Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Ali Smith | William Dalrymple

Ali Smith’s experimental quartet of seasonal novels was described on Friday night by Edinburgh International Book Festival director Nick Barley as “one of the most significant works of fiction of the 21st century”. More than 1,000 people tuned in to the online festival for the launch of the final novel in the series, Summer.

Smith can be relied on to find words for the times in which we find ourselves, and has coined what might be best description so far for Covid-19, “the world’s tiniest, biggest disruptor”. She began her event with a short film, “Festival”, an essay paired with found footage by the artist Sarah Wood.

As archival images of Edinburgh shimmered on the screen, she reminded us how the city’s festival began – with a vision of cultural connection across borders in the post-war years – and that creativity is communal, however isolated we feel.“What happens in a book is the opposite of lockdown,” she said. “It is a communal act of thinking and imagining.”

She spoke about the guiding spirits of Summer: the artists and writers who were interned as enemy aliens during the Second World War on the Isle of Man; the filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti, who became a key figure in the British Free Cinema movement; Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.

And she reminded us that all art is political, the lens “through which we see what structures are around us and how they work with us or against us”.

Smith’s quartet of novels exemplify something the Book Festival as a whole does well: drawing insights from the past to speak to the present moment. Historian William Dalrymple’s history of the East India Company (The Anarchy) has much light to shed on today.

Speaking with journalist Fergal Keane, Dalrymple recounted frankly the greed and brutality of the company, “the world’s first multinational corporation”, of country houses in Scotland furnished with Indian “loot” (a Hindustani word coming into use in English at this time), of “asset stripping” without mercy, and of sending armed soldiers to collect taxes during a famine in 1770s Bengal. While more than a million people died, the investors regarded the exercise to be so successful they awarded themselves an increased dividend.

So there is little new about the actions of multinationals, from a disregard for human life to the use of profit to buy political favour. We must get real, Dalrymple urged, about the foundations of British imperial rule in India: not benevolent, not philanthropic, not a Merchant Ivory movie, but driven by a ruthless desire for profit.

Power and profit as drivers in Donald Trump’s America were dissected by journalist Masha Gessen, in conversation with lawyer Philippe Sands. Gessen’s background, first in Soviet Russia, then as an observer of the rise of Putin, has given them a valuable perspective on present day US. Gessen’s essay, Surviving Autocracy, written the day after Trump’s election and now the basis for a book, offers important insights on his term of office.

Gessen spoke of Trump’s admiration of other autocrats, from Putin to Kim Jong-un; the erosion of the institutions of state, perhaps beyond repair; the danger of looking for normality in an abnormal situation; and the president’s use of “the entire autocratic repertoire” in his language.

Language is often where the trouble starts, said novelist Elif Shafak, speaking about her new (non-fiction) book, a long essay written in lockdown called How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. The dehumanising of other human beings starts with words, so the battle against it must begin with words too.

In a world where little is solid, and democracy is more fragile than we thought, writers don’t have the luxury of being apolitical, she said.

But – in a beautiful echo of Ali Smith – the novel is a democratic space because reading is an act of empathy, or seeing the world through another’s eyes.

Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Ali Smith | William Dalrymple | Elif Shafak