Edinburgh International Book Festival reviews: Kate Atkinson | Louise Welsh | Sir Alexander McCall Smith

Our latest roundup of Book Festival reviews includes Kate Atkinson revealing her plans for Jackson Brodie, Louise Welsh on what she would do if she found a dead body and Sir Alexander McCall Smith in typically charming and giggly mood

Author Kate Atkinson

She’s been dead half a century, but the spirit of Agatha Christie still hovers over writers’ imaginations.  Already at this book festival Alistair Moffat has blamed her creation of the fictional village of St Mary Mead for English nationalism (a bit of a reach, surely?) and Christopher Brookmyre has dreamed up its Perthshire equivalent in his new novel, The Cracked Mirror. Now along comes Kate Atkinson with a murder in a country house.

Atkinson doesn’t think of herself as a crime writer, and you only had to listen to her reading from Death at the Sign of the Rook yesterday to see why. In the extract she chose, when we were reintroduced to her protagonist Jackson Brodie, the narrative mixed whimsy (imagining Hemingway at Betty’s tea shop in Ilkley), with details of Brodie’s car choice, and his childhood memories of meat pies in Castleford. Somewhere amongst all of that, she is seeding the plot, but not so obviously that as to be boring. Character matters more.

“It’s just the way I write, dark and light together,” she said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Yet if it really was so easy, the book wouldn’t have been 20 years in the making. She’s been mentioning it, she said, ever since she first started speaking at book festivals.

Atkinson considers A God in Ruins her best, while Big Sky is her favourite Jackson Brodie and the astonishing Life After Life was the easiest to write. Next up is a novel set at the time of the Festival of Britain (she’s 70,000 words in but stuck) and at some stage Jackson Brodie will go on a cruise. I’m a fan, so I hope we don’t have to wait 20 years for either.

In the reading Louise Welsh gave from To The Dogs, her university vice-principal main character was facing down a crowd of students protesting “No to blood money!” against a Saudi-funded campus development. The question of whether this was an ironic commentary on Fossil Free Books’ campaign against Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of book festivals went, alas, unasked. (Interestingly, on Monday, Ed Conway pointed out that there’s no such thing as fossil free books as paper-making involves china clay, and both ink and glue are derived from petrochemicals.)

Welsh said she particularly liked the way in which the crime novel has the capacity to blend social realism with violence, but that there’s usually an element of absurdity about the latter. If she ever came across a dead body herself, for example, she’d phone the police straight off: there’d be no story. Her new book’s plot depends on her protagonist doing just the opposite.

To the best of my knowledge, Sir Alexander McCall Smith has yet to produce a murdered body in his fiction. In his new book, the 26th (!) In the Mma Ramotswe series, there is indeed a country house hotel, but it’s in Botswana, not Atkinson’s fictional Yorkshire village of Burton Makepeace. But although he mentioned the title of his book – The Great Hippopotamus Hotel – that was about as far as he went.

This is the McCall Smith way with book festivals. He might read the odd poem, but basically he’s there for the chat. And as he is one of the most charming and brainiest raconteurs in the business (and certainly the one with the most infectious giggle) no-one minds.

So it was here. Instead of plugs for books, there were overheard Morningside conversations and psychologists’  academic papers on love, mixed in with serious musings on the divisiveness of social media: “We all know that leads to unhappiness. Community and friendliness – that’s what people really want”. And at McCall Smith’s event, that’s exactly what they got.

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