REBECCA GOWERS Reaching out with realistic dialogue
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For everything you need to know about all the Festivals visit www.list.co.uk/festival XIAOLU GUO Creating political parables out of flying saucers
After her reading at the Book Festival last year, Chinese author Xiaolu Guo spent a lot of her Q&A session chatting about the literary headaches, not to mention boredom, created by translating from her first language, Chinese, into English. She had gone from living in Beijing with what she described as ‘a very broken and childish’ English, to residing in London. Despite struggling with the
‘How you write about a woman somewhere in her 20s without being labelled chick-lit, I don’t know,’ says Rebecca Gowers, frustrated by the fact that her novels are so often lumped into the genre of pastel- covered books all about modern ladies cooing over sex and designer shoes. ‘You can be a young woman somewhere in your 20s and have a mentality and interests and even fall in love, yet not fall into the norms of a chick-lit narrative.’
Gowers’ second novel, The Twisted Heart, proves it. The story of gawky Oxford post-graduate student Kit’s awkward relationship with mysterious maths lecturer Joe, it avoids cliché by becoming intertwined with a secondary plot based on Kit’s academic investigation linking Charles Dickens to the murder of a prostitute in 1838 (a theory conceived and researched by the author herself). ‘I hope ultimately that those two storylines speak to each other across the course of the novel.’
Her use of dialogue too is highly unconventional. Gowers eschews perfect, flowing discourse in favour of a ‘more plausible form of disrupted speech’ that falters and stumbles like real conversations do. ‘I get terribly bored of reading dialogue in books that manifestly isn’t how people speak,’ she says. ‘I suppose if this reads like real dialogue, the whole thing is that much more plausible to the reader.’ Gowers hopes those readers will include males and females alike. ‘This is certainly not a book that’s aimed at women specifically. I’d like to think that anyone could read it and find it interesting.’ (Malcolm Jack) ■ 26 Aug (with Kate Pullinger), 10.15am, £9 (£7).
JOHN ABERDEIN Hard-edged visions of the future
Think you can handle pressure? Try following an award-winning debut. John Aberdein kept a cool head when it came to writing Strip the Willow, however, despite the huge anticipation
written subtleties of English tone and slang, Guo mastered a translation of her Chinese language novel, Village of Stone, which was shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2004. Having smoothed over her initial language speedbumps, Guo then wrote her first English language novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Fast forward two years, and she’s back with UFO in Her Eyes, which uses various points of view to piece together the mystery surrounding a UFO sighting.
Set in a backwards peasant village in southern China, it is an easy-to-digest political parable that playfully switches voices between a curt, cold police officer’s line of questioning, to an illiterate and potty-mouthed pork butcher, with shy spinsters and no- nonsense tea farmers filling in the gaps. Showing she’s now comfortable enough with English to write a multi- layered satire with it (and make films too, but that’s a whole other story) her lighthearted, sweary comedy pokes fun at China’s clumsy transition from Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution into a capitalist superpower. (Claire Sawers) ■ 26 Aug, 7pm, £9 (£7).
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for the novel as a result of excellent first offering Amande’s Bed. ‘Some book people got the notion I was going to copy my Amande’s Bed “formula” and write a follow-up bestseller,’ he says. ‘But I’m more concerned with being alert to what’s happening now and finding a novel way to approach it. That’s partly why it took three years to write.’ The scribe’s latest offering is a darkly
comic love story and striking social commentary, set in the city of Uberdeen — a vision of a future, multinational-run Granite City — and he will be reading from it at his forthcoming event with Esther Woolfson. ‘At first I wondered why the festival supremos had chosen to have us jamming together,’ Aberdein says. ‘Then I discovered that both our current novels explore the poignant perspectives involved in re-opening a relationship after a 40-year silence. Plus some pretty hard-edged historical and political stuff.’
Aberdein and Woolfson make for an intriguing pairing indeed, and the former is clearly looking forward to discussing their work in more detail; it’s all part of what is shaping up to be an incredibly successful year for him. ‘Amande’s Bed was a homage to my people, Strip the Willow an exorcism, a clearing of certain decks,’ he says. ‘The third is entitled Hearts and Minds and I’m reading widely and hoping to travel to the States in September. Hearts and Minds aims to explore the limits of love in this world of ours.’ (Camilla Pia) ■ 21 Aug (with Esther Woolfson), 4.30pm, £6 (£4).
JAMES LOVELOCK Dire warnings of a planet fading away He has been likened to ‘an Old Testament prophet’ by John Carey, identified as the creator of an ‘evil religion’ by biologist John Maynard Smith, and labelled a writer of ‘pop- ecology literature’ by Richard Dawkins. James Lovelock, veteran scientist and author, has been making waves ever
Festival Books
since he explained his Gaia theory in a book published in 1979. The atmosphere, he suggested, was not simply created by random events but was made and sustained by the cumulative effects of life on earth; in this sense, the earth is alive.
The hippies adored it; Dawkins didn’t. Thirty years later and just as he turns 90, Lovelock is back and more like the Greek god of thunder, Zeus. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, was published in February and warns of the disastrous effects of climate change which probably won’t explode the earth, but might well doom humanity.
KIDSEVENTS
There’s a jumble of big names and intriguing unknowns at the festival this week. Luckily Lizzie Mitchell is on hand to point out the best events for kids Old favourites for kids include Michael Morpurgo (22 Aug), Malorie Blackman (22 Aug), Jacqueline Wilson (23 Aug), Anne Fine (23 Aug), Julia Donaldson (24 Aug), and Terry Deary of Horrible Histories stardom (28 Aug), but there’s a whole lucky-dip of events out there, and some of the titles look good enough to take a chance on even if you’ve got no idea what’s coming. Try Grubtown Tales (26 Aug), HIVE (the Higher Institute for Villainous Education; 24 Aug), Sir Charlie Stinky Socks (22 Aug) or Vampirates Ahoy! (21 Aug), or, if you’re a budding illustrator- detective, go solve The Mystery of Harris Burdick (24 Aug) – the adults haven’t managed it yet. For those who really want to venture into uncharted literary territory, there are Scroll Stories from India (20 Aug), African Legends (23 Aug) or Egyptian Adventures (23 Aug). And if you’re completely at a loss for where to begin, Dr Recommenda Book will be on hand for much of Friday (21 Aug) to prescribe cures for all your reading ills. Just don’t let the end of the week catch you without a book in hand. (Lizzie Mitchell) ■ See edbookfest.co.uk for full details of events.
20–27 Aug 2009 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 15