Peter Farrugia explores the ins and outs of the UK’s most renowned literary festival, including talks by P.D. James and Kazuo Ishiguro and the ever-changing world of international publishing.
The reclusive writer, once a mysterious and inscrutable oracle of universal wisdom, is long gone. In their place we find the unashamed media showboat, ready to dispense an anecdote or six with the calculated effect of whipping audiences into a frenzy before the obligatory book signings and photo opportunity.
It’s well-rehearsed patter and seamless schmooze that win the day, even at what is arguably Europe’s grandest literary event, the Oxford Literary Festival.
This dosen’t mean authors haven’t always been quite capable of self-promotion. If Charles Dickens could do it, it’s hardly surprising that this millennium’s crop of writers shouldn’t rise to the challenge.
In our internet-fueled instant access world, the writer is expected to be part savant, part performing seal, meet deadlines without breaking a sweat and still give a baying audience the smile they’ve paid for. It’s not enough to write well, you’ve got to sell well too.
This isn’t the only way the Oxford Literary Festival has changed since it began in the late 1990s. What only involved a few events over one weekend has evolved into a week-long exhibition of talent and marketing prowess from all over the world.
This year’s festival hosted around 550 speakers at over 300 events, peppered with big names included Melvyn Bragg, Princess Anne, Philip Pullman, Kazuo Ishiguro, P.D. James and Colin Dexter.
The festival organisers managed a delicate balancing act between literary competitiveness, full-throttle commercialism and that potent aura of glowing self-satisfaction that always follows success.
The pavilions housed historians and travelers, genre innovators and poets, polemicists and the occasional celebrity – relatively unknown names sat alongside masters in the field. And perhaps the most important player in this cast of luminaries, Oxford itself.
The festival was rooted in Christ Church, a college many people might only know as the Hogwarts set in the Harry Potter films. Other events were held at a more modern lecture hall in Corpus Christi, at Merton college and Oriel, at the Sheldonian Theatre and the Bodleian Library.
It hardly mattered what the speakers said; in rare moments of boredom all you had to do was look up at the frescoed ceilings, or count the number of ‘green men’ you could find carved into the Medieval panels. It was a rare privilege to listen to Tim Smit deliver a private talk about the Eden Project.
The Sheldonian was hushed as he described the ways perseverance and chance came together to create one of the world’s most wonderful ecological centres, and revealed that the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee would include a special visit to Eden.
I also attended a debate between P.D. James and Jill Paton Walsh, where James championed the cause of Agatha Christie and Walsh spoke for Dorothy L. Sayers as the greatest of the Golden Age writers of detective fiction.
By turns amusing and insightful James talked about her start as a writer when she was well into her 40s, setting her alarm clock an hour earlier each day to find time to write, “I didn’t ever want to tell my grandchildren I wanted to be a writer”.
Walsh revealed she got into writing genre fiction after the publisher of her first novel Knowledge of Angels said literary work was so much harder to sell.
In the end a tie was declared, with Christie and Sayers sharing the crown as the most celebrated female crime writer. Both James and Walsh also said they were excited by recent developments in the genre, especially with writing from Scandinavia.
“It’s becoming a lot more realistic,” said Walsh, “people are more interested in the details of crime.”
James concluded by affirming, “we’re in another golden age of detective fiction”.
Of the various events, the one I most looked forward to and most enjoyed was Ishiguro in conversation with Peter Kemp, lead book reviewer for The Sunday Times of London. As a novelist whose work has been respected and admired for decades, Ishiguro’s stories have also found a niche in film adaptation, with Remains of the Day still topping DVD sales (thanks to its award-winning narrative and Oscar nominated performances by Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson).
The discussion turned around a film adaptation of Ishiguro’s latest novel Never Let Me Go, starring Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.
While praising the end result and confirming his participation during filming, Ishiguro said he considers it his goal to “write an unfilmable book. Novels must do something that TV and cinema cannot.
“Writing has got to take an audience somewhere new and while there’s a natural alliance between good books and good films, right now we’re under siege by a commercialised culture. Film has to reach a wide audience and it must necessarily be dumbed down.”
He had something to say about the use of young characters by the film industry, and remembered a chat with one executive who explicitly said they wanted “to use novels that feature a lot of younger people”.
“Film is very much a third person medium, while novels are set in a hinterland between interior and exterior worlds,” said Ishiguro. He went on to describe the importance of escapist narratives in Hollywood cinema, perhaps all the more important because most people never try to escape in their daily lives.
“They try to dignify their position and accept it, and I’m interested in the extent to which people don’t rebel,” citing that as a major theme in his latest novel but indeed in all his work where the interplay between acceptance, resignation and obedience are constantly developed.
“There’s something to be celebrated in people trying to find dignity in small lives,” he said. “We don’t all have the perspective to rebel.”
In between the drive to shift product, present authors to the public, and show Oxford to its best advantage, the 2011 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival created an atmosphere that was at once welcoming and exciting.
Inspired by the speakers, discovering new books and writers, visitors to the festival were left with a new view on publishing as a still vibrant industry.
The Oxford Literary Festival has never failed to cause a stir and this year’s exceptional programme proved to be more dramatic than ever. Whatever next year has in store, it’ll be well worth the wait.