I WAS at an event about early medieval history in one of the smaller tents at Melrose over the weekend when I saw something that, for me, somehow summed up this year's Borders Book Festival – in the audience an elderly woman's face almost comically
racked with doubt.
I knew why; it only mirrored what I was feeling, too. Because from the stage, festival director Alistair Moffat had just reminded anyone who wanted to watch Rory Bremner and John Fortune in the main tent that they had just about three minutes to do so. The woman in the audience clearly had the ticket for that, as did I.
Yet there, in the smaller tent, both of us were momentarily wavering, unsure. For no matter how Britain's best satirists would turn out to be, how could they possibly be any better than the event Moffat was chairing with historian Tom Holland – lucid without being showy, concise without being simplistic, accessible without being dumbed-down? Most of us in the audience, I'd guess, might not know too much about the early medieval mind, with its Tolkienesque inner landscape on which saints clashed with dragons, or the swirling, deadly politics of 10th-century western Europe, or the later groundswell to purify the world through crusade. Compellingly, eloquently, intelligently, Holland set such ignorance to rights.
I've been to enough book festivals to know that the most enjoyable events are often held, like that, in the smaller venues. In the big tents, it's the lure of celebrity's inner circle that magnetises – will Joan Bakewell be asked about her affair with Pinter (yes), what will John Fortune reveal about Peter Cook (that he was so funny people had to beg him to shut up), what can Jim Naughtie reveal about Obama, and so on.
Yet just look at what was on offer in Melrose's smaller tents. Jim Kelman, having just won the £30,000 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year award the previous day, reading from Kieron Smith, boy; Ian Rankin brilliantly explaining why Muriel Spark's unclassifiability left him clutching at straws while writing a PhD thesis about her; Tom Pow explaining how he had tried to write poetry that moved inside and yet beyond the minds of the inmates of the Crichton Asylum in Dumfries.
That's not to say that you should ignore the big ticket numbers. No-one in the audience for Jim Naughtie's eloquent tour d'horizon of contemporary American politics, or who witnessed Diana Athill's steely refusal to indulge in nostalgia, could ever forget them.
But any good book festival has to have an authoritative authors' line-up in the smaller tents, one that's just so damn good that it makes deciding which strand of the festival to follow hard to work out. Melrose did that this year right from the start, programming Gervaise Phinn and Jackie Kay in the smaller tents against Joan Bakewell and Michael Palin in the big ones.
A really good book festival has to do a lot more, too. It's got to be friendly, relaxed, efficient; to look after its audience as well as its authors; to be intelligently programmed and damn good fun, too. That's a lot of boxes to tick, and many festivals fail. At the weekend, Melrose didn't.
