A chance to revisit 50 years of reading

Sunday 26 August 2012

Marking half a century since the 1962 International Writers' Conference, the Edinburgh International Book Festival courted the past this week, and not just to apply 50-year-old questions to a digital world.

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alastair mabbott at the Edinburgh international book festival

It was also a time for writers to look back over old friendships.

Liz Lochhead was ostensibly there to interview James Kelman about his new novel, but their audience enjoyed seeing them reminisce "like George Burns and Gracie Allen", Lochhead admitting that when she read her first Kelman story she "didn't get it", and when they initially met poet Tom Leonard "we were all scared of each other – and we were right!"

They were united in praise for Glasgow University's inspirational Philip Hobsbaum. Kelman stories were read at Hobsbaum's class, the author recalled, and two schoolteachers never came back after being subjected to "the language of the gutter". "That prepared me for a lot in life," he added dryly.Joyce Carol Oates, though, had only nice things to say about Kelman, complimenting his skilftul use of a "modified stream of consciousness". It also turned out that her new book, Mudwoman, was inspired by a dream she'd had in Edinburgh: "It may have been the dour skies."Oates spoke candidly about the six months of insomnia she suffered after her husband's death, which often had her cleaning obsessively at 4am. "Being in one of those fugue states of mind is not necessarily a bad thing," she said, noting that her thoughts and feelings had fed into the novel.Put old buddies Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod together, and suddenly you're in a snug the size of a big top, Banks holding court with expansive and garrulous charm, unable to stay on topic. Before long, we had been taken back to 1975 to witness Banks and MacLeod encountering Mormons at their friend Les's house ("one of the peak experiences of my life!") and learned of Banks's frustration that, of all his books, he still considers The Bridge to be the best.It was a contrast to Alan Warner, who spent a more focused, calmer hour discussing the technical craft and formal challenges behind his universally acclaimed The Deadman's Pedal. He set out his difficulties with "the moral position of the third person voice" – or "the bugbear of Scottish literature", as he calls it – and explained that his key to writing convincing female characters has been to repeatedly redraft their scenes. He also discussed his approach to background research: "For me, it's not about research, it's getting into the mindset of people."Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney graciously took a back seat to his old friend Karl Miller ("for my money, the most significant literary critic in British history") when the two of them spoke with Andrew O'Hagan about the countryside. When Heaney did contribute, he made illuminating remarks, explaining that he never studied Burns at University because Burns "felt like one of our own". And of Burns's uncrowned successor? "MacDiarmid sat in the corner like somebody I knew at home, with a pipe, saying 'Aye' and 'Och'."MacDiarmid's "cosmopolitan scum" barb hung over the writers' conference panel at A National Literature? where the assembled authors discussed the importance of national identity. In his opening address, Irvine Welsh made the point that, 50 years on, the word "internationalism" has been redefined by global consumerism, with implications of homogeneity and corporate control. "Why is the aim to see our own lives reflected?" asked one delegate. Alan Bissett, on the other hand, unapologetically writes "for Scotland", declaring: "If we can't define ourselves, then others will do it for us."Later, the conference considered The Future Of The Novel, China Mieville welcoming the age of mash-ups and reader remixes but getting a mixed reception. For every Melvin Burgess, who would welcome guerrilla-editing of his novels, was a Ewan Morrison, who found Mieville's speech "naive" and grounded in "dot-communism". Ben Okri, feeling that Mieville's concerns were based on 21st-century Western anxieties, found claims of the exhaustion of the novel "puzzling".In his own session, reading from Trainspotting prequel Skagboys, Welsh said: "I suppose I wanted to write about the eighties, and look at the reasons people got into heroin." Skagboys, it was pointed out, is more politically engaged than the earlier work. "When I started writing Trainspotting, I was 28 and writing about 25-year-olds," he replied. "Writing about 21-year-olds when you're nearly 50 is very different."Welsh revealed that he is working with HBO, which has put him in mind of a TV adaptation of his Trainspotting trilogy.Another shiny-pated Scot, Grant Morrison, nurtured the schoolboy dream of writing American comics, and not only achieved his goal but became one of the most acclaimed writers in the field. Not the prophet of gritty realism you might expect, Morrison wants "to engage with the artificiality of the medium and its own rules". Accordingly, he talked of his fascination with the madness of the 1950s, when restrictions on content forced comics into bizarre areas. He also teased fans about his plans to finally explore the sexuality of Wonder Woman, a journey sharply curtailed in the early 1940s. "I've had to go somewhere else with it, and the somewhere I've gone is, I think, unusual and new."

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A chance to revisit 50 years of reading

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