Festival review: Borders Book Festival, Harmony Garden, Melrose
Borders Book Festival, Harmony Garden, Melrose
On Friday morning, a colloquium at Bowhill on historical fiction with authors shortlisted for this year’s Walter Scott Prize teased apart some of the moral hazards of the genre, discussing questions such as whether a novel with a sympathetic portrait of, say, a slaveholder could ever win publication today.
It’s a valid question: although in his own event in the evening, Robert Harris did mention that the protagonist of An Officer and a Spy was an unrepentant anti-Semite, and that was published ten years ago.
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For his latest book, Act of Oblivion, he admitted that he had to invent the central character, who is hunting down two Cromwellian regicides in 1660s New England.
Researching its puritan townships, he said, he had never realised the extent to which the foundations of modern America were laid down then. (“Exactly,” Jim Naughtie muttered behind me).
The real justification for historical fiction, he said, is that fictional characters can bring the past to life far more vividly than historians ever could. Anyone attending Richard Holloway’s talk on Adam Smith would have the right philosophical vocabulary for this: a circle of sympathy extending back into the past.
Elsewhere, Judy Murray was as dazzling an interviewee talking about her novel as she had been six years ago at Melrose (her first book festival) discussing her memoir.
Kate Bingham was no less impressive talking about bringing an effective Covid vaccine to market via endless conference calls from her Herefordshire home where husband Jesse Norman (then a Treasury minister) organised £100 billion of furlough payments downstairs.
But although Norman was at the festival in his own right as a historical novelist (The Winding Stair is out this month), Saturday’s real political star was Andy Burnham, who charmed his audience more effectively than any Labour politician I’ve seen for a long while.