Begin Call

‘Only connect!’ beseeched E.M. Forster. Could Mr Forster have envisaged a world in which one person connected with another, thousands of miles away, through free video and voice calls, instant messages and file sharing, via a computer and broadband internet connection and a company called Skype? Humans are now so freely connected through computers as to cause consternation to governments like those of Russia and China.

Skype is on a mission to ‘enable the world’s conversations,’ says its President, Josh Silverman. ‘Allowing the world to communicate for free empowers and links people and communities everywhere,’ he believes. The etymology of the word ‘conversation’ is ‘act of living with’, or ‘to live with, keep company with’. But does Skype improve or impair that capacity for good human connection? How are conversations and thus relationships and identities changing in the age of Skype, as so many of us now have online presences?

Stemming from a wider curiosity (which has been encouraged by Skype and new technology), I want to connect with those far from me, researching for long-lost relatives, scattered family overseas, and friends and strangers, too. I want to learn more about how they might pass each day; their ideas about the world; the texture not only of their voices but of their lives. Indeed, I want to get back to the etymological root meaning of that word, conversation. The fundamental impossibility of being in two places at once has driven me to communicate virtually, and now to delve beneath the hype about Skype. Only connect, I think, as I begin Skyping. Far from being alone in my internet stirrings, there are currently 12, 868, 311 people online at the same time as me. There we have it – the breathing human and the virtual, in two places at once.

It is 1:03 a.m. in Sydney and the middle of the afternoon here in England. A white tick against a green background tells me that I am connected. I am ‘keeping company’ with those also bearing this status. ‘This is the best time to be using Skype, as I get to chat to people overseas,’ explains a long-lost Australian acquaintance, whom I’ll call ‘Ash’. Hearing his voice with all its quirks of accent elevates the communication from the brief exchange of written instant messages. The novelty is also in being able to see the person in glorious three-dimensionality, as well as hear their voices. I can see in the background the place where they live; the colours of the walls and pictures which adorn it – a glimpse of their context. For this is all we get in the virtual world: glimpses. I can see the expression on the face as they are talking and am more carefully attuned to it. As I listen to a tale of heartbreak unfold, hearing how Ash was cheated on by a girlfriend, I watch his face as it shows anger, upset, resignation, pensiveness, hurt, humour, a spectrum of human emotion passing over it in the space of just over an hour, as swift as an interplay of clouds passing through the sky, now overcast, now bright. Skype exhibits how much of communication is non-verbal (although the visual and phonic are allowed, touch and smell are of course still excluded). This becomes important with rather monosyllabic acquaintances, or those who have greater facility with the spoken than written word.

To what extent are these exchanges close to ‘living with’ (that etymological root of conversation) or actually a form of detachment; a pseudo-version of ‘to live with/keep company with’ and thus an inadequate substitute for the real thing? The performativity of the experience is in some respects akin to watching real-life television; an unfolding soap opera in which the players are not fictional. However, this is no television programme. At times, I am spooked by the experience. The connection is patchy and Ash’s blurred face breaks, as if it is a scifi movie and the pixels are about to disperse. His mouth cracks open and then the screen freezes, with an elongated black hole where his mouth should be. The frozen moment.

The screen freeze-frames a particular expression, that of the jilted lover, etching into the mind a mood that, were Ash in my presence, I may not even have noticed. Thus is the paradox of Skype; being at once removed and yet brought closer to seeing and comprehending through these strange glitches and hiatuses, the mobility of the human face and emotion it carries. As he scratches his head, the screen suddenly stops, leaving his image there, hand raised aloft – pensiveness freeze-framed. I have learnt about his life; work, love, education. There has been more knowledge exchanged in this conversation than in the previous twenty-something years of our lives.

But these glitches can also be just that – frustrating ruptures in the flow of conversation, breaking the illusion of closeness. Skype freezes at a crucial moment in the plot story of fraught romance. As he is explaining the complexities of his love triangle, the screen suddenly plunges into silence and blacks out. ‘Hello,’ I bellow, wondering whose side this mishap is on. The sound begins again but he is now caught up in the flow of the story and already sailed on, sketching characters and incidents, so I must pause him and tell him to rewind, go back to the moment when. . .

