Edinburgh International Book Festival: A National Literature?

Outside, the rain was hammering onto the big tent; inside, things were getting pretty stormy too. The theme was national literature, and Irvine Welsh kicked off with a broadside against the Booker Prize. The Booker, said Welsh, worked on the conceit that upper-class Englishness was the benchmark against which all literature should be judged. For Welsh, anything that smacked of hegemony of culture was to be held in suspicion. He believed it would be hard for a novel like Trainspotting to get published today, but as Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall demonstrated, “there is always room for mavericks.”

Chairing the meeting, Ian Rankin followed up with some questions of his own before being shouted down by some of the writers in the audience. Rankin conceded to the literary uprising, and with that the heavens opened, followed by floods of opinion. Hardly a continent was unrepresented, with views from Argentina, Portugal, China, Bulgaria, Nigeria and Denmark.

Some lamented the paucity of foreign literature being translated into English, others highlighted the threat to writers and readers from the dissolution of public libraries. Alan Bissett raised the flag for protection of national literature from the forces of globalisation. But in a stirring intervention, Ben Okri warned against overdefining national literature. “If you say this space is Scottishness, you have limited the possibilities of Scottishness for all time. Keep the spirit open, keep the spirit wild.” The resulting ovation threatened to drown out Mother Nature’s downpour. As the event concluded, the rain kept falling, but inside the outlook was sunnier. As Irvine Welsh observed: “I haven’t disagreed with anything I’ve heard.” [James Carson]