Book festival
Cosy chats with Ely and John
Anne Smith finds the tents in Charlotte Square a little stuffy this year
Queueing for the Jilly Cooper show, an excited mother remarks to her daughter, `I can't wait to see how tall she is. Appar- ently she's a tiny little thing.' At question time a member of the audience asks, 'How do you physically write your books?' Later in the week someone asks John Mortimer, `Do you need a period of peace and quiet to create your characters?' Well, it is a festival after all, and nothing very profound can be expected from popu- lar novelists manifesting themselves to the faithful and the curious in tents so well constructed that they let in none of the brisk Caledonian breeze and are conse- quently as stuffy as the audience for an interview with Monica Dickens. If anything profound were threatened, there is always the sporadic roar of buses changing gear as they round Charlotte Square to distract. But we are here to celebrate, not cerebrate.
The Charlotte Square Book Festival is a far cry from those notorious literary events of past Festivals, when a poets' conference that had gone stale with the intransigent egos of the participants could be enlivened by the trundling on to the platform of a nude model. This is a festival of respectability, where Jilly Cooper can explain why she seems to love her dogs more than her husband to a murmur of tweed-skirted approval. Books are quite good fun and authors are tame creatures really, it tells you between the lines.
John Mortimer reflected the tone when he commented that, 'When I say things `Oh no! It's Hermann Friday!' they sound obnoxious and left-wing; when Rumpole says the same things they sound crusty and conservative.' He gave the sec- ond of the Teacher's Sunday Night Lec- tures, on The Truth about Fiction'. It was an anecdotal performance, in which he kept nodding and smiling at his theme rather than actually engaging with it and grappling it to the ground. The closest he came to profundity was with the rhetorical question, 'Who is more real, Falstaff or Mr John Major?' A bottle of whisky was raf- fled at the end.
Jilly Cooper's conservatism — she admires Mr Major to the point of indiscre- tion — did not stand out like a sore thumb in this genteel and civilised affair, though it perhaps ought to have done, given how much the Book Festival appears to lean to the left. In last Saturday's debate on cen- sorship, for instance, Allan Massie was out- numbered by Duncan Campbell and John McGrath (outnumbered but not over- whelmed; everyone more or less agreed). On the same day, left-wing luminary Anto- nia Fraser described the hardship of being the only girl in her convent school with ambition: 'Fifty per cent wanted to be wives, 49 per cent wanted to be nuns, and I was the one per cent who wanted to be a journalist on the Daily Express.'
That was rather a good session, with feminist crime novelist Sara Paretsky being frank about her insecurity and both agree- ing that they felt, 'If it fails, I can always get a job as a secretary [Paretsky] or an accounts typist [Fraser] again.' Jilly Cooper does not have the same security, having been sacked no fewer than 22 times from such demanding posts. No, she is not rich, she insisted to Hunter Davies, who pursued her on the subject of her earnings to the point of discomfort: she has all those dogs to feed and, The children don't work and they say they need BMW convertibles'.
Doris Lessing came unprepared and gave pretty much the talk she gave four years ago. George MacDonald Fraser of Flash- man fame used his session to argue against the cutting-back of the Scottish regiments, and people wondered if he should have `got so political' at a book festival. Mar- garet Forster fascinated with her account of how she had been researching the life of her heroine, Daphne Du Maurier.
Meanwhile the Scottish theme — 'Why Scottish History Matters', 'The Nature of Scotland', 'The Role and Performance of Literary Magazines in Scotland' — throbs on in the background like barely heard bagpipe music. This week's three-day Inter- national Writers' Conference on Aspects of the Novel might just introduce one or two more dangerous, foreign animals to the menagerie, but not enough, probably, to send a draught up the tweed skirts or ruffle the feathers of the ever-increasing flocks of literary yuppies who attend.
Anne Smith is working with lain Finlayson on The Dictionary of Scottish Quotations.
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