Method in madness

As a youngling, the Browser was adamant that Modernism, Psychology and the Avant-Garde were the heights of literary brilliance. How odd then, as middle age settles on me like a comfy dressing-gown, to discover that the conservative, common-sense Catholic apologist G K Chesterton delights me more than Virginia Woolf or Samuel Beckett. I was discussing Chesterton and his relationship to Robert Louis Stevenson at the excellent Stirling conference on RLS, and quoted a line which ought to be tattooed on every aspiring writer's napper: "the fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world".

Scotch mythed

Chesterton was hovering in my thoughts again as I went off to the City Chambers in Edinburgh for a soire to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Edinburgh. The evening had been put together by Harry Reid, whose volume on the Reformation is one of the last titles published by the Kirk's St Andrews Press – a casualty of the economic cuts. Harry has been spending the year nobly attempting to convince Scotland to shrug off its myths about the Reformation: but, in the words of Chesterton "The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad."

We have lift off

And with that in mind, I went to my own book launch. Unlike some literary editors I won't use this column as free advertising space: but the night went swimmingly; rather like having a second wedding party. Curiously, I'm always more interested in what I've read than what I've written, so my top tip for the summer is to recommend Jeff Vandermeer, above, and Chris Beckett, whose novels introduce a robot that might be the Messiah and a detective working for the Mushroom People.