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FESTIVAL BOOKS | Previews
PATRICK NESS More than just young adult fiction
In an interview last year, Patrick Ness spoke of the way his stories direct him rather than the other way round. Admitting that he never set out to write young adult fiction, Ness allows the ideas to suggest which direction his stories should go in. This strategy has certainly served him well. The UK-based, US-born writer (he now holds dual citizenship) has won acclaim and awards for novels such as The Knife of Never Letting Go and A Monster Calls, while his latest, The Crane Wife (Ness’ first book in a decade to be aimed specifically at an adult audience, however it may have started life), has been a soaraway success. But how does he adjust to writing for different age
ranges? ‘I don’t actually see a distinction,’ he insists. ‘The story needs to be what it is, and my job is to find that. It’s the same effort and investment for both.’ The Crane Wife is the beautifully-told story of a decent man called George, who is visited in his garden one night by a magical white bird with an injured wing. The next day, a mysterious woman called Kumiko walks into George’s print shop; he is fascinated by the delicate artworks she has crafted out of feathers and the pair start up a relationship. Having been a published writer for a decade, Ness can
now reflect on the progression he has made as an author. ‘The main change is probably just confidence with a small c and boldness with a small b. It’s what I want in a writer when I read, so it’s what I try to do for my readers. Make them feel they can trust where I’m going to take them. No one wants to read an apologetic book.’ (Brian Donaldson) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 10 Aug, 10.15am, £10 (£8).
MULTIPLES An experiment in literary Chinese whispers PHILIPP MEYER & PATRICK FLANERY The cruelty of the American dream
‘Twelve stories in eighteen languages by sixty-one authors’ boasts the cover of Multiples, a book that sets out to experiment with everything that is gained and lost in the process of translation. The project was conceived and edited by British
novelist Adam Thirlwell (pictured), and he eagerly anticipates discussing it with contributors John Banville and Nadeem Aslam at this year’s Book Festival.
In an event intriguingly titled As Dreams Become Nightmares, American writers Philipp Meyer (pictured) and Patrick Flanery team up to discuss their latest novels. Both books, Flanery’s Fallen Land and Meyer’s The Son, examine the American dream and its darker intricacies – a similarity that Flanery describes as only one of the reasons he feels his piece will work well in discussion alongside Meyer’s.
‘It’s definitely changed the way I think, in ways I’m ‘I am reading Meyer’s book at the moment and
still trying to process,’ Thirlwell explains. ‘Mainly, it has to do with thinking in more multiple ways about style – either questioning the usual idea that a single novelist should have a single style or, even more disturbingly, whether style in a novel is really locatable in a specific language at all. But we could talk about that for centuries.’ When asked what sort of discussions audiences
should expect from the event this year, Thirlwell suggests: ‘Nervous discussions about minute linguistic problems; exuberant discussions about the joys of collective projects; utopian discussions about a future international literature.’ (Ashley Welling) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 12 Aug, 3.30pm, £10 (£8).
30 THE LIST FESTIVAL 8–15 Aug 2013
immediately see interesting ways in which The Son and Fallen Land might potentially be placed in conversation,’ says Flanery. ‘Superficially, both are concerned with land and the complex dynamics of inheritance (not only in terms of property) across generations of a single family. More interestingly from my perspective, both books are attentive to language, to the ways in which words accrue meaning over time, and in Meyer’s case, with the recuperation of language that has been forgotten.’ Book Festival director Nick Barley has highlighted Meyer as ‘one to watch’, and we predict that tickets will sell out fast. (Ashley Welling) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 10 Aug, 6.45pm, £10 (£8).
WILL STORR: IN SCIENCE WE TRUST? Adventures with the non-believers
For Will Storr it started with the question ‘why don’t facts work?’ The result is The Heretics, his entertaining and insightful investigation into why people hold irrational beliefs, often in the face of overwhelming evidence. ‘You go into a project like this saying “I’m going to find answers”,’ he says, ‘but you don’t really believe it.’ Over the course of his research, he met a colourful
array of psychics, psychologists, scholars, healers, sceptics and scientists. He experienced past-life regression, extreme Buddhist meditation and, in an unsettling chapter that will be a focus of this event, joined a tour group of neo-Nazis led by controversial historian David Irving. ‘The holiday was extremely tense! It was exhausting pretending to be a racist for a week. The timing was especially awkward, as I came back the day before my wedding. The fiancée wasn’t pleased.’ Storr discovered that even the most ‘rational’
thinker is not immune to the trickery of their own brain. ‘The main surprise for me was that the atheist- sceptical community are so often on such shaky ground. They are just as vulnerable to the processes of bias as the rest of us.’ (Ally Nicholl) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 13 Aug, 2pm, £7 (£5).