The first week of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is up and, in terms of precision organisation and feelgood atmosphere, this is the brightest things have ever looked. The technology works consistently, events go off at a pneumatic pace, authors enjoy themselves.
I'd argue for a greater concentration of internationals and a tougher intellectual core. But then I don't have to keep a fledgling annual event financially solvent. And audiences know what they like. Prospective investors take note. Sell-out events predominate; ticket sales are up by 25% on last year. So it's interesting to note what few events haven't pulled in the crowds. Put it this way: if alcohol sets the pulse racing, democracy is clearly a sedative.
On Thursday evening Russian author Vitali Vitaliev, Scottish rake Tom Morton, and English poet Simon Armitage charged an audience with the symptoms of booze in what used to be called the ''national character'' and is now termed ''cultural identity''. Vitaliev drew the parallel between vodka's origins as a medicine for the body with its use under Soviet communism as a medicine for the spirit, ''to obliterate reality''. Armitage noted that in England Blue Nun is still the best-selling wine, ''a shocking indictment'' of the culture. And Tom Morton took an ancient analysis of the differing effects of drink on different peoples (it makes the Finns weepy, the Germans quarrelsome, the Gauls querulous, and the Goths obstreperous) and noted that whisky had all four of these effects on the Scots.
This easy antisyzygy of potent commentary on the human soul and fast-track entertainment (take ''Ceaucescu ruined my liver'' for tragi-comic effect) was not matched by a maudlin discussion, Scottish Writers on Democracy, the same night. Audiences stayed away and each of the writers - Kathleen Jamie, Andrew O'Hagan, and Chris Dolan - acknowledged that the dominant public sentiments of Scottish devolution had become complacency and disillusion. At one moment it occurred to me that, hey, we haven't had Stalin or Ceausescu to ruin our livers (we do it in a state of grim freedom) and now even the pressures of Scottish political resentment have been lightened a bit. C'mon, thing's ain't so bad. But as O'Hagan pointed out, ''saying that things are all right really doesn't make for a great debate.''
Kathleen Jamie's sense of the writer's role in democracy was to remain on guard, not for old ideological enemies but for the new enemies of complacency and greed.
International Writers on Democracy the following day had the recent shadow of serious totalitarianism to inflame their notions of the meaning of democracy. But audiences were still apparently unconcerned. South African novelist Andre Brink noted the irony of pleading for a political system that draws everyone together in an arena where so many had stayed away. But this was raw stuff all the same. The writer's need to be in opposition, said Brink, was a need which was seeded in him by a now-vanished system of apartheid. But this oppositional instinct was a basic tool of the trade. ''I don't think there is any fair, free, open society in the world,'' he said with the confidence of one who knows his kind will always be in a job.
Joined by Herta Muller, a German-speaking Romanian whose stark, clear, analysis of writing under dictatorship was a lightning-bright wake-up call to more comfortable times, and Trinidad-born Earl Lovelace on the legacies of Western guilt which transpose the victims of racism into new demons, this was worth every empty seat in the Post Office Theatre.
n In case you're in any doubt as to the state of contemporary British literature, writes Lesley McDowell, Tibor Fischer, award-winning author of Under the Frog and co-editor of New Writing Vo 8, part of the British Council's new writing series, promoting both published and unpublished writers, was at the Book Festival to remind us. One of the most interesting panels, the Best of New Writing, consisted of poet Simon Armitage and New Zealander Emily Perkins, who set out to expand on the concept of Brit Lit.
Fischer's claim that the new writing volumes are open to anyone (budding writers get ready - Volume 10 will soon be looking for contributors) was tempered by his admission that he ''did go around and ask friends for stuff'', who just happened to be published and well-placed friends like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. His assertion that ''good writing isn't difficult to find, it's obvious'', was substantiated by Armitage's witty and observant schoolboy poems (''an age of possibility when nothing is fixed'') and Perkins's take on schoolgirl politics.
Young writers feeding off other writers was interestingly evident in a session with ''hot new Scottish talent'' Sarah Sheridan who read from her new novel, Ma Polinski's Pockets, partly based on the experiences of a Holocaust survivor.
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