Book Festival round-up: Richard Osman | Irvine Welsh | Caroline Lucas + more

Richard Osman | Edinburgh International Book Festival

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club novels have been one of the great publishing sensations of recent years. On Saturday, Book Festival audiences packed the McEwan Hall to hear Osman speak for the first time about his new book, We Solve Murders, his first departure from the series. 

After a quartet of books set in the retirement complex at Cooper’s Chase, he said he “wanted to write something more globe-trotting. I then thought: what would be the most fun way to do this? With someone who doesn’t want to go around the world.”

Enter ex-cop Steve Wheeler, who is perfectly happy with his life in a New Forest village finding lost cats and winning the local pub quiz. He finds himself drawn into a globe-trotting adventure when his daughter-in-law Amy, a protection agent for the super rich, needs his help.

With Amy and best-selling pulp novelist Rosie D’Antonia in tow, he is the reluctant lead in an international “caper” involved superyachts and private jets, outwitting hitmen and pursuing justice.

Osman, who had a significant career in television before he started to write - latterly as creative director of TV production company Endemol - seems to have an intuitive grasp of what is good entertainment, whether on the printed page or in swapping crime-writing stories with interviewer Ian Rankin.

But he said that he feels strongly that his writing “must come from truth about how the world is, how we treat each other. That gives me the freedom to muck about and entertain.”

Promising to return to The Thursday Murder Club for his next novel, he described visits to the set to the film which is currently being shot in the UK with director Chris Columbus and a top quartet of British actors as the four leads: Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley. Regardless of their star status, however, he said, everyone on set was starstruck when Steven Spielberg, whose company is producing the film, helicoptered in for a visit.

It was a day of “firsts” at the Book Festival: a few hours later historian William Dalrymple spoke for the first time about his new book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.

This, too, marks something of a departure. Dalrymple, who has written so compellingly about the world of the Mughals and the East India Company, now turns the clock further back to reveal a story which is almost unknown in this country: the pivotal role played by India in international trade stretching across half the world. 

Traditional maps of the silk road from Europe to China bypass India, but map discoveries of caches of Roman coins and you find different story. This reveals India was a great trading nation, the focal point for trade in luxury goods between China and the West. In the days of the Roman empire, Pliny blamed it as being the main drain on the coffers of Rome.

When Rome fell, India turned its attention eastwards, exporting art and ideas, philosophy, medicine, mathematics and religion all over East Asia. That’s why the biggest surviving Hindu temple in the world is at Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the biggest surviving Bhuddish shrine at Borobudur in Java.

For a brief time in the 7th century, Buddhism was even the state religion of China. And the numbers zero to nine, often believed to be an Arab invention, actually originated in India.

When he was asked why we in the UK don’t know this story, he replied: “One word: colonialism. You can’t argue that you’re conquering a country and bringing it civilisation if it was civilised already, so it has been more or less ignored by our education system.”

And there was one more “first”: journalist and self-help author Oliver Burkeman spoke for the first time about his soon-to-be-released book, Meditations for Mortals. The book follows on from 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, offering practical reflections for day to day life. 

Burkeman explained that 4,000 Weeks represented a sea-change in his thinking. Having tried hundreds of solutions to manage life in the overstretched contemporary world, he decided he might have “been asking the wrong question”. Perhaps the attempt to find a magic solution to put us in control of our lives is, in fact, the problem.

Accepting, instead, that such control isn’t always possible, that life is finite and imperfect, is ultimately “empowering”, enabling us to build a meaningful life in the present.

Thoughtful and far-reaching solutions to some of the problems of the UK were on the agenda in the morning in an excellent event in which former Green Party leader - and an MP until July - Caroline Lucas was in conversation with Allan Little about her book Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story.

After the Brexit referendum, Lucas said, divisions deepened between the countries of the UK, and England was the only one not considering deeply questions of its own identity. Instead this discussion had been “hijacked by the Right” with an agenda of exceptionalism and exclusion.

She was frank in her criticism of Boris Johnson’s government as being “totally unprincipled”, pushing a blatant rhetoric of imperialism. How about some facts, instead? If the country is being fed jingoism on the back of the Battle of Britain, it’s time to remember that one in 10 pilots in that battle were refugees from occupied Europe.

Drawing on a great deal of knowledge and reading, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the poetry of John Clare to the novels of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham, she suggests a range of new ways to understand Englishness, including a heritage of tolerance and progressiveness, and a complex relationship to nature and the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, best-selling author Nicci French - actually, husband and wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French - was interviewed by another writing couple, Scotland’s Christopher Brookmyre and his wife Marisa Haetzman. Gerrard and French, who have written 25 novels together and sold more than 16 million books worldwide, were talking about their latest novel, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?, about a woman who goes missing in 1990 and the impact on her family through the following three decades.

What the audience most wanted to know, however, was: what is it like to write collaboratively with your spouse? Gerrard and French plan everything together, then write in separate rooms at opposite ends of their house, emailing their work to each other for editing.

Very different writers when working individually, they seem to have found a way, through trust, diplomacy and respect for one another’s work, to “write into the same voice”.

Diplomacy, by contrast, has never been a priority for Irvine Welsh, who used to delight Book Festival crowds with his deliciously outrageous tales. On Friday night, he seemed uncharacteristically reserved, answer questions from Denise Mina about his latest book, Resolution, the concluding part of a trilogy featuring policeman Ray Lennox, and its successful TV adaptation starring Dougray Scott.

Lest one assumes that the bad boy of Scottish literature has retreated into writing police procedurals, Welsh explained that the focus of the trilogy is elsewhere: Lennox is fighting his own demons, determined to track down the men who attacked and abused him as a young man.

He did surprise the audience, however, by naming his most important literary influence as Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. He had said as much to Waugh’s son Auberon when he found himself seated next to him on a transatlantic flight, to whom is was arguably an even greater surprise.