Slavery, anarchy, political skullduggery – and two women writers at the top of the game, fizzing with literary energy
WE BOOK Festival types may be used to a fancy of poets over a coffee and a croissant, or a quibble of politicians in the bright lights of the main theatre. But a mutiny of slaves on a summer’s evening in Charlotte Square is something new. And all the better for it.
The event was a rehearsed reading by six actors of Jackie Kay’s radio play The
Lamplighter, which has already featured as part of the cultural programme of the Commonwealth Games.
Opening with the frightened voice of a recently-taken young African girl, intercut with the routine formalities of the slavery business – weather reports, burial records – it is an account which takes a straight line to the emotional heart of its subject. Kay’s writing is an incantatory, personal narrative fractured into a collage of voices and impressions. There are lists aplenty: lists of slave trade ports, lists of ways of dying, lists of the confectionery produced from the imported sugar, of slave ship names, lists of the things a slave loses, or is told to do, or say. And there are killer facts. Did you know that sharks followed the slave ships for the pickings? Or that a port could smell their approach when they were still two days’ travel away?
If the poetic form shares the individual voices among the cast at the expense of focused characterisation, Alison Peebles’s direction for the Tron Theatre develops a community of five women, holding hands, echoing each other, and singing. It’s a story that can’t fail to uplift, climaxing with the littleknown slave rebellions on the Caribbean islands and William Wilberforce’s victory, to a joyous rendering of Down to the
River and Pray.
There were innovations, too, in the session featuring
Elizabeth Pisani, who treated her audience to a debut sample of the embedded video from the e-book of her title
Indonesia Etc. Fortunately, this was only a brief distraction. And any concerns that the late withdrawal from the bill of BBC journalist John Sweeney might have left the session short of words were quickly assuaged, for Pisani is a one-woman word torrent.
As someone who has worked in Indonesia, both as a Reuters correspondent and as an epidemiologist for that country’s ministry of health, she is also a person with an unusual perspective on her complicated, if not anarchic, subject. As she put it herself: “It’s quite a challenge to get one’s head around Indonesia, much less try to explain it to somebody else.”
Taking in a range of traveller’s tales – her personification of the cockerel she prepared for a mass chicken slaughter lingers in the memory – she brought a dynamic presence to this review of a country where people without electricity are avid Facebook followers (Jakarta apparently tweets more than any other city on Earth.) If there was an omission, it was in the unanswered question hanging over the session: what is it about what she calls this “improbable nation”, that it has ensnared so much of this striking woman’s life?
NINIAN DUNNETT
Nicola Barker was likened to Muriel Spark on a runaway horse
FIZZING with literary energy, Book Festival guest selector Ali Smith accomplished something of a coup on Friday morning, not only bringing to Edinburgh the festival-avoiding novelist
Nicola Barker, but persuading her to read from her latest book. Smith, who is immensely gifted at passing on her enthusiasm, described Barker as “one of the most original writers at work in any of the written forms today”, and likened her to “Muriel Spark on the back of a runaway horse”. Barker’s reading from In
T he Approaches more than backed this up with its literary acrobatics, offering a snapshot (albeit a brief one) into a novel of politics and society, love and spirituality, and of many voices, at least one of whom openly challenges “that mean cow of an author” for putting him in the story at all. Barker admitted that In T he
Approaches started out as a “classic romantic comedy”, but that she was visited by a sense of mischief and began to unpick things. Literary energy contined to sparkle through the ensuing conversation in which she and Smith teased out much about her writing life and the writing life in general. It was a privilege to witness to these two daring, innovative writers at the height of their powers discussing their art, and is a credit to Smith as a facilitator and enabler of other writers.
Energy of a political kind bristled through in the next hour in which husband and wife team, political journalists
Polly Toynbee and David Walker, took the stage to discuss their forthcoming book,
Cameron’s Coup, delving into the coalition government and its legislation. The audience participated actively, not only with questions but with hisses, boos and applause.
Toynbee and Walker, who delivered their talk by speaking alternate sentences, argued that the coalition policies have been “profoundly regressive”, and that Cameron, while appearing pragmatic, is drawing on deeprooted right-wing ideology, which ultimately aims to reduce welfare to pre-1945 levels and usher in an American-style insurance-based healthcare system.
Ably questioned by the magnificent Ruth Wishart, who didn’t quite manage to leave her Yes badge behind, they also argued for Scotland to stay in the Union. “People in England have such a vested interested in you not going,” said Toynbee. “Don’t go!”
While urging Scotland to stay on and fight for political change within the UK, she contended that an independent nation would have “a mountain the size of Ben Nevis” to climb in order to become a Scandinavian-style social democracy.
But there were murmurs of sympathy for the questioner who made the point that in Scotland we like climbing mountains, we relish the challenge.