St Andrew's Book Festival, London reviews: Ian Rankin | Hugo Rifkind | Alexander McCall Smith

The inaugural St Andrew’s Book Festival drew to a close with Rankin on Rebus, Rifkind on Rabbits and McCall Smith on friendship and forgiveness, writes David Robinson

The first St Andrew's Book Festival in London ended its titular saint’s day on Saturday on a high, with Colin McIntyre (aka Mull Historical Society) leading Sir Ian Rankin and the congregation in a version of Auld Lang Syne that was loud enough to be vaguely convincing, if somewhat lacking in interlocked arms.

Earlier, chair Georgina Godwin had taken Rankin on a gentle trot through his 25-book relationship with his main fictional protagonist and his various musical or theatrical side projects. Yet the focus never slipped far from Rebus, with Rankin admitting that even though he was executive producer of Gregory Burke’s small-screen adaptation earlier this year, he never realised just how sweaty and violent it actually was – something he hopes to rectify if a second series gets the green light.

His relationship with Rebus is, he says, a strange one. “I like him more than he’d like me. To him, I’d just be a wishy-washy liberal who’s never done a day’s work in his life. I’m 64 and I’ve spent 40 years of my life arguing with him. The fact that I’ve put him in jail in my new book is proof of that. Maybe he’s going to meet people in prison who make him realise that crime isn’t always as black and white as he thinks it is.”

And maybe, he hinted, there’d be a locked cell murder to solve, Michael Fox to put back in his box and a prison to be stopped from imploding.

As a plot, I find that a lot more intriguing than the one Hugo Rifkind outlined in the preceding event about his novel Rabbits, which seemed to involve a group of hormonal, hedonistic upper-class teenagers slaughtering wildlife and generally behaving badly. This might be unfair, because I admire Rifkind’s wit on radio and his verve as a newspaper columnist, and The Scotsman’s own Allan Massie gave Rabbits a good review, but his event sent out too many conflicting signals. For one thing, he said that all teenagers are sociopaths, yet none of his friends has spent their teenage years shooting rabbits and birds. Ah yes, he said, but they would have done if they’d had the opportunity. Really?

Perhaps the event which Rifkind had chaired (ably, as expected) with James Naughtie and Gavin Esler, earlier on, had affected my mood. In it, Naughtie had compared the dangers the world faced back in 1984 – the setting for his novel The Spy Across the Water – with today. “Back then, we were holding the line. Now, we don’t know where the line is. A month or so ago, South Africa and India decided to forego the Commonwealth summit and go to meet Putin instead and Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the UN, goes to Moscow to pay obeisance. And North Korea sent troops to help Russia fight its war in the same week Donald Trump won the US election.”

Agreeing that these are far scarier times than anything Thatcher faced, Esler pointed out that whatever you thought about her, at least she was trying to solve problems rather than just distract the electorate with false promises. And as the conversation, eloquent and informed, swung round to political lying and the decline of media objectivity, it was hard not to feel gloomy. I could only find three antidotes.

First of all, Sir Alexander McCall Smith – not just for the gentle humour of 44 Scotland Street but for the moral grace that underlies all of his work. His latest standalone novel, The Winds from Further West, tackles cancel culture, with an academic hounded out of his job after being misquoted. Friendship and forgiveness – two things completely missing in social media pile-ons – are fundamental. A happy ending helps, ideally on Mull, and the novel has that too.

It’s thanks to McCall Smith’s vision that we now have the Great Tapestry of Scotland, and the illustrated talk historian Alistair Moffat and project manager Jan Rutherford gave about it deserved a far larger audience, not least to hear how its 1,000-plus stitchers helped bring a female perspective to our history, personalising it and adding detail in the process.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw it finished,” said Moffat. “I walked down the panels with tears streaming down my face. I hadn’t anticipated the power it has, the vibrancy of the colour and text together. It was the first time I heard its music, the music of the women who had made it. It was a love letter to Scotland.”

Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa is also a powerful love letter to a country. In her case, it’s Ukraine and last Thursday it won First Book of the Year at the Scottish Book Awards. She’ll go far. And whatever the future holds for Ukraine, let’s hope St Andrew can help. He’s their patron saint as well as ours.

READ MORE: St Andrew's Book Festival, London reviews: Chris Brookmyre | Alan Taylor | Coineach MacLeod