothing less than outrageous.