It is not only across oceans that Skype connects, but with people in the next room, as I discovered through an excited ten year old, who ushers me next door, eager to experiment with talking virtually. But it’s another patchy connection and when I re-enter the room, I hear my voice on the sound system as a tinny droning and my body is elongated. The experience is uncanny. It is the eerie sense of viewing a thing both alive yet not alive; or stepping into a fun-house hall of mirrors; the self distorted. The inherent comedy of the situation is appreciated by children: as the webcam works for a few moments, the key instinct is to exaggerate what is already distorted – to pull funny faces. The webcam has been recording and has forever captured the hyperbolic sticking out of tongues, rolling eyes and clownish grins.

The new generation is learning the language of these communications even in childhood and are taught of the dangers of allowing the private and public realms to overlap, the need for online protection. The way we adjust Privacy settings, allowing only a portion of our private world to be viewed, can also be a reflection of personality and identity: the sensible; the paranoid; the open and closed mentality; the small and wide social circle. Should I be myself or assume a cyber identity? This latter choice is not applicable to video chatting on Skype, of course. There is no hiding one’s true appearance behind a cartoon sketch or image of a politician or popstar (there is, of course, the option of putting a paper bag over one’s head during the video conversation if one does not wish to be seen, or just utilizing Skype as a telephone rather than as a video-cam). There remain manifold dangers of identity confusion, with multiple people of the same name, and no need to upload a photograph - as I discovered when searching for a long lost cousin in India. I am excited by the prospect of having found him, but how can I verify that I have the right ‘Sanjeev’? Via instant message (he doesn’t have webcam), I ask questions about mutual family and for his nickname. He cannot answer. He replies. ‘If that is your wish, then I am. I am whoever you want me to be.’ Cyberspace indeed offers a frightening capacity to be whoever we want to be.

Reciprocity can be difficult to read in the complex tangle of human relationships: was a glance a sign to proceed or retreat? Is the relationship now defunct? But there are many tools that more ostensibly exhibit reciprocity – or unreciprocity – on multimedia functions; being followed on Twitter and yet not following back, for example, or using ‘Limited Profile’ on Facebook, or ‘Blocking’ people.

The implications for the democratization of communication are clear in the very way that Skype is being censored by those opposing democracy. Reuters recently reported that Russia’s most powerful big business lobby has declared Skype a threat to national security and is working to regulate it. In October 2008, news broke that China has been monitoring and censoring politically sensitive words sent over Skype. Skype is free to those with broadband connection, enabling instantaneous communication between remote regions. But that other kind of ‘free’, the freedom of the written and spoken word, of the press, is a key limitation for non-democracies, thus Skype and services like it are being targeted for a clamp-down.

But is technology anthropologist Stefana Broadbent right to suggest, as she did in July this year, that a ‘democratization of intimacy’ has occurred? She also pointed out the eroded compartmentalization of work and family life. Skype has indeed woven multi-faceted, overlapping functions for itself. Whilst it is light entertainment for some, where funny faces might be pulled, for others it is a life-line and even a method of parenting.

Non-verbal communication becomes even more paramount when communicating with a child, for whom concentration spans are short and gestures and tactility are foremost. With high divorce rates and globalization, there is a new generation of ‘Skype Daddies’ and Skype children, who will know their parents primarily through their presence in their computer screen. Not for these children the touch of the human body – instead these Skype kids must learn a new kind of affection, dispensed virtually. Affection must be wired into the consciousness in new ways, not by touch, but by the intonation of voice, the observation of a kindly expression.

There is no denying that despite bringing me closer to some people, there is still the sense of a chasm, a loneliness leaking through these online messages, a heightened sense of the person being there and yet not there, a ghostly absent presence. Being in two places at once has been achieved – but at a non-monetary cost. Still, Skype is liberating me in my quest to connect with family and people I might not otherwise ever meet. Through Skype, I am cementing broken connections. I hear stories of how, in the time since our last being in touch, one has had a brain operation; another, a car crash; for another, life is ‘hard but good’. Online as I type is an old travelling companion in Ireland; a lost university acquaintance; and a relative in a village in Berbice, Guyana. It is sunset there, he tells me via instant message, and he is closing up his gas station for the day. ‘Only connect!’ remains an important philosophy, and we must keep learning how to do so in ever more effective ways…

But wait, excuse me for a moment, for as I type, somebody is calling me. Our words are connected across oceans as we swap tales of life in London and Berbice.

