September 1, 2002

This strange circumlocutory buzz word was flying round the tented venues of Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square this August as the annual book festival roared into full gear as never before. There were over 550 authors; over 100 events and many were booked out before the opening date. It has been a huge success for the modest and fearsomely effective festival boss, Catherine Lockerbie. For she has made this not just a staging post for writers pushing their latest book but much, much more. As Alan Bennett says, we just love to come here: and no wonder, Ms Lockerbie has rug-covered sofas in her specially designed Mongolian yurt where authors can lounge around between gigs.

Real issues are discussed, compelling arguments thrust forward and bags of meaty intellectual ideas are tossed around: heady stuff and good fun too.

Feminist Fay Weldon hit the headlines early on with her dismissal of what she terms ‘Chick Lit’. These books by young women in the Bridget Jones Diary mode are instantly forgettable, she opined. Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing weighed in to support her. Another ‘Big Lit’ girl, Germaine Greer, slammed into the British prime minister’s private life before she was off to the Highlands to buy, as she said, her wardrobe for the next ten years: a dozen grey cashmere dresses.

Karachi’s very own ‘Chick Lit’ was on hand to show the world that the phrase certainly does not apply to her. Kamila Shamsie’s graceful elegance and keen intelligence shone through as she told a packed audience that more people died in Karachi in 1995 than in Bosnia that year when it was at the height of its internal convulsions and in the eye of the whole world. She read out an awesome passage from her latest book describing what it was like to be there at that time. Some old Raj figure (are there really any left?) rose to lament the passing of the old garden city Karachi of fifty years ago. Kamila looked slightly quizzical, regretting that sort of past is certainly not her bag.

Later that day the Kool Kamila took part in a discussion called Women in Islam with the famous Egyptian author Nawal el Saadawi. But as she said, women are more oppressed by patriarchal capitalism than they are by religion.

And of course there were plenty of events discussing these two big issues of the moment — environmental degradation or Nature’s Revenge as the organizers so poetically put it; and the aftermath of 9/11. There were a number of specialists on Islam wheeled in For example; Malise Ruthven had been commissioned to write a book in five months to explain the Muslim view to the West. He cited the moral vacuum, which is currently turning people of all religions back to the fundamentals of their beliefs.

None of this came out in another session where three well-known American authors explained what 9/11 meant to them: Mainly fear and a deep searching inside themselves. They were quite frankly bewildered when their mainly European audience questioned them about whether they thought America might just have been even a tiny bit to blame.

Certainly the environmentalists were beautifully articulate about what the capitalist system is doing to planet earth. “We are turning off the life support systems of everything that exists here,” said one apoplectically. Time to sneak off to the Spiegel tent for some soup before returning to the core focus of Edinburgh’s bibliobibulation — the passion and imponderables of the book writing creative process — being around with all those authors, wonderful. The most memorable for me was listening to the quietly spoken and infinitely polite Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian writer who lives in the impossibly besieged Ramallah. His latest book chronicles the story of his father but through it the reader is unforgettably reminded of what it is like to be Palestinian — as he said so movingly, “we travel like other people, but we return to nowhere”. n

Writer’s email: thenewliz@hotmail.com

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