David Larsen spends a week at Wellington's Writers Festival and finds surprises, rock-star writers and one disappointment.
You walk into a bookshop for a browse and discover the sky has fallen. All the books have been reshelved with total disregard for genre, title, author name, or any other organising principle known to science. Jane Austen is next to Diana Wynne Jones. John Milton is next to Dick Francis. "Yes," says a bookseller cheerfully, when you ask what on earth is going on."It's our new system. We're shelving books according to how groovy they are."
The Grooviness Index was suggested by Audrey Niffenegger, at the gala opening of the Writers and Readers Week at the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts in Wellington. I trek along to these opening nights with a mild sense of doom. They typically involve long and worthy speeches from organisers, sponsors, and - be afraid - local dignitaries, after which a selection of amazing writers stand up and read from their work.
Some people love hearing writers read aloud. I can read quite adequately myself, thank you, and unless the writers are exceptional voice performers, which most, to put it kindly, are not, I'd rather hear them talk. But getting a panel of four or five writers to talk for 90 minutes is a high-risk business. Usually, one or two will dominate, the chairperson's efforts to bring in the quieter ones will fail while simultaneously putting the voluble ones off their stride, and the audience will complain afterwards it was like being an eavesdropper at a very awkward dinner party.
This opening night, held, like most of the sessions throughout the week, at the grand old Embassy Theatre, was the kind of dinner party that makes you happy you bothered to dress up. The four writers on the panel were Niffenegger; Canadian poet, short story writer and novelist Gil Adamson; Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie; and Wellington-based British crime writer Neil Cross. Kate De Goldi, who was running the panel, teased out connections between them and kick-started an absorbing four-way conversation about the nature of the novel in the 21st century.
Things accelerated when Cross, by his own admission "a born stirrer", came out with the line, "Literary fiction is the only sort where if you don't enjoy it, the author can say it's your fault."
"Truer to say," remarked literary novelist Shamsie, "that literary fiction is the only sort that doesn't sell." Soon we were deep into a discussion of exactly what literary means, exactly what genre means, and exactly why, in Niffenegger's not entirely facetious view, it would be productive to junk these labels and reorganise bookshops according to bookseller grooviness ratings. "People would find themselves looking at writers they normally wouldn't even know were there."
It's a provocative thought, and it also nicely sums up one of the best things about literary festivals. Faced with a five-day smorgasbord of hour-long sessions with individual writers, public readings and multi-writer panels on a wide range of topics, you could just drop in for the two or three writers you were most excited about. But how much more interesting to go to the sessions on either side of your favourites, and find out about people completely new to you.
My bookshelves - and, alas, my credit card - are groaning under the weight of titles by people I barely knew existed a week ago. Gil Adamson; her husband, the poet Kevin Connolly; the British poet Glyn Maxwell; the German-language writer Ilija Trojanow; Kamila Shamsie; Samuel Johnson Award-winning non-fiction writer Philip Hoare - all of them were so incisive, funny, intelligent and generous on stage that buying their books seemed no more optional than buying another cup of coffee. (You do not stay focused through a week like this without a great deal of coffee.)
One of the incidental virtues of going to as many sessions as possible is the way conversations start to develop between writers. One example among many: a passing remark of Bill Manhire's about the usefulness of imposing limits on your writing was picked up and developed by at least four other authors. (Kevin Connolly rephrased it neatly as: "Limiting your options is often the best way of expanding your horizons.")
The opening night discussion of genre versus literary echoed throughout the rest of the week, partly thanks to the presence of populist/literary crossover writers like Niffenegger, Margo Lanagan and Neil Gaiman, and partly because so many of the other writers seemed ambitious to obliterate publishing category distinctions. In particular, the line between fiction and non-fiction came in for vigorous smudging from biographers, poets and novelists alike.
Most of the festival's numerous conversations about religion were not started by Richard Dawkins, the science writer and champion of atheism, who appeared once and flew out the next day. But his pitbull reputation served as a running gag. Kim Hill, asking Philip Hoare about the jaw-dropping possibility that whales may have their own religions, was one of many people in the week to pause, glance round, and ask: "Richard Dawkins isn't in the building, is he?"
Dawkins' own session at the sold-out Michael Fowler Centre was my biggest disappointment of the festival, thanks to the great man's insistence on devoting half of his hour to a prepared lecture. It was a perfectly well written one, and he delivered it nicely enough. But it held no surprises for anyone familiar with his work, and it left too little time for him to debate his ideas with Bernard Beckett - who, being one of the most scientifically literate writers in New Zealand, would have made an ideal foil for Dawkins, had he been allowed time to do the job properly.
Dawkins was one of three writers whose solo sessions had to be held in larger venues, because of the demand for tickets. The others, historian Simon Schama and cult fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, were every bit as entertaining and inspiring as their popularity might suggest. Each also appeared on two-writer panels, and as it happened, the other writer on both of them was the brilliant Australian fantasist Margo Lanagan, who was able to demonstrate her strength of character by smiling cheerfully while being upstaged twice in a row.
Schama is a larger-than-life figure, vastly erudite and possessed of the priceless gift of being able to make his enthusiasm for his subject infectious. But Gaiman was far and away the festival's biggest hit, bringing in a younger crowd and showing the initially bemused older members of the audience exactly what the fuss was about.
And there was a great deal of fuss, every time Gaiman appeared. Wild cheering, whooping, wolf whistles, the full rock star treatment. Astonishingly, he lived up to it. His poetry and novel readings were good enough to blow my "talk, don't read" prejudices right out of the room; his conversations with Lanagan and Kate De Goldi were intelligent and wide-ranging; and he gave hilarious and thoughtful answers to audience questions. Prolific, protean, endlessly inventive, he is - as De Goldi put it in one of the festival's sweetest turns of phrase - "the Amadeus Mozart of post-modern literature."