Then the screen flickers and our voices vanish.

At four o’clock in the morning, when Louis de Bernières has lines of poetry repeating in his head which won’t stop gnawing away, he writes them down. ‘I think of poetry as my original vocation,’ he tells me. ‘Novel writing somehow grew out of it.’ De Bernières did not become a published writer until he was thirty-five, but, he declares: ‘I always knew I was going to be a writer from a very early age, the way someone knows they are going to a doctor or a priest.’ Since being named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 1993, de Bernières’s books have included the bestselling Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and Birds Without Wings (2004), his sixth novel and the one he is most proud of. A new short story collection, Notwithstanding: Stories of Village Life, will be published in October by Harvill Secker.

At the Oxfam Bookfest, an inaugural literary festival launched to celebrate the fact that Oxfam, England’s largest retailer of secondhand books, has through booksales raised millions of pounds to help fight poverty, I interviewed de Bernières and he gave an enchanting reading of his poetry – he is preparing three poetry collections for publication, as he returns to that original vocation.

‘I don’t want to be cool and metropolitan and cynical,’ he declares. ‘I want to express my feelings and hope that the reader feels those feelings too.’ He admires poetry that comes from a state of high emotion, such as the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. Until he was around thirty-five, he only read Latin Americans novelists. ‘My contemporaries were all reading Martin Amis, which is what I characterize as that cool metropolitan style of writing; people often just being nasty to each other.’ De Bernières applies the rules of poetry to prose, suffusing his novels with a deliberate lyricism, such as Pelagia lamenting her father’s death in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the passage at the end of Birds Without Wings mourning things that have passed away.

Poetry runs in the family – his father would quote passages of Shakespeare at the dinner table and wrote his own ‘old-fashioned but good’ poetry in the style of Georgian poets, until ‘his whole life was pushed off course’ when the war broke out. His mother’s greatest love was the work of Rupert Brooke. Once upon a time, however, young Louis was on track for a military career. When Louis was fifteen, his father couldn’t afford the fees of his Berkshire public school and suggested his son apply instead for an army scholarship. ‘But by the time I was eighteen I just wanted to be Bob Dylan. This was when youngsters were growing their hair long, falling in love at rock festivals. I no longer had the right personality to be a soldier. I wanted to play the guitar. I didn’t want to be told what to do by anyone. I didn’t want to tell anyone what to do. At that time I thought I was a pacifist. Now I want to kill everybody. There are lots of people I’d like to see strung up on lampposts.’ He managed only a few months in the army, before a sergeant major advised him: ‘What we do is break people down and rebuild them. It’s like hypnotism; it only works on people who want it, but we haven’t been able to break you down or change you because that’s not what you want so I think it’s better if you go.’ This caused huge familial difficulties as he was expected to go into his father’s regiment and his parents were ‘very upset and even ashamed’. He then worked for about six months as a stone mason living at home, but ‘in the end it became unbearable’.

Aged nineteen, he escaped to Colombia. ‘When I came back I didn’t feel British again for absolutely years.’ Advice from some fabulous English teachers has also shaped the wide, global scope of his fictional settings, with one teacher telling him: ‘You must never, ever think that the only good writers are writing in English. You can’t be literate if you haven’t read Tolstoy or Balzac.’ This international outlook is deepened by de Bernières’s own heritage: ‘Being of French origin makes a difference,’ he muses. ‘It makes you feel almost as if you have a right to be anywhere. After I spent a year in Colombia living in the middle of nowhere, I did feel as if I could be from anywhere. One of the great pains of my life is that I can’t be everywhere. You have to live somewhere.’ But when he is writing, does he imaginatively inhabit these other worlds? ‘Imaginatively, I mostly live in Greece and Turkey. My car and body are in East Anglia. But my head is in Anatolia.’

After the globe-trotting of his previous works, his fascinating new book, Notwithstanding: Stories of Village Life, sees a return to settings much closer to home; a compelling collection of stories based on what he remembers of growing up in a village in the South of England. ‘It came about because I had failed to see my country in a proper way,’ he explains. The stories were inspired during a visit to the South of France where he met a gentleman who provided insight into England. ‘He said to me, “I love England!” And I said “why?” and he said “because it’s so exotic” and I said “come on, what on earth do you mean?” And he said “well, I go to France or Belgium or Germany or Holland, and to me they all seem the same but when I go to England it is a huge lunatic asylum.” When I thought about this, I realised he was right.’

