The missing magic

The model for many of these events is as much religious as artistic. The high priest, aka the author, is presented to the audience in suitably adulatory fashion by an intercessor, who is neither part of the audience nor quite has the status of the author. A passage is read aloud which is followed by a series of largely reverential questions. In the book-signing tent

afterwards, members of the congregation are allowed to approach the priest for a few intimate moments (on condition that they buy their book).

It would be interesting to know what an anthropologist would make of all this or, for that matter, an archaeologist, centuries in the future, stumbling across the fossilised remains of a book festival overtaken by some Pompeii-like disaster. How would they interpret the signing table with its stack of autographed books, the glass of cheap white wine beside the author, the snaking queue? Surely they would concede that this was the site of some kind of votive exchange, an example of a belief in a primitive magic.

These religious overtones are not of themselves a bad thing. Books are magical objects and the process of writing will always be mysterious. I would far rather live in a world in which a writer, rather than a banker, was considered worthy of veneration. It would be a hard heart that begrudged the pleasure that authors – whose daily grind typically consists of long hours

working for small financial reward – get from meeting their readers. And, at their best, I genuinely believe book events help fill a void left by the decline of organised religion, providing a secular forum for considering ethical concerns. I’m thinking here of the sort of event at which the philosopher AC Grayling does so well or the excellent debate about learning to live

with less, chaired by Richard Holloway at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival.

Nonetheless, the excessively deferential nature of the average literary festival goes against the grain. Such deference, which is particularly directed towards well-known authors, runs paradoxically counter to how most book festivalgoers would like to see themselves. Why is it that people who would scorn the celebrity fixation of Heat magazine go gooey-eyed and weak-kneed in the presence of Ian McEwan?

Perhaps more insidious is the selfcongratulation that pervades some festivals, particularly those with large, captive middle-class audiences. For many such festival-goers, going to a book festival seems to be less about discovering something new than validating long-held views of themselves. In these bouts of literary tummy-tickling, the audience flatters the author with

their presence while the author flatters (but rarely challenges) the audience’s intellect.

As someone who runs a book festival, this smugness troubles me. (Even if, for reasons I’ll go into later, I don’t think Wigtown is as guilty as most.) It is something that everyone involved in the funding and running of book festivals – including the soon-to-be-appointed head of the Edinburgh International Book Festival – might care to ponder.

The success of the lit-fest as a format is indisputable. Funders like them because they are cheap to run compared with, say, staging an opera – especially since publishers traditionally pick up some of the costs for the authors they are promoting.

When Edinburgh launched a quarter of a century ago, there were four book festivals in the UK; now there are getting on for 200. From Balquhidder to Appledore, every last hamlet wants its little bit of Sebastian Faulks and Roy Hattersley.

I question how sustainable this boom is, especially given the economic slowdown. With cuts in public services looming, some local authorities may decide that they simply don’t have the

money required to help establish a festival over a number of years. Hay wasn’t built in a day; Wigtown has taken a decade of hard slog to grow to its current size, something that would not have happened without some far-sighted strategic investment by Dumfries & Galloway Council.

Likewise, sponsorship will become harder to come by, while publishers feeling the pinch will be increasingly reluctant to find budgets to send their authors to smaller or more geographically

remote festivals. The popularity of holidaying at home may boost the visitor numbers this year but it won’t be enough to offset the wider trends. A rainy day is coming. It would be no

surprise to see a few festivals go to the wall over the next few years. Perhaps, whisper it, that winnowing would be no bad thing.

At least it would stop the rest of us standing on our laurels. Because it seems to me that those book festivals that wish to not just survive, but thrive, need to start asking themselves a few fundamental questions, not least: “What exactly is the purpose of a book festival?”

Television and radio offer ample opportunities to see and hear talking heads. Reading and writing are, by their nature, solitary pursuits. What are we trying to add when we charge almost

as much to see a writer speak for an hour as it would cost to buy their book? If collectively we are unable to answer this question, then the danger is that the book festival circuit will start to feel as stale as rep theatre did in the 1950s: different town each week, same old faces, same comforting format, same dwindling, semi-engaged and increasingly complacent audiences. Oh for a Kenneth Tynan or a John Osborne.

