Hay Festival

The Guardian’s Hay festival is renowned for being the Holy Grail of literary festivals. It certainly is swamped by media coverage and a wealth of people willing to descend upon the small town of Hay-on-Wye. Having never been before I thought I would go and see what all the fuss was about, so early last Saturday morning I went sauntering down the M4 for the Hay Festival’s last weekend.

From the outside it looks like some overblown marquees in a field with a few limp silk flags. However, once inside, I was quite astonished about the amount of people in such a small space. After wandering around the stalls and bookshops for an hour or so I was feeling a little disheartened. I wasn’t getting the excitement of literature that I expected to wash over me as soon as I entered. Speaking to a retired advertising and marketing manager I asked him if he thought this was all a bit contrived. After laughing (at what I presume was my naivety) He said that of course this was all contrived (we were sitting in deckchairs comparing free samples of ethically sourced coffee at the time) but what mattered was the quality of the speakers and their ideas.

After seeing Mark Kermode (the film critic, who was funny and more charming on stage than he is on the radio), I went to see Yann Martel (famed for writing The Life of Pi) who was speaking on the Guardian stage about his new novel Beatrice and Virgil and the nature of human cruelty. The essence of his argument was that the taboo surrounding the approach to the holocaust means that there are not enough artistic interpretations of it and this in turn limits our response. History needs different perspectives and conflicting views in order for the truth to emerge. You may not agree with one response but this does not render it invalid (‘Silence is not useful’ to anybody). Martel did not come across as warm or dynamic but I enjoyed and agreed with his ideas on the interpretation of history. His talked also worked in the marketing sense: I bought The Life of Pi.

The crime writer Val McDermid spoke to Marcel Berlins about her writing, morality and the crime novel. This wasn’t an event I had planned to go to and I haven’t even read one of her novels but I thought I would go along anyway. Her audience had a very noticeable demographic of ‘nice old ladies’ (as one audience member put it) which was curious given the violence contained within her novels. McDermid was both amiable and interesting- a nice way to start my Sunday morning.

I ended Sunday by going to see two art history talks. The first was an investigation on the drama of the self-portrait by the Observer art critic Laura Cumming. This was pleasant, mildly funny and quite instructive to someone like me who knows little about art history. The second was the Story of Graphic Design, a talk by Patrick Cramsie. Cramsie seemed a little nervous and although the talk was good, it wasn’t as revolutionary as I had hoped.

I will definitely attend Hay next year but I will go with a different attitude. You need to go to Hay festival for a longer period of time and see as varied a range of events as possible to try and dig out the ideas and immerse yourself. It will still be commercialised and most speakers will probably still be trying to plug their new book subtly but this facilitates the magnificence of learning something new and speaking to people who get as excited about books as you do. I suppose this is what the Hay festival really is all about: the ideas and the literature are the core, surrounded by the slightly woolly and commercialised presence. Pretention aside: books are books and I love them!

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