Look up ‘literary festivals’ on Wikipedia and you will find a list of a hundred festivals, taking place internationally each year. The list runs from Asia to the Americas, and does not pretend to be exhaustive. What the accompanying article does not stress is the way that Literary Festivals have become Big Business in recent years, staged with some of the glitz and razzmatazz of a rock concert. One of the earliest British book festivals, held for more than 30 years in Hay-on-Wye on the remote border between England and Wales, has lately morphed into a global literary franchise, with fifteen spin-off festivals around the world from Mexico to Kerala.
These are the general, all-purpose festivals; beyond them you may discover a galaxy of specific, genre-based festivals, where the fans and writers of crime stories, or fantasy novels, or science fiction, romantic, historical, meet and mingle. I’ve been to several crime fiction festivals around the world: you meet very nice people (if you want real violence, and blood on the carpet, I’m told you should go to a romantic novelists’ convention). The US crime writing festival, Bouchercon, is so huge, it needs a convention town to support it.
The festival idea makes a lot of sense for authors, readers and publishers. One-off events, where a writer comes to give a talk at a bookshop, can be great – as long as the writer has plenty of relatives in town, bags of friends, a long-awaited bestseller and/or incredible social networking skills. Even then, people find it hard to get along to the bookshop at the right time, or else they miss the event by mistake, or it doesn’t get the right publicity.
That’s not all. Let’s face it, authors aren’t pop groups. A few may be stand-up comedians, but most of them would find it hard to promise you a full evening of hilarity and entertainment. Every writer has a tale of authorial embarrassment, when they turn up at a bookshop to sign books and speak – and nobody shows up to hear them. On the night of the Space Shuttle disaster I spoke to a crowd of two in a Seattle bookstore (one turned out to be a monoglot Chinese lady, taking shelter from the rain; the other woman co-hosted the event). Of course I was funny, insightful, surprising and entertaining, and if you’d heard me that evening, you would have rushed to buy my books. It’s just that you weren’t there.
Plus another difficulty, for the writer. He, or she, is a shy beast, not easily detected with the naked eye. You can’t spot him on the bus, or in a crowded restaurant – he looks like anyone else (probably: this is up for debate). He works alone, for months on end. He delivers his manuscript by email, which is how his publisher responds. Months later, walking down the street, he passes his own book in a shop window. He reads what somebody thought of it, in a newspaper he buys on the street. The entire sequence can take place without a sound, a remark, or a squeeze of the hand. But by then, of course, she or he’s working again, on his own at the desk, in an empty room, writing another book.
The point of the festival is to articulate what was silent. The idea is to lift the work off the page, the author off his chair, his readers out of their books, and bring all of them triumphantly together in one place, at one time; observing the classical unities in a great convocation of writers, readers, publishers, critics. The point is to bring everyone into a conversation.
The point of the festival is to articulate what was silent. The idea is to lift the work off the page, the author off his chair, his readers out of their books, and bring all of them triumphantly together in one place, at one time; observing the classical unities in a great convocation of writers, readers, publishers, critics. The point is to bring everyone into a conversation.
I think of Estonia as a country involved in conversation, as it happens. Not just because I’ve had so many conversations here myself, in Tallinn and Tartu, morning, evening and night, year after year almost since the HeadRead Literary Festival began five years ago. Partly it’s that Estonia exists because of language: you Estonians speak a language of your own, and that ultimately makes you impossible to swallow. That rare, old, Finno-Ugric language is to this southern tip of the Gulf of Finland what semi-automatic handguns are to the freedom-loving citizens of the USA, or civil defence bunkers to the Swiss: a sort of guarantee of sovereignty. Literature is about language – and that, incidentally, is why at this year’s festival we are going to have a debate about the future of small languages.
I’m not suggesting that Estonia’s voice always gets heard. The conversation round here, like conversations almost anywhere, tend to be dominated by the big, booming voices of aggressive neighbours. But yours is a small but persistent voice, that breaks through again and again and will not be denied. By some sort of double miracle, in the 20th century you have created a nation-state not once, but twice. It gives you all sorts of bragging rights, I’m sure, and neuroses to underlie them; but I think it also makes Estonia, and Tallinn, an interesting place for writers and readers to meet and talk. To talk about the uses of language, of course.
Other writers seem to think so too. HeadRead is not big, but it has the kind of line-up you’d be lucky to experience at a festival five times the size: the Canadian Rawi Hage; Simon Sebag-Montefiore talking to Mart Laar about Stalin; David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas; Robert Service; Boris Akunin. HeadRead presents a complete mix of styles and genres, balancing fiction and non-fiction. There have been appearances by romantic novelists and crime writers; biographers and historians – not to mention their multi-talented translators, who give them an Estonian voice.
For plenty of foreign authors, the intimacy and friendliness of HeadRead comes as a pleasant surprise. Some of these writers are keyed up for international appearances, for lectures and tv shows, for a major run of book signings to promote a new work in the US or France – and then here they are, in Tallinn, having a chat, taking a walk, slipping into a bar late at night for a drink or two… It’s small city, in a small country – and perhaps they’re drawn by something almost allegorical about Estonia, as though it were a country in fairy tale: the sort of country, in other words, that writers like to invent for themselves, where everything is a little brighter, a little sharper, and a little more interconnected than elsewhere.
It’s a good place for a conversation.
Every year, Ott Sandrak takes the writers on a tour of the city, or out into the countryside – last year, we visited the coast. Ott is a big man, with a bushy beard, who speaks in a voice so deep it seems to come through up through his magnificent leather boots – and he knows everything. Flora and fauna, local history, mediaeval battles, family trees, folklore: whatever it is, Ott knows it. It makes him the consummate guide.
So I look around at the visiting writers, standing in a semi circle around Ott, held spellbound by the stories he is sharing, and by his gravelly delivery (and possibly bewitched by his boots), and my thought is that they are all in it together, Ott and the visitors. They are all storytellers. They weave tales, unfold plots and bring characters alive; they make selections, choose angles, points of view, and deliberately and craftily lead their audiences to certain conclusions.
In a sense what all these writers share is their ability to take us travelling – in time, through space, to other cities and other worlds. Where they come from does not matter so much as as where they can take us. They are delivering bulletins from distant frontiers, forbidden jungles, and the dark caverns of the human heart. They are at HeadRead to file their reports.
Ott takes us along the coast, and I imagine people gathering at those wonderful huge swings. There would be a campfire, too. Everyone sits in a ring around the fire, the light on their faces, backs to the dark; and one by one, people tell stories. All these stories are true – even if the people in the stories aren’t real, and have never lived. They tell stories of their own lives, and the lives of others – dictators, painters, murderers, lovers. The stories they tell transport their listeners to Greece, or to the past (which is another country, too), or just to an office like any other. Some of the stories are funny, and everyone laughs; sometimes they make people sigh, or wrinkle their noses, or weep.
When the sun rises, and the campfire is just a smudge on the ground and a wisp of smoke in the air, the ring breaks up; but it is not forgotten.