Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Yassmin Abdel-Magied | Gavin Francis | Naomi Ishiguro | Mark Haddon + more

A bit of a rhetorical question, that: most of us Edbookfest veterans already know that by the end of a couple of weeks we always do end up brainier and better informed more in touch with the planet’s finest writers than we started out, even if for some of us the transformation is sadly only temporary.

Why she was really asking, the question at the heart of the whole event and a key theme of the festival itself, was Can You Change Your Mind? And again, the answer is yes, because based on past experience, my own mind told me that such assemblage of specially commissioned pieces would be a bit of a letdown. This one wasn’t.

For that, blame Jackie Kay for her self-mocking story about meeting her identical twin, separated at birth and adopted by different mothers, and discovering that her twin was a police chief inspector in Aberdeen who thought feminism had gone too far and that Kemi Badenoch was the bees’ knees.

Cue rapid rethink on Nature v Nurture and, given Kay’s comic timing and shocked envisioning, hilarity.

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Then again, Anne Enright also twisted the mind-changing theme towards comedy in her story of an Irish matriarch seeing a distant fire threaten the Croatian holiday cottage yet determined to make everyone else in the family change their minds about not leaving early.

Earlier in the day - the very first event at this year’s festival - her essay on clearing the family home showed a different side to her writing: focussed, reflective, moving.

Also back in the evening was Gavin Francis, whose morning event about mental health - sensitively chaired by Karine Polwart - was everything such an event should be.

A GP in Edinburgh and Mull, Francis made a convincing case against rigid categorisation of mental illness, which affects over a third of his patients. A key skill in his job, he said, is working out what kind of doctor they want him to be - collaborative, didactic (an increasingly small number) or just someone who explains the science.

Compassion and humility are key parts of the process and reading is a way of opening up both. “Why read,” he asked in his evening essay, “if not to try out other points of view?”

A bibliotherapist and bookseller before she began following her Nobel prizewinning father’s footsteps as an author, Naomi Ishiguro would doubtless agree.

Her story about a wife escaping a desert-dry marriage had a cool fabulousness - as did the music provided later by composer and fiddle player Aidan O’Rourke and saxophonist Harben Kay, which successfully met their stated aim to “de-tartanise, de-Ossianise” traditional music.

Whatever the pieces they played are called (they didn’t let on), they were wonderful. Check them out.

“You have to remember,” Mark Haddon’s mother once told his sister, “that your father only wanted the one child.”

Not a happy family then, even without him revealing that the subtext of his 2019 novel The Porpoise was about sexual abuse as was one of the captions in his just-published memoir, Leaving Home.

“People say it’s brave,” he said, “but it’s not. If you write a novel, people will slag you off. But with a memoir they don’t.”

These days, the million-selling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time works as a volunteer for the Samaritans.

“What that teaches you is just to listen - not to deflect, or to do anything else but say ‘Tell me about it’ and just be totally interested in someone else.” Which sounded very much like Francis’s modus operandi too.

READ MORE: Author Tom Newlands on neurodiversity, new towns and becoming a novelist at 40

What else did I see that changed me? Peter Apps. I hadn’t read any of his books, didn’t know that he had broken his neck while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka 20 years ago, or that he currently works as Reuters defence correspondent despite not having any working limbs.

I have just been reading about the first screening of Peter Watkins’s The War Game about the aftermath of a nuclear war and “the stunned and shattered faces” Kenneth Tynan saw around him in the viewing room after watching the film the BBC judged too terrible to be shown for the next 20 years.

This had, I thought, some small echo in Apps’s event with Middle East expert Lina Khatib. Admittedly, Apps suggests in his book The Next World War, events might not be quite so cataclysmic - not imminent mutually assured destruction, just more of the same kind of nightmare the Ukrainians are trapped in right now. Unless, of course, China invades Taiwan, in which case all bets are off.

The way Apps discusses war - clipped, fast, no-nonsense - comes as a shock to the system. He talks of “genocide” and “real genocide” (eh?) and speculates that if Putin wants to make a point he could lob a missile or two at Rosyth and it might rattle the windows here in Edinburgh. (Lob? Rattle?)

What would be really awkward, he added, would be if the internet then went down and we didn’t know whether world war had started or whether it was just a local substation on the fritz.

What could we do to stop it? We could start by beefing up our presence in Estonia, where the 15 US tanks were at least a small bit of a deterrent before Trump withdrew them in May. Would things be better when Trump (“the last great and first mad” US President, said Apps (“great?” his audience wondered collectively) left the stage? Not if his successor was weak. But what with America using up its missiles on Iran just as China might be contemplating flexing its muscles over Taiwan, things aren’t looking peachy.

Ms Khatib, I was relieved to find out, is more of an optimist. Lebanon, she pointed out, chooses its own leaders these days, not just the ones Syria and Iran foist on it. That’s good, of course, but we didn’t even get on to Gaza’s future, never mind AI.

This is where a good book festival can whistle up someone like Yi-Ling Liu, an expert on the Chinese internet. The Chinese Communist Party, she said, does change its mind - but not always in a good way. In 2017, for example, the Party clamped down on Chinese hip hop, which most of us didn’t even realise was a thing, and briefly tolerated the rise of a gay dating app that at one stage was twice as big as Grindr.

Avoiding state censorship forces the Chinese to adopt some particularly creative workarounds: because the government wasn’t keen on anyone copying the #MeToo movement, feminists started posting the characters for a bowl of rice and a rabbit - homonyms for the offending hashtag.

All of which leaves me with not enough space to celebrate the work of consultant neurologist Orlando Swayne, who talked movingly about how some patients with brain injuries so severe that they had effectively been written off can recover if given enough intensive therapy. He did, though, come up with one fact the book festival might not want to hear. Because in evolutionary terms, we haven’t been reading very long, there is no separate part of the brain devoted to it, so reading shares the part that handles facial recognition. As a result, the more we read, the less we recognise people’s faces. It’s only by a small factor, but it’s a good excuse and I won’t change my mind about using it. David Robinson

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