Preview: These Silences

Stuart Kelly wanders away from Charlotte Square to look at a new writing event that could prove to be the ‘fringe’ the Book Festival has always been missing

It is often said that the greatest testament to the success of the Edinburgh International Festival is the Fringe. Over the years, as the Book Festival has become larger and more established, there have been numerous attempts to create a book festival fringe. Word Power Books still hosts a fringe with a clear-cut commitment to left-wing authors. The boutique West Port Festival, having carved out its own niche over three years as a satellite to Charlotte Square, is now running in the autumn. There have been spoken word events from Writers’ Bloc and performance poets like Luke Wright, and it could be argued that the Unbound events in the evening in the Speigeltent at the Book Festival are an attempt to bring some of the fringe event aesthetic into the fold of Charlotte Square.

The These Silences Writing Festival, which starts today at Summerhall, the new performance space in the former Royal Dick Medical College, is the latest contender. It might also be the one with most potential. The Book Festival thrives on the diversity of its programme – bringing everyone from sex therapists and CIA spooks to stand-up comedians and politicians into one venue. These Silences is unashamedly partisan in its literary tastes, showcasing some of the most interesting experimental writers in the country. It’s a small but crucial difference that These Silences is a writing festival, not a book festival. Its manifesto states that “just as realist painting lost its appeal for many artists after the invention of photography, so many writers abandoned naturalistic storytelling after the development of cinema. These Silences turns the spotlight on novelists who have overhauled and re-invented modernist developments in fiction, to bring up-to-the-minute literary experimentation kicking and screaming into the 21st century”.

Curated by Rupert Thomson, the former director of the much-missed Roxy Art House, These Silences boasts appearances by Booker short-listed novelist and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, Tom McCarthy, and the “Neo-ist” provocateur Stewart Home, author of 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and a novel with a four-letter title that WH Smith famously refused to stock, and a writer who went on “art strike” during the Thatcher government.

“Literature is undergoing a largely invisible crisis,” says Thomson. “The world is changing fast and the common forms of literary production are not keeping pace. The writers chosen for These Silences do not offer a simple answer as to ‘where we should be going’, or what work matters now. But they are all those who are not afraid of crisis, who build it into the very fabric of their work. That alone is exciting, but to bring a number of them together over a short period of time, for me, opens up new vistas of interest and opportunity.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Home: “I think the conventional literary novel predicated on characterisation has been dead for more than 100 years, but the corpse of literary fiction is always being stuffed in the mouth of emerging cultures. These Silences was a way of allowing a dynamic cultural current to speak without the hindrance of having a corpse in its mouth.”

The biggest coup for These Silences is the appearance of Iain Sinclair, the most prominent British exponent of psychogeography, whose new work, Ghost Milk, anato-mises the folly and ulterior motivations behind the London Olympics site. Ghost Milk confirms Sinclair’s reputation as “a toxicologist of the 21st-century landscape”. Sinclair has never attended the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and his appearance at Summerhall is in keeping with his long commitment to preserving and promoting the forgotten avant-garde pioneers of London.

London, or rather King’s Cross, looms large in the work of Iphigenia Baal, whose newly published The Hardy Tree is a work in the same exciting vein. Although one might wonder if Edinburgh requires a radical transfusion from London, perhaps the most exciting appearance at These Silences is Bridget Penney. Born and raised in Edinburgh, and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize back in 1991, she is perhaps better known amongst aficionados of the surrealist tradition than in the salons of “tartan noir”. Her novel Index, published by the innovative Book Works, is a salutary reminder that the novel is capable of more than soap opera plotting and Moral Maze “dilemmas”. Other writers include the Language poet and Afro-futurist Anthony Joseph and Katrina Palmer, author of the deliberately elusive and allusive The Dark Object. There is also a discussion of the “cut- up technique” of Burroughs and Brion Gysin from Ed Robinson. By any standard this is a challenging and intriguing line-up. As Tom McCarthy says: “The most interesting writing in Britain at the moment is coming from that corner of the literary world that intersects with the worlds of visual and conceptual art. To have figures like Stewart Home and Katrina Palmer on the same bill is a real gift for Edinburgh.”

Although These Silences has the blessing of Book Festival director Nick Barley, and Thomson is quick to applaud the increased amount of experimental work in Charlotte Square, he also claims that “most of the book festivals I have been to are not thrilling. Individual talks can be, but the atmosphere tends to be very sedate. We have deliberately created a special ‘conference ticket’ for These Silences, because we want to bring together a group of authors, enthusiasts, thinkers and artists to share ideas and inspiration, in a way that will hopefully galvanise interest in experimental work, but also be the seeding ground for new practices, collaborations, and new work.”

The true test of These Silences might not be this year, but what emerges from it next.