The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Tom Tivnan is the features editor of The Bookseller. He will be blogging about the magazine's in depth coverage.

A mystery guest in Edinburgh

12.08.08

The 25th instalment of the Edinburgh International Book Festival opened with two sons of the Kingdom of Fife: Ian Rankin in conversation with a former director of Mainstream Publishing, Gordon Brown. Brown has, of course, gone on to bigger but not necessarily better things.
 
The Prime Minister was warmly received by the audience (he was the surprise mystery guest) and he said he was happy to be here – and looked it. He praised EIBF director  Catherine Lockerbie’s deft handling of the festival. He praised book festivals, of which he said Britain has 250 a year, and related an anecdote from Robin Cook. Cook once said that whenever he had attended a political meeting in Cheltenham for free, few people came; if he had a book event at the Cheltenham Book Festival the venue would be packed, even though people had to pay.
 
Brown name-checked Mainstream head honchos Bill Campbell and Peter MacKenzie, and later joked the two had sacked him from Mainstream. If he was sacked the PM bears no grudges; Mainstream published his book last year Everyday Heroes, and Brown said he is writing a new one for them on Britishness.  
 
The good portion of the talk was about Brown’s books, of which he has had three published in the past 18 months. Though cordial, the interview wasn’t full of softball questions. Pointing out that Brown extols the virtue of community volunteers in Everyday Heroes, Rankin asked if that is not an argument against the New Labour’s nanny state.
 
Brown seemed in his element, though, in this bookish environment. He impresses with his intellect and obviously has read widely, at one point trotting out a rather obscure Mark Twain quote when talking about his own move from small town Fife to Edinburgh: "This was no place for a puritan and I didn’t remain one for long." He obviously read the book and the quote wasn’t conjured up by some junior speech writer.
 
He may be one of the most intellectual PMs, and that, in this age of sound bites, might be why he has not been so successful. His answer to a rather pointed question from the audience about how much his government interferes with people’s lives began with a discursive treatment of the repressive society of John Knox’s Edinburgh and how far we have moved on. Well, yes. But answers like that might appeal in the cerebral surrounds of the book festival, but perhaps not in middle England.

The PM's generally jolly mood matched that of the festival, which was busy and buzzy despite the torrential rain on day one. The EIBF said pre-festival sales were 24% up on last year and the inclement weather did not seem to keep any punters away.

The quarter century instalment sees the EIBF rolling out its biggest programme yet, with 800 authors participating in 750 events over the three weeks. Highlights include appearances from Sean Connery, Terry Pratchett, Kate Mosse and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond; as well as talks from Edinburgh stalwarts Rankin, Iain Banks, A L Kennedy and Alexander McCall Smith.

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