list.co.uk/festival Previews | FESTIVAL BOOKS
A CELEBRATION OF IAIN BANKS Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Ken Macleod pay tribute to the much-loved Scottish author
‘For Iain Banks not to be able to join in our 30th anniversary celebrations is deeply saddening for everyone at the Book Festival,’ says Roland Gulliver, associate director of the event, on the passing of the highly respected Scottish author earlier this year. ‘He’s part of our literary DNA, an unmistakable shock of silver hair in our yurt, a quiet man but always one with a wry smile and a fierce opinion.’
The annual Banks event at the festival had b ecome an August tradition, a source of reassuring levels of good humour and forthright opinion from a much-loved local success story. He would have been back again this year to promote his new book The Quarry, which follows in the family saga tradition of earlier works The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale, yet ironically with a character dying of cancer, as Banks himself did.
This will be the first Edinburgh Book Festival not to feature Banks since its inception, so at this event friends will get the discussion going instead: fellow Fifers Ian Rankin and Val McDermid alongside Banks’ closest literary friend Ken Macleod. ‘As a reader beginning to find my way in the grown-up literary world, I was blown away by what he created, fantastical imaginings that still remained tied to the world I knew,’ says Gulliver, encapsulating the sense of place in Banks’ work. ‘The Griffin pub in Glasgow was one of Espedair Street’s iconic locations and I lived ten minutes away from it. The Bridge is a fantasy based around the Forth Road Bridge and I knew where that was. I could find Banks’ stories in the world around me, and that was thrilling.’ (David Pollock) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 25 Aug, 9.30pm, £10 (£8).
S T E V E U L L A T H O R N E
BEN AARONOVITCH & PAUL CORNELL Two former Dr Who writers discuss the cult TV series LUKE WRIGHT Essex lion ●●●●●
By now we’ve all heard that Peter Capaldi, best known for his creative use of the c-word in The Thick of It, is the new Doctor Who. But this is not the most controversial Who-related decision: in 1988, Remembrance of the Daleks featured the first Dalek to climb stairs. Scriptwriter Ben Aaronovitch comments: ‘I was hoping to put an end to all those jokes about how Daleks were never going to conquer the galaxy if they couldn’t climb stairs.’ Luke Wright’s sweary titular poem is last year’s silly season scoop: the tale of Essex natives losing their shit after spying a lion in a field. (Spoiler alert: it was not a lion). Their impotently impassioned refrain, ‘We fucking saw a fucking lion,’ unearths the universally understood perception of pinning your hopes on something, whether heroes or first kisses or a moggy in disguise, as a way of escaping mundanity.
Aaronovitch visits the Book Festival with Paul Cornell, a veteran of Who- These yearnings and reminiscences are woven throughout the show and
based writing: he’s produced scripts, novels and comics. Aaronovitch, too, has immortalised the famous Doctor in prose. ‘[Doctor Who’s producer] John Nathan Turner asked me to make the novelisation as close to the series as I could make it, but prose and scripts are different mediums,’ he says. ‘We have to take a different approach – especially in action sequences.’ Much has changed in Doctor Who’s production since the 1980s. So what would Aaronovitch alter if his scripts were written now? ‘You’d need to take account of the faster pace of modern drama. The higher budget would be nice!’ (Kirsty Logan) ■ Charlotte Square Gardens, 0845 373 5888, 24 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
Wright is perfectly placed to dissect the dreams of the British nation – he is just as at home with a ‘Posh Plumber’ – ‘eats and plays squash / never quaffs it,’ – as he is getting his teeth into Nigel Farrage – ‘the cream-stuffed cat with verbal squits’. Hardly a one-trick pony, his electric delivery is placated with a flowing ode to
growing up in Cogglesham, Sunday evening Lovejoy watching and an inviolable adolescence. Go for the wordsmithery, stay for the painful poignancy. Hardly a one-trick pony, Essex Lion showcases both Wright’s electric delivery and his carefully sculpted craft. (Kirstyn Smith) ■ Assembly George Square, 623 3030, until 26 Aug, 6pm, £10.50–£9.50.
22 Aug–19 Sep 2013 THE LIST 95