Festival Books
ANDREW O’HAGAN Finding the spot where literature and performance meet
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, And of His Friend Marilyn Monroe is not your run-of-the-mill contemporary novel, and not just because the eponymous first-person narrator is an aristocratic Maltese terrier with Trotskyist tendencies, owned by the greatest icon of the 20th century. It’s an extraordinarily articulate engagement with the nature of celebrity and America’s theatre of dreams, and has, only a couple of months after publication, struck a rather inevitable chord with Hollywood. ‘Yes, it’s been bought by a film studio, and production is gearing up just
now,’ says a rather bewildered-sounding O’Hagan, speaking to me during a week in which names like George Clooney and Naomi Watts were rumoured to be attached to the project. ‘People just seem to want to take it off the page and make it live, this book, perhaps because there’s so much life, so much theatricality and performance already in it.’
Those particular qualities, and the way people have reacted to them, has led O’Hagan to investigate alternative ways of presenting the novel at public appearances. At Charlotte Square Gardens he’ll be joined onstage by the actors Ian McDiarmid, Andrew Hawley and Suzanne Bertish, playing the various legends – Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Natalie Wood, Carson McCullers and the drama teacher Lee Strasberg amongst others – who dance across the narrative. O’Hagan will be playing the Scottish-born Maf the Dog himself, of course.
‘This book is so full of voices I felt it would be a real treat if people could hear them, and rehearsals so far have been sensational. Ian McDiarmid doing Lee Strasberg is worth the ticket price alone.’ McDiarmid and O’Hagan have worked together before: McDiarmid both adapted and starred in the National Theatre of Scotland production of O’Hagan’s last novel Be Near Me. It seems perfectly designed for an Edinburgh International Book Festival programme which has sought to break down the traditional ‘literary’ event, and O’Hagan reveals that that’s no accident.
‘Nick Barley [the festival director] has a very contemporary mind: it’s
natural to him to see cross-currents between art forms and try to make the festival a home for all those other disciplines that have writing as a central plank, and that certainly chimed with this book. I think I also wanted to do something, in Edinburgh; just a moment to pause and recognise the performability, before it goes off to its next incarnation, its next life, in the movies.’ (Kirstin Innes) ■ 15 Aug, 11.30am (solo event), 5pm (with Bill Clegg), £10 (£8).
24 THE LIST 12–19 Aug 2010
ALLAN BROWN A cult classic analysed in a batty book
Inside the Wicker Man is a cinema lover’s dream. The book is packed with fascinating trivia from the horror classic it explores, along with in-depth analysis and humour; and it’s a pleasure to find its author Allan Brown just as funny in everyday parlance. ‘I’m rather dreading it in a way,’ he says of his festival appearance. ‘The thought of people hiring babysitters and paying cash just to come out and hear me speak fills me with a crippling embarrassment. I’m astonished that such a prestigious event considers this film worthy of such recognition. At the same time, it is quite an amusingly batty book, I hope, and I do tell a good anecdote about a BBC researcher, so it all balances out.’ The Glasgow-based writer and critic will discuss his cult work at the event, where he will also be joined by two actors who appeared in the film. There may even be some debate about the long-awaited sequel The Wicker Tree. But Brown doesn’t hold out much hope for it. ‘I doubt I’ll enjoy it. It looks like a hybrid of Catweazle and Take the High Road. It’ll just be an anagram of the original film.’ A more pressing concern for him is that he will be left high and dry in front of a room full of Wicker Man devotees. ‘Actors are reluctant to commit to anything further than a day away, unless it’s work,’ he quips. ‘I’m hoping the prestige of the Book Festival lures them in the end. But it may just be me in a series of fetching wigs.’ (Camilla Pia) ■ 14 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
CANDIA MCWILLIAM A festival veteran considers her own difficult story
‘I have loved the Edinburgh International Book Festival all its 22 years,’ says Charlotte Square Gardens veteran Candia McWilliam. ‘It makes an annual conversation about books
and about thinking, about what it is to share in the examined life. It is intimate and serious, familial and exalting.’ And her appearance this year is likely to be more electric than any she’s made before. In 2006, following years of writers’ block, she discovered she was losing her sight. The disconcerting process of composing through dictation released a series of memories, and difficult, jagged associations of her mother’s suicide, finding her bearings in London and Cambridge, and losing those bearings and a descent into alcoholism.
Her event promises to be doubly momentous for her Edinburgh audience, who’ve been party to her confessions at festivals past. Not only will McWilliam present her first book in over a decade (instead of the special EIBF story she traditionally came to pen the day before her ‘gig’) with the eagerly-awaited What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness, but she will also read from it, having had her sight restored thanks to pioneering surgery in 2009. ‘Every year, a new surprising theme gradually declares itself throughout the Book Festival; in that way, it’s like a good novel, with its own momentum of jokes, revelations and interior life.’ (Peggy Hughes) ■ 19 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
LARS HUSUM A wild and bizarre slapstick farce
Given that My Friend Jesus Christ reads like a Dogme movie, you can’t help but feel Lars Husum’s time working as a dramaturge at Lars von Trier’s Copenhagen film production company Zentropa fed into his debut novel. ‘It’s not conscious, but I see your point,’ says Husum. ‘What the best Dogme films did well was to focus on stories about the human condition, doing it with humour, brutality and originality. My novel is comedy, tragedy, melodrama, religious drama and slapstick farce.’
It’s about a very bad boy named Niko who drives his sister to suicide before being visited by a big hairy biker who says he’s Jesus and is here to save the soul of the troubled youngster. Where did that wacky idea come from? ‘I wanted to write something that was wild, bizarre and unpredictable,’ says Husum. ‘I got the title before I had anything else, and I think the Jesus character represents all that, because you’re never told whether it’s Niko’s imagination, actually Jesus or just a biker calling himself Jesus. In Denmark, when we deal with religion it is often either very much pro or very much against. My novel is neither.’