Community Centre & Newton Hotel, Nairn, 7-8 June 2009

Nairn Book and Arts Festival 2009

THE SUN always shines in Nairn. Or at least, it always seems to when the town is en fête. And this year the organisers of the Nairn Book and Arts Festival certainly seem to have got the weather gods on their side again, so far at least. Last year’s festival was the first that had been able to make use of Nairn’s fine new Community Centre, and there were inevitably still a few teething problems. This year the Festival seems to have settled comfortably into the venue and is using it to its full potential.

The programme is a judicious mix of big names, old favourites, local stars, and new talent. Definitely falling into the first two categories were Liz Lochhead and William Dalrymple, in the Sunday afternoon slots. Both have the enviable ability to be both relaxed and professional, and to communicate to a large audience as if they were speaking to each member individually. Both also successfully mixed the old and the new.

Liz Lochhead’s reading came on the back of two performances by the National Theatre of Scotland of her play Mary Queen of Scots got her head chopped off, and so it was understandable that she should open with the prologue from that very play. I haven’t seen this new production, but if the actor playing Corbie delivers a better prologue than the author herself, then it truly is remarkable!

She then alternated selections from her two volumes of Collected Poems with new and unpublished poems, explaining that she’d only recently come back to poetry after concentrating on theatre work for several years. Liz is one of those poets-Betjeman is another-where it’s almost impossible to separate the texts of the poems from the sound of the author reading them, so distinctive is her language, and so characterful her delivery.

She ended her all too short hour with what she admitted was something of a departure for her, a short story. In effect, it was a monologue not unlike Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and a very effective one: creating a wholly believable persona in a situation that was at once achingly funny and very humane.

Last year, William Dalrymple gave a dazzling illustrated lecture, updating his classic travel book From the Holy Mountain. This year, like Liz Lochhead, he offered us a reading of unpublished new work, together with, as he termed them, some ‘lollipops’ from his earlier books. The core of the session was a long extract from his new book, out in October, which examines different aspects of spirituality in India through the personal stories of nine very different individuals.

Dalrymple chose to introduce us to the extraordinary, and rather harrowing, life of a young Jain nun-an unforgettable, profound, and unsettling story. Like Liz Lochhead, Dalrymple reads as he writes, with a keen sense of drama and pace and, in the shorter pieces, excellent comic timing.

The question and answer session at the end opened up deep issues that could easily have kept us all debating for the rest of the evening! Due to the need for set-up time in the Community Centre, William Dalrymple’s reading was in the Newton Hotel which also makes a fine venue for such an event. Seated on a podium, in a wing armchair, potted plant to one side, and pint of beer in hand, Dalrymple gave the impression of being the host welcoming us into his grand nabob-funded home!

Back to Nairn on Monday afternoon, and the sun was still shining, which didn’t dissuade a large audience from coming indoors to listen to Professor Ted Cowan on the cultural impact of the Scots abroad. This was lecturing on a bravura scale. With the briefest of notes and a sheaf of internet print-outs, Professor Cowan kept us enthralled for an hour or more.

Big, bearded, bear-like and with a wicked sense of humour, he resembles a Scottish Bill Bryson, and he has Bryson’s ability to encompass a huge range of information in a compact and wholly palatable form. In a festival which has foregrounded the Homecoming Year, he was scathing about the underlying idea that the descendants of emigrant Scots are filled with longing and nostalgia for the ‘homeland’.

Instead, his thesis is that the colonial Scots were often the most active in building a new nation. Lachlan MacQuarrie, Governor of New South Wales, was the man who firmly established the name ‘Australia’. James Busby drafted the Treaty of Waitangi which has become the worldwide basis for negotiations on the land rights of native peoples. Donald Smith from Forres started as a fur-trader and rose to become Lord Strathcona and one of the builders of the Dominion of Canada.

This was bracing, stereotype-challenging stuff-I can’t have been the only member of the audience to be amazed to learn that the counties of Scotland with the highest rates of emigration in the 19th century were nowhere near the Highlands-they were Kirkcudbright- and Dumfries-shire!

Time for a quick refreshment in the late afternoon sun, and then back in for a very different event, under the ‘new talent’ category. Karen Campbell and Sophie Hannah are two of the rising generation of crime writers. Their approaches are very different: Karen, a former police officer, bases her novels in police procedure-and ‘on the beat’ officers, not CID-with a strong emphasis on character.

Sophie, on the other hand, admitted that she’s addicted to mystery, and all her novels, though termed ‘psychological thrillers’, begin with the kind of conundrum that ensures the reader keeps turning the pages. In fact, she confessed (the mot juste) that the mystery in her latest novel was so baffling that for a long time she couldn’t think how to resolve it!

This was a perfect example of a well constructed reading event. Both writers spoke fluently and entertainingly about how they approached their work, and then read tantalising extracts from their latest novels. The Q&A session which followed was lively and illuminating. It’s just a pity that, with so many delights on offer in the festival programme, lesser-known writers such as these can’t yet draw an audience as large as the bigger names do. But a gratifying number of books were being signed at the end of the session!

The Nairn Book & Arts Festival runs until 13 June 2009

© Robert Livingston, 2009

Links

• Nairn Book and Arts Festival