Perhaps a more positive way of looking at this is to ask what are some of the qualities that make for an interesting book festival. My list would include the following: the widest possible mix of ages and classes; plenty of interaction between writers and audiences through debates and master classes; the ability to draw people from both near and far; a sense of humour (could some of these events be any more po-faced?). But right at the top of this list, I’d argue, is the idea that a good festival should be rooted firmly in its locale. It sounds obvious. Yet it’s surprising how often you pick up a festival brochure and have no sense of place. Wigtown is fortunate in this respect. Not only is it Scotland’s National Book Town, it’s in a part of Scotland with a very distinct sense of its own identity. Try coming to Galloway and calling it part of the Borders and you will be met with a sharp response.

What matters here is not so much landscape as people. The Wigtown Book Festival began as part of a community regeneration project, an attempt to find a new direction for a town that had

been blighted by the closure of its two main employers, the local distillery and creamery. Because of that there remains a sense of ownership. In a town of just over 900 people, more

than 70 individuals work as volunteers, taking tickets, delivering programmes, driving authors to and from stations and carrying out 1001 other tasks.

This community involvement as much as anything is what gives the Stena Line Wigtown Book Festival a sense of purpose. I’m not suggesting that it is a practical model for other lit-fests: imagine trying to drive a juggernaut like the Edinburgh International Book Festival with a volunteer army. It just wouldn’t work. But what the Wigtown experience illustrates, I think, is that every festival needs to have a heart. It needs to know why it is vital to the community within which it takes place – and why it would matter if it didn’t take place. For too many book-fests that heart is missing, and the growing trend for festival companies to run multiple events around the country (and abroad) only adds to this sense of rootlessness and soullessness.

Of course, there is more than one way that a festival can make itself essential. The greatest achievement of the outgoing Edinburgh International Book Festival director Catherine Lockerbie is not that she has made Edinburgh the largest literary festival in the world but that during her reign it cemented its place as the most genuinely international. At a time when newspaper books pages are shrinking and TV and radio coverage is confined to the Man Booker shortlist, this oasis of literary internationalism has never been more necessary.

It would be a disaster if that changed. But in other ways the Edinburgh International Book Festival is crying out for transformation. Financially, the great middle-class masses of the New Town represent a Godsend to the EIB. (This year the festival put on at least four events with Alexander McCall Smith, a tidy little earner.) Yet the very proximity of this ready-made audience has become a double-edged sword. It sometimes feels that the railings around Charlotte Square are there to keep out the wrong sort. The result is a festival which, despite the panoramic breadth of its programme, can sometimes seem a little fusty and overly homogeneous.

Whoever takes over at the EIB is going to need to address this. It’s time for the grande dame of book festivals to let her hair down and flash her petticoats a little. The first thing they should do is look at staging some events outside the parameters of Charlotte Square, taking a leaf from the Fringe’s book. Theatre directors have long understood how effective it can be to set shows outside traditional venues, with bars, cellars, historic buildings and hotels whipped into service for site-specific productions. Is it too much to imagine appropriately themed readings in the Signet Library, the parliament building in Holyrood or Harvey Nichols?

Rather than defining itself in opposition to the Fringe, the EIB should look at the party taking place outside its gates in August as an opportunity to find a new audience – not to replace the old one but to expand and diversify it. There are a lot of them out there: the 20 and 30-somethings who might lap up new writing at the Traverse or St Stephen’s but wouldn’t think of crossing the threshold of Charlotte Square. If they are not coming to the Book Festival, it’s time to take the Book Festival to them. I don’t believe that book festivals need gimmicks to survive. Part of the charm can be their simplicity. There’s a low-tech purity about the idea of two engaged people sitting on the stage just talking. But there is no reason why this has to be

always the default format. It’s interesting that two of the literary festivals with the biggest buzz about them at the moment are Port Eliot and Latitude, both of which have embraced performance. I would like to see Charlotte Square used to its full potential in the evenings. Why not programme a series of nighttime shows from the likes of Daniel Kitson, Owen O’Neill or Ben Moor, performers whose love of language ought to fit perfectly within the context of a literary festival? If AL Kennedy and Liz Lochhead can find a crossover for their shows at the

Assembly Rooms, there’s no reason why the reverse should not be true.

Will the nation still be in love with the literary festival a decade from now? I hope so. But I also know that the status quo has to change. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, an event that many of the UK’s literary festivals have been celebrating. They might do well to learn from the great Victorian. Evolve or die. There is no other choice.

The Stena Line Wigtown Book Festival runs from September 25 to October 4. For more information or to book call 01988 403222