Village Hall and other venues, Ullapool, 6-8 May 2011

WRITING a review of the Ullapool Book Festival feels a bit like trying to make dried whisky. How can a weekend of words – erudite, funny, moving, infuriating, delightful and wise – be distilled into a few paragraphs?

From the warm wit of Denise Mina, who opened the 2011 festival, to the emotional closing words of the festival’s new honorary president James Robertson, it was a weekend charged with passionate debate.

Denise Mina

The context of the extraordinary election events, as the scale of the SNP’s political tsunami became clear, undoubtedly added to the mood, but the eclectic gathering of literary voices and the unique way that this festival brings them together, were always going to make a special conversation, no matter how Scotland had cast its votes.

What can this review add to the weekend? It could pick out personal highlights, like the story told by Ian Stephen about the small Irish king who falls into the porridge pot of the large Irish king, or the powerful argument made by Canadian writer Linden MacIntyre that institutions have no morals, or the reading by Peter Mackay of Sorley MacLean’s poem Hallaig.

It could make observations about those slots which, for whatever reason, made less of an impression (the free opera, for example, or the Saturday night hour of short-stories and songs), or note that a gap in the programme caused by the illness of John Burnside was filled with writers from the audience.

But if you were there, you had your own favourite performances, and those you did not enjoy, and if you weren’t, a few glints from me won’t reveal the intensity of the light all weekend.

So perhaps I should try to explain what makes this festival so special. At the UBF, there is no need to make a choice between parallel events, and thank goodness. How could anyone choose between a reading by Don Paterson, Scotland’s supreme poetic technician, and a talk by literary editor Stuart Kelly about how Scott has shaped the very idea of Scottishness?

Yet it is more than this. It is much to do with the way most of the writers stay around for most of the weekend, eating and drinking together at the Ceilidh Place, mingling into and among the audience, with the result that what is created is not just a linear string of spoken word performances, but a community of people exploring, together, what can be achieved with words.

In this community fame and status slip away, so an almost forgotten Gaelic ballad can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with an international prize-winning novel. Boundaries blur between journalism, songs, poetry, memoir and fiction; over the weekend we come to see them all as ways to make connections between people, to bolster communities, even to strengthen the nation.

It is of course enriching to hear discussion between erudite experts on Scots and Gaelic, to hear the works of best-selling writers like Denise Mina and Bernard Maclaverty, to delight in a taste of the language of poets like Chris Powici and Shetlander Robert Alan Jamieson, to hear voices of travelling people from Eleanor Thom and a Manhattan twang from Nora Chassler. Bringing such people to the north west Highlands so that we can be enriched by their words is worthwhile in its own right.

Yet the real magic happens when the visitors are just as excited by what local wordsmiths have to offer. Roddie Macleod’s work to gather some fragments of the poetry of the Polbain Bard, Neil Macleod, was hugely appreciated. As he told of how his own grandfather was cleared, as a child, from their home in Badentarbet in Coigach, the emotional significance of the song, Oran Badentarbet, became clear. It was moments like this that proved that words can bring particular moments of the past into the present, transforming local history into art.

Words in a language also hook into the specifics of the culture whose language it is, as Christine de Luca showed in her poem ‘Yarbent’, the Shetlandic name for a cold, dry westerly wind, one of many pithy words that seem to require a whole phrase to translate into English, as many Gaelic words also do.

Yet language also transcends particularity, and allows us  to grope for wider, universal truths, like the issue of the breakdown in trust in institutions, explored by Linden MacIntyre in his novel The Bishop’s Man, or the grief at the loss of a child in one of Margaret Bennet’s songs.

I reflected at one point (when the wee Irish king made the big Irish king a pair of magical shoes), and again (in a discussion about the hilarious instant when a shoe-fetishist in James Robertson’s book And The Land Lay Still has a near-religious experience at the sight of Margaret Thatcher’s feet), and again (when someone referred to the Pope having revived the tradition of wearing ceremonial red shoes), that words are rather like shoes – both are expressions of personality, and both can take us on a voyage.

Over the course of a single weekend in Ullapool, we journeyed over diverse territories, local and cosmic, intimate and political.

With a huge smile Gavin Wallace, head of literature at Creative Scotland, took the stage on Saturday night and said how pleased he was to be at ‘this miraculous festival’, before introducing Bernard MacLaverty, who went on to give one of those readings that you wish would go on all night.

Gavin reminded the audience that ‘This is as good as it gets’. And he was right. No other book festival comes close to the intimacy, intelligence and warmth of Ullapool’s. This time next May I know exactly where my shoes will be taking me.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• Ullapool Book Festival