You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

As the Book Festival draws to a close, David Robinson looks back on what makes it unique, and how it helps to create that vital spark that is empathy

The l orr i es c ame f or t he b o o k f e s t i v a l ’s G e o r g e S t r e e t t e n t s y e s t e r d a y morning; t he y ’ l l a r r i ve to star t taking down the ones i n Charlotte S quare at ab out f i v e o’c l o c k t h i s a f t e r n o o n . O n e t h i n g a b o u t a u t u mn me l a n c h o l y i n E d i n b u rg h : yo u c a n a l ways b e chronologically precise about when it begins.

Ye s t e r d a y ’s p r o g r a m m e c o u l d almost have been framed to emphasise what we’ll be missing. When else do we get a chance to see great writers such as Richard Ford, this time talking about life in Trump’s America – and coming out yes, of course, with all the usual appalled embarrassment at their braggadocious leader, but also with a flinty anger at the Democrats’ failure, and a blithe disregard for ruffling liberal feathers?

Take Hilary Clinton. Picking a nonentity for a running- mate was “boneheaded” and “skill- less”, said Ford, when she could have chosen a Latino or African- American.

And n o , h e was n’t g o i n g t o c o n - demn, as she did, Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables”: he’s glad at least that they got involved in the democratic process rather than staying out of it as usual, even if they did put Trump in the White House in the process.

And as for Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi – “Well, what is she still doing there? You lost! You failed.”

If you like your writers to be predictable, Ford’s not your man. I’ve never heard anyone I r e s p e c t giv i ng t he New York Times a hard time for not acknowledging that – just for once – Trump was right over Charlottes- ville: “Two sides were involved”. Then again, nor do I know any writers who have spat on fellow- novelists who’ve g i ve n t h e m a b a d r e v i e w ( C o l s o n Whitehead) or whose wife has shot a bullet through a book by an author who did just that too ( Alice Hoffman) – or who would, as Ford did yesterday, laugh about it.

Similarly, I know few writers who would s ay t hat i ncome i nequalit y matters more than race ( because it includes race) or who would object to statues of Confederate general Rob - ert E Lee because he was a traitor, not a defender of slaver y. Not ever yone who wants those statues to stay up is a white cracker nationalist, he said: to unite the polity, you should move the statues to less divisive places, teach more history, educate people better.

And yet, and yet… Read Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels and you’ll realise 0 No fear of ruffling liberal feathers when Richard Ford is holding forth t hat t his selfsame man i s also j ust about the most empathetic novelist in America. The audience who heard Ford talking about Bet ween Them, his wonderful book about his parents, got a small hint why. In Inde - pendence Day, Ford shows Bascombe in mid- career as a real estate agent.

Cue 7 3 - ye a r - o l d nove l i s t t a l k i ng ab out t hose endless Sunday afternoon drives around suburban Jackson, Mississipi, with his beloved parents, the whole hours that passed as they lo oked at houses they’d never buy but would always dream of doing. Just like Bascombe, he said, his parents lived “applause - less” lives. Not any more, they don’t.

Empathy was, i n f act, t he t heme of the festival’s last day. It was there front, back and centre in Peter Bazalgette’s discussion of his latest book, The Empathy Instinct.

And i f you thought the man who imported Big Brother to British TV wouldn’t be a good guide to the subject you’d be wildly wrong (“What’s Big Brother?” asked a man in the front row to general hilarit y). This year Bazalgette became chairman of ITV, but he has spent four years before that as head of the Ar ts Council in England and is still the chair of a campaign to erect a Holocaust memorial in London.

Those two jobs both require oodles o f e mpathy, b ut t he a r t s j o b i s a l l about funding its creation. If a book is an empathy engine ( as the writer Neil Gaiman once observed), an arts council is – just like a book festival – an enormous empathy factory, an absolute necessity for creating a more civil society.

Earlier, as Natalie Hayes and Dav- id Vann both pointed out from the Spiegeltent stage, the interiorit y in Greek tragedy comes from the actors, not the text, so novelists had plenty of scope to redress the balance. Hayes has done that with The Children of Jocasta, which gives her heroine ( Oedipus’s wife and mother, remember: it’s complicated) a lot more than the 120 lines Sophocles allocated her i n Oedipus Tyrannos (“I can’t stop you calling it Oedipus Rex, but since he isn’t Roman or a dinosaur I’m not going to do it”).

As David Van said, t hough, t heir