Aye Write reviews: Irvine Welsh & John Niven | Nicola Sturgeon | Sally Magnusson
Every day’s a school day at Glasgow’s Aye Write festival, writes David Robinson
You find out all kinds of things at book festivals. There is, for example, an afterlife. I wouldn’t have known that before I went in to see Irvine Welsh late on Friday night, but he seemed quite sure about it. And that’s not all.
Take the right amount of dimethyltryptamine (DMT for short) and “it takes you right back to before you were born”.
You might already have heard him talk about this in his documentary Reality Is Not Enough, but I hadn’t.
John Niven, sharing the stage with him, nodded wisely, and for a while I thought they were going to compare notes on hallucinogens when Niven mentioned that he’d been at a dinner party with a Peruvian priestess who used ayahuasca in her rituals and he asked if he could try some.
But no: “Apparently you have to go to Peru. So f*** that.”
They’re a good pairing, Welsh and Niven, each with a touch of the bad sheep uncle out to shock at a family gathering, reminiscing about the good old days of drugs and no plot-killing mobile phones.
You can stick your social media too, said Welsh: “Remember the 1970s, when your neighbours would invite you round to look at their crummy, out of focus slide show and you’d want to run a mile? Well, it’s like that now.”
Something else I never knew is that Nicola Sturgeon used to go clubbing with Hollywood star Gerard Butler when they were both at Glasgow Uni.
Not often, it must be said, and maybe hardly ever, but they did have a mutual friend from Paisley so at least there’s more truth in that than the nonsense rumour about her having an affair with the French ambassador.
Freed from the cares of office, Sturgeon is different: softer, more relaxed.
She still has a lawyer’s sharp mind and a politician’s awareness of the need to shut down misinterpretation even as she speaks, but there’s a different side to her now.
She’ll stick to her guns about trans rights, but she’ll mention that she actually loves JK Rowling’s fiction, and stress that it’s possible to disagree with someone without disliking them.
A shy person herself (aye, right: no, actually I believe her) she says that in any room she always gravitates towards the person who appears the least confident, and the motto she tries to live for is quite simple: Be kind.
These days Sally Magnusson is free from the stresses of live broadcasting but doesn’t appear to be missing it either.
Her new novel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, is easily her most ambitious, weaving together the world of the Norse gods with the story of a repressed fiftysomething Surrey librarian who returns to her native Orkney to die after being given a terminal cancer diagnosis.
“The Norse myths matter,” she said, “and they reflect us in our fallibilities, our cruelty and our fears.”
Hel, the Norse goddess of death, for example, is half that of a wizened old crone – “that’s women’s fear of ageing” – and her story is normally sidelined in favour of Odin.
Telling it from Hel’s point of view instead subverts the myths, feminising them in the way the Odyssey has been subverted by the likes of Madeleine Miller and Pat Barker.
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She has been under their spell, she said, since she was a child, when on trips to Iceland her father Magnus Magnusson was an “absolutely mesmerising” teacher and the portrait of the librarian’s inspirational father in her novel is indeed partly based on him.
Fuse that with a story set in contemporary Orkney - in many ways, she suggested, the book is a love letter to the islands - and the result sounds intriguing.
And although Magnusson doesn’t in fact read the audiobook herself, it will have to be quite special to outshine the reading she gave from it herself on Saturday.
The Aye Write Festival runs until 16 November
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