Book Festival reviews: a promising start in a new venue


First impressions are good. The Edinburgh Futures Institute may never eclipse memories of Charlotte Square, but if it really is going to be the Book Festival’s forever home, it has much to commend it. On the grassy courtyard, the box office has shrunk alarmingly but the Spiegeltent’s return should cheer nostalgists. Inside, the venues are bright and spacious, the stages all minimalist grey and pastels, the audience seats comfy, the staff helpful and plentiful, the corridors wide enough for queueing crowds, and there as many loos and quiet areas as anyone could possibly want.
So from the moment at 9.30am on Saturday when its new director Jenny Niven walked past the Gruffalo and cut the red tape to declare it open, there’s a lot to cheer. Her programme is intelligent, forward-thinking and (on the programme if not the website) clearly presented. It’s also risky. The 10 o’clock slot in the Spiegeltent each morning chewing over the day’s news, for example, could be a daily blast of enlightenment or a snoozefest. That’s brave programming.
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Hide AdBut I’ll start towards the end of her first day, when last year’s director Nick Barley returned to chair Elif Shafak, a writer with whom he is clearly (purely professionally) besotted. One of Barley’s strengths as a chair is his ability to get writers to clearly explain their novels’ structure. Shafak’s latest, There Are Rivers in the Sky, needs it more than most.
Essentially, it seems, this is a story of a drop of water. It falls on an Assyrian king walking through Nineveh, then on a 19th century London boy who becomes the archaeologist who decodes the cuneiform tablets on which the epic of Gilgamesh is written. In our own century, it is used to baptise a nine-year-old Yazidi girl just before her people are massacred (the 73rd massacre in their history) by Islamic State.
Complicated? Of course. But, Shafak said, just look at how our civilisation is written in both water and art. At how the archeologist’s cultural colonialism is balanced by commitment. Look at what is lost by othering: Isis a short while back, a library being burnt in Liverpool just last week. She has always thought of cultures as being either solid (tolerant of minorities) or liquid (intolerant), but the dividing lines are getting more blurred, the once-solid polities now looking shakier than ever.
Remember the heady tech-led optimism of the 2000s? she asked. In Egypt, in the wake of the Arab Spring, she read of a child being named Facebook. In Israel, another was named Like. Different days.
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Hide AdA bookfest with the title Future Tense can’t be a place for facile optimism. It’s got to be grounded. So can literature help? Yes, said Shafak. “People may forget what you said to them or what you have done to them, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Not a bad way of judging a book festival event, I thought. And hers made me feel I’ll have to read her book.
With the event honouring John Burnside, it was impossible to feel anything other than a sense of loss at the death in May of such an enormously talented writer. Fellow poet Robin Robertson, novelist and singer/songwriter Malachi Tallack, The Essex Serpent novelist Sarah Perry (very impressive: catch her event with Richard Holloway at noon on 12 August) and chair Robyn Marsack all reminded us not only of the depth of Burnside's engagement with the natural world but also his generous support of other writers.
And, of course, his poetry. To Robertson, Burnside’s work was “as mysterious and as natural as breathing” - so much so that reading it “didn’t feel like reading as much as easing into his hinterland”. “His baseline,” added Perry, “was transcendency. John’s poetry was a perforation of reality that takes you straight to the way he saw life”. Next year will see the publication of a posthumous collection, The Empire of Forgetting. As if anyone who knew him ever could.
I’m tempted not to mention the biggest names on Niven’s first day - Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson, who probably didn’t even need the added bonus of being chaired by national treasure Jackie Kay - on the grounds that theirs was one of the 100 live-streamed events so you can check it out yourself on the festival’s website. Their reunion as Kelvinside am-dram duo Victor and Barry was prompted by the British Library’s discovery of a recording of one of their shows from 1991. “Back then,” said Cumming, “we didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘artisanal’. Victor [his character] pronounced it ‘art is anal’ [pauses, raises eyebrows, looks to audience] ... and there was none of THAT in those days either.” And if 1990s nostalgia gets you salivating, the good news is that the duo are already working on High Life: The Musical with the National Theatre of Scotland.
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Hide AdTheir Victor and Barry alter egos, both men agreed, left them with one priceless asset. “Doing live TV and in cabaret at huge theatres made us unafraid of the audience.” Margaret Atwood accidentally went one better in the professionalism stakes. Because her live feed to Edinburgh didn’t work, she couldn’t see either her audience or her interviewer, speculative novelist Naomi Alderman. Still on the Future Tense theme, she talked with her customary Sahara-dry wit about utopias and dystopias, why Trump won’t win, why cryogenics won’t work, how we already can build printable houses and already have developed plastic-and oil-devouring mushrooms.
Every utopia, she said, contains its opposite. But some are impractical beyond belief. Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendentalist father tried out one - Fruitlands, a commune at Harvard. “They were going to live a pure and virtuous life based on fruit and vegetables,” she explained. “But they didn’t grow anything that grew down, like carrots, because that was too earthy. They didn’t last long.”
If only they’d met poet, artist and historian JC Niala. In fact, if only more people had than the 40 people at her Saturday morning event. I thought she was brilliant. She is an excellent writer, and opened up a subject - the anthropology of allotments - that I know nothing about and which, I have to admit, sounds boring.
It wasn’t. Niala’s writing mixes colonial history (she grew up in Kenya) and memoir with guerrilla gardening (burying a tennis court-sized artwork on a disused Tesco site in Liverpool) and history - everything from the Diggers to the allotments behind the First World War trenches to working with former criminals in Kibera, usually described as Africa’s largest slum. The event which followed it, on Caring for Future Generations was, it felt, its complete opposite, long on jargon and mantras (“decolonising Time”, anyone?) and short on practicalities.
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Hide AdIt’s easy to forget what a difficult year this has been for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. As recently as September, it was still uncertain whether it needed to find an alternative venue as the site looked so far from ever being ready in time. In May, performative so-called climate activists threatened its very future by forcing it to end a valuable sponsorship partnership with Baillie Gifford.
There are still problems ahead, and certainly the cramped, Waterstone’s-run bookshop seems more determined to resemble any other branch of the chain rather than celebrating the works of festival authors. But Jenny Niven’s first festival is up and running, and anyone who loves books can only hope its future at the Futures Institute is long and bright.
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