I interviewed Joseph Heller 20 years ago at Hay. He was fabulous. I was terrible. I was overawed and came up with a line of sycophantic questioning that ran along the lines of: “I love you, please tell me a story.” The audience was far more robust. The first question was from a fierce woman who pitched right in with “Mr Heller, since Catch-22 you haven’t written anything else as good!” He smiled, and said: “No.” He nodded. “No, you’re right.” A pause. He smiled again. “But then, neither has anyone else.” Sweetly done, and funnier for being largely true. Truly great literature comes along a few times in your lifetime, if you are lucky. But surely we can make a case that, in book terms at least, we’ve never had it so good. There are fabulous authors writing now, sharing more contemporary stories than at any time in history. And if we mainly celebrate the ones we know and cherish in the English language, then in the week of World Book Day, we ought to nod to the fact that only one in 10 of the 7 billion people on the planet read in English, and that the other nine have their Austens, Mantels, Rushdies and Rowlings, too.
I love the first two weeks of March. Here in Hay, the calendar ticks over and I sit in the library and pull together all the ideas and stories that have tumbled on to my desk and into my awareness, and write the festival programme. The festival is a 12-day, 10-ring circus. The logistics will be familiar to anyone who’s juggled a school timetable or crossed a river on pigback with a herd of cats. The thrill of it is in tracing lines of inquiry and adventure across genres and subjects, picking up on the threads of identity and dependence, of mistakes and reactions, of migrations and change, that run through fictions and poetry, through histories and scientific studies.
In a digital world, where the currency of commentary can be most powerfully compressed into 140 characters, the book is surging back precisely because of the seriousness of the artefact. It’s not just the brilliant and durable technology, it’s the slow, careful and undemonstrative attention to clarity and depth of thought. Those bound pages have been created with care by expert printers, designers, editors and publishers. They’ve all worked with devotion to share the work of the writer. For almost 600 years, this is the way we’ve stored what we know – from Tyndale’s Bible and Newton’s Principia to the tales of love, death, war and peace that are imagined by novelists and poets the world over. The scholars and scientists and storytellers committed themselves to paper, and to the satisfyingly tactile and weighty authority of a book.
And what are writers for? It seems to me that they articulate truths that we recognise. They imagine the world as it is, and sometimes as it might be. You can make an argument that writers who appeal particularly to young readers create some kind of moral framework for the secular world, and in that instance I trust the humane genius of storytellers over the agendas of politicians and ministers of faith.
Ask a class of 15-year-olds what the common cultural reference points are. I’ve tried this across the country. There are shyly confessed addictions to Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty games, and rapturous approval of Ellie Goulding and Caitlin Moran, but where once a generation might have come together over Grange Hill or chart shows, now the one thing that seems to reach across all boundaries of background, ethnicity, gender and geography is a close familiarity with the wizarding world of Hogwarts. For anyone troubled by attention spans, it’s worth factoring what this means about readers and scale. This generation knows who the Slytherins are. They know it’s a long haul, but that worlds turn if you make them turn; and that to prevail, you have to persist, to dare and to read.
Peter Florence is director of Hay festival. The 30th Hay festival Wales runs from 25 May to 4 June. Earlybird tickets are on sale now. The full programme will be announced on 3 April. .
