Book Festival reviews: Rebecca F. Kuang | Marion Keyes | Peter Pomerantsev

R.F. Kuang | Mike Styer

Because her husband wanted to be near his parents, Rebecca F. Kuang spent the pandemic summer of 2021 in “Nowheresville, Florida”. She didn’t know anyone her own age there and the only way of keeping in touch with the rest of the world was being on Twitter (“it was still functional then”) all the time.

She soaked up its mad, virulent energy and angry concision and put it into the book she was writing, along with all her doubts, self-loathing, fear of being overlooked, and  everything she’d already picked up on about publishing. A quick stir of satire and the worldwide bestseller that is Yellowface was born.

It’s a story about June, a young white writer whose more successful, rich Chinese-American frenemy dies suddenly. June then passes off her rival’s manuscript as her own work, and rides the hype wave as far as she can.  Which - because of cover-ups and complicity at every stage from agents to (gulp) festivals - turns out to be very far indeed. 

There’s a whole host of ideas - on cultural appropriation, diversity and tokenism - floating around here and Kuang took her audience through them with all the intellectual brio one might expect from someone with an MPhil from Cambridge, an MSc from Oxford and who is finishing up a PhD at Yale. All that, five published novels, and still only 28.   

In June 2021, around the time Huang was following Twitter flame wars, Marion Keyes was driving round Co Galway, where “after the sensory deprivation of lockdown, I felt I’d taken loads of LSD, everything was so phenomenally beautiful”.

Some of that formed the background to 2022’s Rachel, Again - the 25-years-on sequel to her 1997 blockbuster Rachel’s Holiday (sales 1.5m and counting), and we’re back there again in her new novel, My Favourite Mistake. 

This time we’re following Anna, another of the Walsh sisters. She’s walking away from a stress-filled job  as a New York PR and a too-nice boyfriend, who is, says Keys, “what’d I’d call a right feathery stroker”. (If I told you that the opposite to a feathery stroker is a “headboard piledriver”, you might get the picture.)

Keyes has long been in that sweet spot where popular and critical appeal meet, and it’s easy to see why. Here it was her writing about post-menopausal love that seems  to strike a chord, but I think she has also hit on something that is under-explored in fiction: the gap left by the ending of a close female friendship.

In person, and though she has been sober for 30 years, Keyes is as friendly and bubbly as a third glass of Prosecco. The audience adored her. 

Peter Pomerantsev couldn’t make it to Edinburgh but beamed in from Baltimore to the Courtyard Theatre’s screen 20 times larger than life. This made him look rather like Big Brother, which - given that he was talking about state power and propaganda -  was both apt and disconcerting. 

Although British journalist Sefton Delmer (1904-79) is long dead, in the Second World War he pioneered disinformation techniques  that are still with us.

The radio stations he set up to broadcast to Nazi Germany succeeded, he pointed out, not because they blethered on about the virtues of democracy but because they offered something useful to their listeners: a bit of mendacious gossip about Gestapo officers here, some (true) German football scores and information about air raids there.  

Deceit isn’t enough, he said. To make people follow a line, you have to tap into their emotions, offer them snippets of truth but, above all, give them a sense of belonging. A fascinating talk and, in the era of Trump and Putin, frighteningly relevant.

David Robinson