Conversations that bring us together despite the distancing
The festival’s careful choice of interviewers has resulted in nuanced and joyful discussions, writes Susan Mansfield
Aweek in, I think I’m beginning to get used to the online manifestation of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. And while I miss Charlotte Square – the smell of wet grass, the buzz of conversation inside the Main Theatre before the author comes in – I can see the value of a festival which authors and readers can attend wherever they are in the world. And not only that, but attend for free, and even watch the events we miss on catch-up.
The theme of the festival is about continuing conversations, and this week has been about witnessing a series of conversations between writers, sometimes in the same room, sometimes in different countries. The Book Festival organisers seem to have sensed, rightly, that these pairings are more important online than for live events, often matching writers with others who know and love their work.
Let’s begin with another conversation. It’s 2016, in a monastery near Bethlehem. Two men are meeting: Rami, an Israeli who lost his 13-yearold daughter in an attack by Palestinian bombers and Bassan, a Palestinian, whose ten-year-old daughter was shot in the head at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier. The meeting is witnessed by the novelist Colum Mccann, and in that “worldcleaving” moment, he knew he had the subject of his next book.
At the Book Festival, Mccann (in New York) was in conversation with the Palestinian writer and lawyer Raja Shehadeh (in Ramallah), who described the novel, Apeirogon, as offering “more insight into this complex and bitter conflict that any other book I have read”. The novel has been long-listed for the Booker Prize, and Steven Spielberg has acquired the film rights.
Mccann spoke of his decision to write the (true) story of Rami and Bassan as a novel, so he could write from inside the heads of the characters, changing Rami’s motorbike from an automatic to manual “because I wanted the reader to feel the jolt of the clutch”. And he spoke about the importance of conversation, how difficult and untidy and essential it is.
There can be few people who know more about navigating a path between fact and fiction than Hilary Mantel, also Booker-longlisted for The Mirror and the Light, the concluding part of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. In conversation with Charlotte Higgins in her home in Devon in one of the most hotly anticipated events of the Book Festival, Mantel spoke about rigorous research, and about using the imagination to go where the historical record does not, into the realm of private thought and feeling.
While writing the book, she had many long conversations with historian Diamaid Macculloch, author of a recent biography of Cromwell, about the events which shaped his downfall and ended in his execution on the orders of Henry VIII. While her take remains slightly different from Macculloch’s, both are writing from a place of research and profound understanding.
Mantel says she has no plans for another big historical novel (“I would like to have some life before it’s too late”), but hopes to continue writing for the theatre, and writing short stories. She did take a moment to shine a light from the age of the Tudors into contemporary political life, describing the US presidency of Donald Trump as offering “an insight into what it means when an individual exercises arbitrary powers”, and commenting that, even in the current “age of information”, facts are as easily distorted as ever.
Meanwhile, writer and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands (in France) in conversation with Ian Rankin (in Edinburgh) talked about the difficulty of writing a story so incredible you couldn’t make it up. Sands’ new book, The Ratline, began with another remarkable meeting, when he met Horst Von Wächter, the son of Nazi Otto Von Wächter, in his 17th-century castle in Austria.
The likeable and hospitable Horst made no attempt to disguise his admiration for his father, who was responsible for the slaughter of Sands’ grandfather’s family in the Ukranian city of Lviv, and was indicted for mass murder in 1945. He shared with Sands an astonishing family archive which charted Wachter’s years on the run after the war, living wild in the Alps before reaching Rome in the hope of a passage on the “ratline” – an escape route – to Argentina.
While the book has the pace of an adventure story, for Sands it has a vital question at its heart: how intelligent, ordinary, middle-class people come to be responsible for terrible acts.
Some festival events felt like conversations between friends on which we were allowed to eaves
By looking at the world as Ali witnessed it, cos grove throws fresh light on Ali’s meeting with Malcolm X, and his conversion to islam
drop, such as Jenny Colgan’s interview with best-selling novelist Marian Keyes, speaking from her home in Ireland about her 20-year writing career, and the critical recognition she has received for her most recent novel, Grown Ups.
And there was great warmth in the transatlantic meeting (on Zoom) between Scots makar Jackie Kay, jazz musician Suzanne Bonnar and American poet laureate Joy
Harjo, the first Native American writer to hold the title. They touched on themes which were complex, nuanced and personal; about memory and race and being a representative for your people, and how (in Harjo’s words) “something as simple as voice and poetry can hold a whole history”.
But it was a pleasure to watch three women brought together through laughter and music: Bonnar gave a superb performance of the American folk song Shenandoah, Harjo is a saxophonist as well as a poet, and Kay’s book on blues singer Bessie Smith will be published next year. One can only imagine what music they might have made if they had been able to meet.
Music was also at the core of a conversation between Val Mcdermid and writer and broadcaster Stuart
Cosgrove, the author of a trilogy of books on the history of soul. His new book, Cassius X, is about the rise of Muhammad Ali, but music is never far away. Ali drove the streets of Miami in a red Cadillac with a built-in turntable, and learned about the importance of managing one’s image from black musicians such as Sam Cooke.
Cosgrove writes about Ali in 1963 in the months before he won his first major title, a time of civil rights protest and the early days of soul. By looking not just at the boxer himself but at the world as he witnessed it,
Cosgrove throws fresh light on Ali’s meeting with Malcolm X, and his eventual conversion to Islam.
This was one of many conversations about race at this year’s Book Festival, each shining light on different facets of a complex and nuanced subject. There was another transatlantic meeting of minds between the New York Times’ Whitney Richardson and British writer and curator
Ekow Eshun, whose new book is Africa State of Mind, a collection of contemporary African photography.
Since the 19th century, Eshun explained, photography has been used to reinforce colonial stereotypes of Africa, as if the continent of 1.2 billion people was stuck in “a primordial past”. He went looking for contemporary photographers with their own particular viewpoint, with the aim of making a multi-faceted picture: art, not documentary. Perhaps that brings us back to the relationship between art and truth: a difference as slight, but as important, as the gears on a motorbike.
All Edinburgh International Book Festival’s events are available to watch for free at www.edbookfest.co.uk. The programme continues until the end of the month.