It is literary festival season, and there seem to be more than ever. In the next three months, there will be gatherings at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Swindon, Oxford, Cambridge, Hay, Glasgow — I could go on and on and on. The second wave of festivals comes in the high summer, before the final and long hurrah in the autumn.
The proliferation is perplexing. These are hardly the best of times for the consumer; you would expect demand to be relatively low, especially as these events are populated by the same authors saying the same things about the same books. Was Martin Bell, for instance, more or less interesting at Guildford than he was at Cheltenham last year?
Bearing all that in mind, I’d assumed that publishers and the major bookshops were the driving force, determined to find alternatives to the bookshop. But, they are not. New festivals, such as that at Warwick, are local movements run by book lovers, entrepreneurs, and that singularly British species which lives to organise.
Cultural festivals are a fine advertisement for provincial towns with businesses that are coming to depend on tourism. Local organisers are determined to publicise themselves to wide audiences, which is why so many seek a media partner. The famous venues have lured the august broadsheets and the all-conquering Sky Arts, latest abode of Mariella Frostrup. Less well known events have forged tie-ins with smaller papers. The shin-dig in Bath this past weekend was hosted in association with the Independent — and the paper’s editor, Chris Blackhurst, became the latest prominent journalist to suggest that Lord Justice Leveson will have a ‘detrimental effect on British journalism’. The tabloid press and its aspiring readership might provide plenty of cash for the emerging festivals, but perhaps the temptation to be conspicuously high-brow is too great.
Naturally, there must be headlines. Some festivals make a great deal of luring reclusive writers on to the stage — the Sunday Times Oxford literary festival, which begins next weekend, has convinced Anne Tyler (£) to talk about why she guards her privacy. Other festivals look to showcase contention — Edinburgh, for instance, has decided to revive the ‘World Writer’s Conference’, which will debate the future of the novel, style versus substance and so forth.
All of these schemes rely on the groundswell of readers who want to meet (in the loosest sense possible) authors. This is more than just a fashion, or a category within the wider culture of celebrity. One publisher who I spoke to last week said that it was a direct consequence of ‘reading at one move’, by which she meant electronic reading. It is persuasive. Jonathan Franzen has spoken of the impermanence of eBooks, but perhaps there is also a sense of intangibility — that the writer becomes less real. If so, then literary festivals will keep on proliferating as the digital revolution deepens.
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