Independent Bath Literature Festival: An abundance of choice

Copyright Julian Foxon Photography

Taking on a 10- day literature festival with 200 sessions to choose from, requires physical and mental stamina and a certain fixedness of purpose. I arrived at the opening party at the Bath Guildhall with my “Searching for Meaning” persona firmly in place, trying not to be distracted by the impressive display of chandeliers in the main Hall.

James Runcie, the Artistic Director, promises us “a festival of ideas, a conversation with the living and the dead”.

In the next ten days, he overwhelmingly delivers, and in this space I can pass on only a few of the nuggets that have been sluiced into my brain by ample helpings of coffee and claret.

My first session featured the popular philosopher Alain de Botton, whose book The Consolation of Philosophy conveys his overall attitude: he really wants to help us use philosophy to cope with life.  His humour and elegance completely win over the audience.

De Botton wrote his first best seller when he was 23 years old. He’s now 43, still writing best sellers in over 30 countries, as well as involving himself in enlightened education, architecture, and television. His latest book, Religion for Atheists attempts to bridge the breach between non -believers and religious believers by pointing out the values in traditional religion that can enhance lives of those “who have replaced religion with culture”. An atheist, himself, he admires how religious ritual, for example, “communally celebrates truth”.

I leave with the same thought I entered: “I want to be Alain de Botton”.

I left the session with William Boyd wanting to read more of his books, which I am now doing. He takes three years to produce each of his 11 books, assiduously researching first, “like a magpie sifting through nuggets”.  He tends to stay in his office: “if your imagination is working well there’s no place you cannot go”. He only starts to write when he has his plot and characters completely figured out. His main concern is “the mystery at the centre of every human heart”. I am now racing through Ordinary Thunderstorms and I picked up his latest, Waiting for Sunrise at the Festival.

Claire Tomalin, who has just completed a biography of Charles Dickens, speaks of him with such intimacy and compassion; you would think she is discussing a living brother.  At one point she reveals that she has forgiven Dickens for deserting his sister on her deathbed, because she knows he couldn’t stand the pain.

James Runcie is brilliant at teasing out the special ways that writers operate. His interview with Hisham Matar, about his first novel, In the Country of Men was mesmerizing. Set in Libya in 1979, it describes a society marked by betrayal and torture, described with intricate elaboration. Matar’s quiet serenity casts a spell over the audience and his writing skill is quite awesome, as he tells his tale from the point of view of a child, as he is remembered by his 22-year-old self.

These shared insights into the working habits of writers seems to unleash everyone’s “inner writer” and when Joan Bakewell describes how she began writing her first novel at age 72, (3 hours writing every morning for a year), you could almost hear the audience’s collective brain whirring with fantasies and calculations.

As well as the very personal encounters with writers, and the work of their imaginations and intellects, there is an amazing array of expertise and debate on offer on many hot topics. If you attended the separate sessions of Simon Baron- Cohen and Susan Greenfield, you came away with a new understanding of the human brain. Did you know, for example, that the hippocampuses of the brains of London taxi drivers grows significantly when they take “The Knowledge”, the process of learning London streets?  The essential role of the brain is to make connections: you are your neuronal connections, a massive network of relay stations and crossroads and what’s more, its plasticity means the more you use it the better it gets (I hope).

The discussions on economics and politics were extremely well attended and evoked heated argument and occasionally original insights. Allan Little characterized the two choices facing western societies after the Lehman’s Brothers crash as, “bankrupting the banks or bankrupting the state”. Tariq Ali questioned why there had not been a dispassionate consideration of default by the Greek government and why there had been no discussion of the Argentinean experience of debt default. And Martin Jacques in his session plotting and predicting the rise of China to global ascendency in the early half of this century predicted the emergence of a new philosophy on the role of the state in modern society.

This is a mere hint at the riches that were on offer this week in Bath. I came away feeling that my imagination, my intellect, and my brain’s hippocampus had significantly expanded.

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