Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: David Olusoga | Anne Sabba | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Michelle de Kretser + more

Say what you like about the Edinburgh book festival - and its middle Saturday wasn’t particularly star-studded - but if you spend a day there, you don’t half come out knowing a lot more than when you went in.

Anne Sabba’s book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz lifted only a small corner on the horrors of that place, but even that was enough. Anti-semitism ran even within the orchestra itself, its Polish prisoners (for whom the camp was originally built) refusing to share the food parcels their relatives sent them with their Jewish fellow-musicians.

Jewish music was banned, but so too was Beethoven, too gloriously German to be sullied by inferior races. The music they did play - cheery marches, mainly - was, as Sabba pointed out, a form of torture. It didn’t help the prisoners, who were kicked (or worse) if they fell out of step, didn’t soften the hearts of the guards, and the 50 or so musicians it helped keep alive were either shunned by survivors or consumed by guilt.

Real music is different. Mahler’s niece Alma Rosé, who died in Auschwitz, was lead violinist in the women’s orchestra and died there. She only seems to have made one recording, of the Bach Double Violin concerto in D Minor, with her virtuoso father, in 1928. Sabba played an excerpt. It’s on YouTube: a bit scratchy, but beautiful and, when you think of everything that Alma’s future was to hold, heartbreaking.

All the time she was writing the book, Sabba said, she was thinking what she’d have done facing such a cataclysm. That’s exactly what I found myself thinking listening to acclaimed African-American cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, for whom the cataclysm is racism. America was built on it, he said: worse, it still is.

So is there no hope? asked a woman in the audience. No, he replied.

“There IS a whole African-American tradition of hope and I respect that, but whatever I am, I am the descendant of people who have been enslaved for 250 years... I have debts to pay and that motivates me more than anything.”

To Coates, America’s racism is systemic and its dominant narratives fundamentally flawed, and he sees echoes of both in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

“Everyone always told me this is such a complex historical problem, that you’d need a PhD to understand what’s happening in Ramallah. No, you don’t. Sometimes we hide behind our intellect. If we see someone beating their child, the reasons don’t matter, it’s nothing to do with right or wrong, you just want them to stop.”

That might sound obvious, even banal, but Coates was brought up in the Black Power/vindicationalist tradition, and in The Message he acknowledges how much of this is echoed in Zionism. So now, charting what he calls the latest genocidal atrocity in Gaza - the “deliberate” killing of the al-Jazeera journalists - he sees the danger of such dreams.

Although he didn’t take that thought as far as he does in the book, this was a fascinating event, with a far younger audience than usual and so many hands raised for questions that if they’d all been answered, we’d all still be there.

Coates was chaired by David Olusoga, Britain’s best TV historian (though he himself would say that the honour belongs to Simon Schama) and who signed off his own event with the news that not only will his excellent BBC Two series A House In Time soon be back on our screens but it will be set in Edinburgh.

Olusoga's fascination with history began, he said, when his mother told him that Yoruba soldiers from Nigeria (where he was born but left aged five) had fought in the Second World War.

“At first I almost didn’t believe her because I’d never heard anything about that. But I became fascinated with history because I felt there was a story being withheld from me.”

It was. Take Captain Yavar Abbas, the 104-year-old who made Queen Camilla (and “my brave king”) cry at the service for the 80th anniversary of VJ Day last week. He was one of 2.5 million Indian soldiers to sign up. We don’t hear too much about them. If the teaching of black history faces the kind of limits already being drawn up in America, he said, we might hear a lot less. The attacks on the National Trust “which have been going on for the last five years by so-called patriots” may be a sign of things to come.

Australian writer Michelle de Kretser has won all of her country’s most glittering literary prizes, yet has a neat line in self-deprecation. Unlike her friend, novelist Deborah Levy, whose mind leaps like a chess knight, she said her own is predictable and purposeful, like a pawn. “So here, I tried to do the leap.”

“Here” is her latest novel, Theory and Practice, “my attempt to write a novel that reads like non-fiction”, starting off like a conventional novel and morphing into an intriguing-sounding story of a mashup of memoir, essay, and a meditation on Virginia Woolf (and her casual racism to a Sri Lankan guest).

Canadian writer Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, set in a fantastical, crumbling and placeless palace where 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza, eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu and American political theorist Hannah Arendt all help her young girl migrant protagonist. She did try introducing Virginia Woolf to the proceedings, she said, but it didn’t work “because she was double-booked in my friend Michelle’s book”.

British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel Saraswati, which mixes myth, the politics of water and ecological collapse, is similarly ambitious. In it, the Indian government decides to bring a mythic river to life. For that, they to abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan – which is exactly what happened earlier this year. Prescient or what?

Finally, as promised, to toxic lesbian vampires. The genre is new to me but VE Schwab is clearly its queen. Like Thien, she picks her three supernatural stars from across the centuries, but the baddest of them all is the oldest (500 years).

Sabine is “a mix of Lestat [from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles] Villanelle [from Killing Eve] and Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine”. She dominates every space she enters, is unapologetic about her urges, “and fulfils all my queer desire for villainy”.

For too long, Schwab said, lesbian fiction has concerned itself with likeability - in itself a form of self-censorship. She’d done that in her own life, when she started off as a young fantasy writer: “I was a coward for such a long time, downplaying my sexuality because I wanted to succeed.”

After 25 books, she’s had enough of that: “I’m in my Sabine era is what I’m saying.”

Cue cheers from the audience - mainly female, mainly young, and clearly fans - as they charged off en masse to the signing tent and the mercifully vampire-free Edinburgh night.

David Robinson

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