Edinburgh Book Festival offers three uniquely different writers within 24 hours

McGough reflected on his visits to the Edinburgh Festival, his first in 1961, when he and his sculptor friend Arthur Dooley slept between the pillars of the RSA because they hadn’t booked anywhere to stay. Apart from the pandemic years, he hasn’t missed a festival since.

In the 1960s, he joined Scottish writers such as Robert Garioch, Edwin Morgan and Norman MacCaig in readings organised by Hamish Henderson in the first Traverse Theatre on the Lawnmarket. He felt a kinship with them, he said, in surrealism and humour, more than with the academic literary tradition of fellow English poets.

Another book with a serious amount of heft is Michel Faber’s Listen: On Music, Sound and Us. Though he is best known as a novelist, Faber’s first love is music, and he listens to six or seven hours of it per day. This, he said, is the book he has always wanted to write, and he could easily have written twice as much. He treated the audience to a reading from a deleted chapter based on interviews with politicians of all persuasions in his Kent constituency.

The results are not what you might expect: the local LibDem leader likes Nine Inch Nails, the UKIP man admits a love of David Bowie, the Green party councillor is reduced to tears by Kylie Minogue’s Locomotion. Music, Faber says, is an art form which circumvents ideologies. Perhaps much could be gained if the warring parties took a break from political disagreement and played one another their favourite songs?

It sounds as though Faber has written a book about music which is not quite like any other. He is setting out to counter the kind of music writing which leaves the reader intimidated for knowing too little. His hope is to offer readers the confidence to enjoy their own musical preferences, be they Mozart or Throbbing Gristle, rather than to feel we have to get to grips with each new fashion.

There was so much here that’s fascinating: how we all hear differently; how music is stored in many different parts of the brain, meaning it often remains accessible even to those with brain injuries or dementia; the fact that, although we have easy access to more music than ever before, we tend not to discover new things. 

He was followed in the Courtyard Theatre by Native American novelist Tommy Orange, recently longlisted for the Booker Prize for his second novel Wandering Stars. His first book, There There, garnered a clutch of awards and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer.

Though he had never intended to write historical fiction, Orange changed his mind when he came across a chance reference, in a museum in Sweden, to a prison castle in Florida where Southern Cheyenne people were held captive in the 1870s and christianised. The orchestrator of this, one Richard Henry Pratt, was so pleased with the results that he rolled out the model for Native American children across the US.

Realising he had come across something people needed to hear about, Orange embarked on an ambitious multi-generational novel spanning 160 years. He writes, he says, against the entrenched narratives still in play about Native American people, who were being dehumanised and brutalised even as the American Civil War was emancipating the enslaved.

This was the Book Festival at its best: three wonderful writers in the same space in one 24-hour period, all completely different and equally excellent.