Friday 22 June 2012

Melrose Book Festival: 2 Things

Last week, in my poverty-line-dance and sloth-paced lifestyle, my grandma very kindly stumped up the tickets to a few events at the Melrose Book Festival for me. It was a drizzly day, but the ebb and flow of bodies (mostly pensioners) was freeing - one can get complacent if surrounded by youth all the time. I have chosen therefore to write a short review of the two 'shows' that I saw, wherewith you can decide yourself if you wish to buy their books or not. Of course actually purchasing one of the books by one of the authors would be the publisher's ultimate outcome and I ought to receive some sort of commission, but my personal ultimate outcome is that, through this out-splurge of word and constructive criticism I will have found a way to vaguely constructively occupy the morning. (NB: Dearest Morning, it is good to see you again, it has been a while.)

6.10pm. I step out of my Grandma's car and walk past a small group of people roughly my age chatting outside Harmony House. It's a beautiful old house that I regret not knowing all that much about apart from its occupation as ground for the Melrose Book Festival. I'm late but to maintain a collected appearance I speed up the pace, without actually indelicately running, to collect my tickets and find out where my first event is. The atmosphere is icky. But... sort of, nice icky, with an air of literature and prosecco. Literalicky.

I find the tent and join a queue of mostly tall, cagouled, welly-booted, grey haired couples chatting and nodding with that regal shadow many Melrosians have - a rural politeness. I look rather out of place in my own head, standing alone in my Converse and charity shop Tweed jacket, but nobody else is in there so that's fine. We follow each other in a neat file into this little tent and sit about for a wee while. People are shifting, chatting, changing seats, complaining about the noise of the fan, rustling raincoats. Eventually we are introduced to Allan Massie, who is here to discuss his book number 2/3.

It's apparently a detective novel set in Vichy France in 1940 or so. He addresses the first two questions as a chance to practice his skills as a tangentier: there is very little in the way of coherent argument and a lot in the way of NBs and whichincidentallys and infacts and indeeds. He is a short man, late 50s or so, with a distractedness, a disconnectedness that is most likely emphasised by his proper English, which has always sounded to me as a language with such a sureness of consonant one can forego vowel and the pressure of being in the room. I don't recall what he was wearing other than it was either dark green or brown, but that probably stands to reason as it took all the concentration I had to listen to what seemed the entire history of Vichy, other parts of France and French colonies. I'll say this, that man had researched well. I would say, though, that it was unexpected when he let out that he didn't even really like crime writing that much, and the actual details of police investigation or whatever weren't what interested him. So, to sum up. He came to promote a book he wrote in a genre he doesn't actually like that much and talked about something else in considerable detail. Cheers, Allan.

7.45pm. I'm hoping for something better from Ed Smith's interview by Rory Bremner. Allan just wasn't really bounding in charisma, despite his impressive knowledge of wartime France. Ed Smith is already winning though, as his picture in his book I flicked through at the shop is not displeasing to the eye. I was later to find it was also probably taken about 10 years ago. What is that?! So misleading.

Nevertheless I have found myself a neat little seat to the right of the action. Ed Smith used to be a cricketer, but then he broke his ankle and never played professionally again. I wasn't too bothered about that though, because I don't like cricket. ( - I love it! ... sorry, had to!) The book is called "Luck" and it is his fourth one. Now, some stuff he said was interesting, and Rory Bremner did a really good job of interviewing him, but all the while I couldn't help feeling slightly uncomfortable with some of the things Smith was saying, and I couldn't work out why until afterwards. Admittedly he had a certain energy about him. He had an infectious confidence and enthusiasm and affectionately used the word 'hubris' on a few occasions, which did genuinely fit in well amongst his very eloquently formed sentences. But between the bedsheets of the spark and guile of his countenance and word choice, I became confused and felt as if I was trying to jam two pieces of jigsaw together which should work because the colours were right, but didn't slot into the big picture, and it didn't matter if a bigger picture didn't even exist. Then I realised that it wasn't me who was jamming the pieces, but Ed Smith.

He talked about luck (both good and bad), and its relationship with chance, serendipity, fate and coincidence, as if they were brothers and sisters, and in many cases did provide charming individual definitions, often with neat little quotes from people or example situations. But he forgot to see the entire fold. He didn't see how all of these things were just total human constructs. In my opinion, these concepts all stem from the inbuilt human approach to life that it is hard, and we must make effort to get what we want, and chance events and the 'universe' don't generally work to a high positive degree in our favour. Therefore, when something truly advantageous happens to us, something that we had no control in creating, then we give it one of these names: luck, serendipity etc. (The chance and coincidence ones are certainly more neutral). And the greater the deep chambre of darkness we find ourselves in, the greater the nightlight of luck will seem, even if it's source is rather minuscule. You could place luck on the same steed of argument as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, saddled neatly upon the train analogy, which appears faster or slower depending on where you are standing.

So I did consider buying the book (my sister was working there and could have got me a 40% discount), but I will probably find it by chance in a second hand bookshop sometime in the future, and for much less than retail price. If not, then not. But how lucky would it be if I did?

I also saw Iain Banks ramble on for a wee while too, who writes very well and talks quite well, but I doubt I could spend more than an hour or so actually engaged in one on one conversation with him. My MBF highlight was however, being less than a foot away for Alistair Darling and his mighty eyebrows.

And that's it. My little review slice of the Melrose Book Festival 2012. Well done if you made it through this post!


No comments:

Post a Comment