Edinburgh Book Festival 2016: Happy Days

I've had a lot of fine times in Edinburgh but this week's visit was the best, no doubt about it. Beautiful summer weather, for one, and it lasted until the morning of my departure when things took a turn back toward the dreich city we know and love. Above all, though, the events were fascinating, the company great, the sense of literary community hugely lively. The Festival Bookshop was even stocking my entire oeuvre, which I've never before seen all in one place outside of my bedroom.

My spot of Tuesday night chairing with Ian Rankin was great fun and surprisingly simple, just because Ian is a hugely assured and at-ease performer, with an audience of readers who are avidly interested in the minutiae of his work. In a world exclusive he read some manuscript pages from the forthcoming Rebus, Rather Be The Devil, which takes its title, to my delight, from John Martyn.

The R4 Open Book panel at EIBF, snapped by Jose Machado

Wednesday was a huge engrossing morning, beginning with a special recording for BBC Radio 4's Open Book, a symposium on the novel, politics and our times, with my friend and fellow Faber novelist Ben Markovits, winner of this year's James Tait Black Prize for fiction; the Festival's hugely impressive director Nick Barley; our emcee Mariella Frostrup; the recent winner of the 'Arabic Booker' Raja Alem; and your correspondent. My thanks to Kirsten Locke, Nicola Holloway and Di Spiers at Open Book for inviting me. Do listen in this Sunday August 21, 1600.

Mark Lawson, me, & Val McDermid (by Phoebe Grigor)

And on Wednesday evening I shared an author event in the Spiegeltent with Mark Lawson, who spoke feelingly and with impressive candour about the personal experiences that shaped his recent novel The Allegations. I chatted away about The Knives, and found the capacity crowd very engaged and encouraging. To my joy a French gentleman in the crowd (himself a novelist, as he revealed to me in the signing tent later) asked me to expound about Dostoyevsky.

Mark and I had the benefit of being chaired by Val McDermid, literary royalty in the locality and elsewhere, and I was quite stunned by the generosity of how fastidiously Val had prepared for the discussion, taking great care in the choice of questions and conversational linkages. A star, for sure.

The Knives & me at Edinburgh Book Festival 2016

The 2016 edition of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now afoot, and I’m calling in next week. It’s a brilliant festival that offers a splendid time for authors: the set-up in Charlotte Square is really handsome and well-organised, the team first-rate, the hospitality lovely, and they draw terrific crowds of curious book lovers. I’m very grateful to have had invitations to present all of my novels there, this year no exception – my thanks to the festival’s first-rate director Nick Barley.

I have a hand in three different events this time round:

On Tuesday night I will be handling emcee duties for Ian Rankin’s event framed round the paperback of his most recent Rebus bestseller, Even Dogs in the Wild. That’s from 8:15pm - 9:15pm in the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre.

On Wednesday morning I’m a guest for a special recording of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, involving Nick Barley and the novelist Raja Alem. I’ll be delivering Open Book’s regular author’s column, a piece I’ve written specially on depictions of politicians in fiction. That’s from 10:00am - 11:00am, again in the Baillie Gifford.

On Wednesday evening I will be discussing The Knives, and Mark Lawson his new novel The Allegations, in an authors event chaired by Val McDermid. Mark’s book is a reflection on real events, and the Festival brochure asks: ‘With such sensitive social contexts involved, what personal risks did the authors take in approaching the material?’ That event is 7:00pm - 8:00pm in The Spiegeltent, tickets £8.00 or £6.00.

So maybe I’ll see you there, do say hello, et cetera.

Dr Jekyll Rises Again

Ian Rankin, a celebrated and most perspicacious admirer of R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, has now written a foreword to a re-issue of the text, extracted in the Guardian. Jekyll/Hyde enthusiasts will find much to celebrate in Rankin's piece - in particular, perhaps, his stress on the story's 'complex narrative', which is much more tricksy than the umpteen film versions that doggedly take Jekyll's point of view from inside his laboratory as he struggles to perfect his 'transcendental medicine'. Whereas in Stevenson, as Rankin points out, "Jekyll himself figures only as a friend of the other characters and narrators – right up until the revelation provided by his "confession". We start the book in the company of two gentlemen called Utterson and Enfield..."
Can readers who encountered the films before the original take the same pleasure, the proper pleasure, in the story's unfolding? "Sadly," Rankin writes, "we'll never know the thrill experienced by this explosive book's original audience. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a work of suspense, but we all know the twist these days, don't we?" All I can say is that while still a schoolboy I'd seen about a zillion adaptations of Jekyll without having savoured the ur-text, but only once I had Stevenson did everything become clear, gloriously so. The best film of Stevenson is actually the Stephen Frears/Christopher Hampton version of Valerie Martin's hommage/rewrite Mary Reilly, but it was a picture that thrill-seeking audiences didn't warm up to. It looks better every year, but - like its inspiration.