Empty streets
9:30am on a Wednesday morning, bright and clear and fresh and having just devoured a ‘Bao’ for breakfast (yeah, I didn’t know what that was either) the book festival was waiting. I watched as the early morning crowd of mums convoyed over the cobble streets with pushchairs and babies and thermal coffee mugs. The excited chatter of young hopefuls, split into gangs of competing artists all wearing their colours; T-shirt sporting their various company logos. The over enthusiastic buskers setting up on their patch. Festival time in Edinburgh City and the machine was sputtering to life. I sat in George Square alone. A few of the food vans are open to catch the breakfast trade (wise indeed), the smell of breakfast wafts over the cobbles, and the air is filled with nursery rhymes and joyous little voices singing along. The place is youth. Late morning and later nights. My stop isn’t here though. I have the altogether more sensible, more cerebral, Book Festival. Situated at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. I’m expecting jet packs and AI driven robots…
The space of the Edbookfest, Edinburgh University’s Futures Institute, is an ironic building. An old cobblestone building of sublime beauty with an android amalgamation of modern glass and steel. It is a striking setting for a jovial and relaxed festival. The garden is abuzz with white wine drinking adults (checks watch, it’s now 11:00 am) and those that are on waiting lists of schools. Space for children. Lots of space for them. Book bugs!! Free sessions of reading and singing for the little ones. In Gaelic, too.
Once inside, if you dare leave the sunshine, reveals low cobble arched roofs and steel handrails. The anatomy of future’s past. But this wonderful setting is not the reason we are all here. The Book Festival is s celebration of literature. And two events stand out to me as worth writing about.
“R F Kaung and Samantha Shannon: The Future of Fantasy (Venue T) 14/08/24 20:30 – 21:30” Hosted by Caro Clarke.
This drew my attention as the topic of Fantasy has a classic structure to it and I was intrigued as to what these two successful authors vision of the future would hold. Firstly, both authors agreed that a story set in the fantasy genre is not obliged to reflect our world. Samantha reminds us that Tolkien was not a fan of allegory in his novels but talked more of the applicability of a story to a real-world narrative. A welcome thought as more and more spaces of art are used for political messaging rather than storytelling.
Then Rebecca F Kaung makes the statement, “Frodo is not a socialist, and that’s the problem.” ‘Collective action’ were the words of the night as Samantha and Rebecca both would like to see the archetypal hero’s journey feature less in fantasy going forward. They see real heroism as something no one person can claim, or inherit, and that a collection of people will all add their skills to the victory.
Samantha’s writing also covers the theme “found family” (Shannon), she states that in her writing she plays with the idea of family and how many different relationships can constitute and cohere with the idea of ‘family’. This is commonplace in most fantasy writing as groups come together to overcome some great adversary, they often suffer together, live the story together. Tolkien’s Hobbits could lay claim to that idea of found family, Sam and Frodo are bound through hardship and one could view that relationship as a brotherhood. The idea that family is not just related by blood, surely is not new.
When asked were they see fantasy heading over the next five years? I’ll leave you with two quotes from Rebecca Kaung
“I would like to see books that tackle really big socio-political-economic questions” (Kaung).
“the more escapist we get or the more into our own heads and feelings at the cost of everything else we get, I think the less that fiction has any, you know, real-world value.” (Kaung)
This talk is available to watch on the EdbookFest website.
“The Front List: Salmon Rushdie in conversation with Fiametta Rocco (McEwan Hall) 17/08/24 17:30 – 18:30” Hosted by Fiametta Rocco
Salman Rushdie is a name I heard at the age of eight. The man has had a career longer than I have had life. In 1988 a Fatwa was issued on Rushdie. And he went into hiding. This is news to no one. On the 12 August 2022 that fatwa was very nearly fulfilled, when a young man attacked him on stage and stabbed him multiple times including his eye. Rushdie speaks from a video link. He speaks with eloquence and class and dignity. Rushdie’s latest novel, ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ details his thoughts and feeling of that night. Rushdie choice of title the word, ‘Knife’, gives it meaning anew. He ponders what the choice of weapon his attack used with a sublime understanding. The knife is a tool of intimate violence, “intimacy of a kind of horror.” Rushdie says. It’s not a gun, for that is impersonal. And turning his own weapon, his words, his knife, against the attacker to “obliterate him”. Rushdie remains in control of himself, with a few minor wobbles of emotion leaking past his honourable exterior.
In the book he doesn’t name his attacker, referring to him as simply “A”, which he muses could stand for a great many things. His attacker had read nothing of Rushdies’ works, nor was this person alive when the murder was sanctioned. And Rushdie likens his attack to Othello’s fate, when all he does is pass over Iago for promotion, his attacker “what he knew about me wasn’t sufficient motivation to do what he did” and this led to a chapter in his book about trying to understand this the mindset of this man.
The seriousness of Rushdie’s attack was brought home when he recounts that by day three they knew he would live. Sober words. And that the doctor told him that his “good fortune had been that he [the attacker] had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
When asked if he could do that which John Paul did, and forgive his attacker, he responds with a “No, I don’t think so. This may be why I’m not Pope.”
Rushdie’s talk is a beautiful, optimistic beacon of art overcoming violence that cracked my cynical heart and is well worth the time of viewing.