De Bernières enumerates anecdotes of some of the lunacy: in the village where he grew up there was an old lady who spent her retirement dressed as a man shooting squirrels. There was another lady next door whose house was a ‘stinking menagerie’, and who drove a car dating back to 1927 with the dashboard hanging off and ‘always had a goat loose on the backseat’. Yet another neighbour stayed in the bath for two days once, just topping it up with hot water. There was a spiritualist convinced she could see the ghost of their husband, would go for walks with him and once paid two fares on the bus. Thus, de Bernières realised what an ‘extraordinarily mad place’ England was, indeed quite like something from a Marquez novel. Although he draws at times on people that he knew, he stresses ‘the most dangerous thing that can happen to a novelist is that you get too addicted to the truth. After a while [the characters] take on their own life anyway and start dictating to you what they can and can’t do. That’s happened to me over and over again’.

‘If you separate off cultures in a society the culture seems to disintegrate. One of the things I love about Greece is that everybody has the same culture. Little children can dance with their grandfather. In this country it’s fragmented. All over the continent right down into Turkey you have the evening walk which everyone goes on. I think we’ve lost the plot in England; children don’t learn folk dances; they don’t learn traditional songs; they don’t learn the old customs; we’re losing our regional dialects. It’s all very depressing. It’s all so diluted.’

‘One of the odd things about being British,’ muses de Bernières, ‘is that you are not allowed to be really good at more than one thing. So a novelist who writes really good poetry like Kingsley Amis isn’t going to get remembered for the poetry. In my case, I’m also a musician but I know I won’t be remembered for that.’

De Bernières has just been playing in Ireland with his band The Antonius Players. What, I wonder, is the relationship between his twin passions for poetry and music? ‘One of the reasons I stopped writing poetry for a long time was that I no longer knew what a poem was,’ he explains. ‘There was once a time when we all knew what a poem was and could tell whether it was good or bad in two ways, whether it was technically good, and whether it made any kind of impact on you. But then at the beginning of the twentieth century the standards started to change. People like T.S. Eliot made it much more confusing and we didn’t know what a poem was. Since I’ve been working as a professional musician I’ve thought the English idea of stress might be just too damn simple. In music you get brevs, minutes, crotchets, quavers, hemi-demi quavers, etc. I feel poetry ought to aspire to that sort of sophistication when it comes to metre. Wouldn’t it be nice to write poetry the way a musician writes music? I aspire to that.’ Music is very physical but also very stressful, he says, so sometimes his right hand clenches so tightly that it’s really very painful but he keeps playing, all the way through.

After a hiatus, mainly due to a crisis of confidence, the poetical inspiration has returned to de Bernières: ‘I’ve been writing a lot of poems as I’ve been having the most terrible time domestically. One of the strange beneficial side effects was that tonnes of poetry came out that had nothing to do with my domestic crisis at all.’

Three separate poetry collections are ready for publication, grouped around the themes of ‘love and sex, general purpose poems, and those in honour of Constantine Cavafy’, the Greek Alexandrian poet with whom de Bernières shares a fascination with the Ancient Hellenic world.

De Bernières reads poems both poignant and comic, about a ‘night time heavy with…promise’; about lovers who ‘ignored the sea and stars’; about wandering through a graveyard and seeing the words ‘love is stronger than death’ (’the cynical agnostic that I am thought, “if only that were true”’; a humorous poem about a fierce dog; another about an ex-girlfriend in Ipswich (a place he associates with heartbreak, and the most stressful job he ever had working in a school). His versatility as a writer – and reader - juxtaposing wry insights with longer, mournful reflections never fails to surprise and delight the audience.

He becomes philosophical when musing on how far he has come since the Granta Best of Young British Novelist nomination in 1993, and on getting older. ‘I’m middle-aged now. When you get older you develop a complex that younger people don’t see you as an equal. It’s a throwback to my generation because that’s how we thought of our parents; they were just a bunch of old boring fascists who didn’t know anything. Of course it isn’t until they get till their eighties [that] you see them as an irreplaceable archive’. The best thing about the Granta nomination was that he got to know writers of his generation, some with whom he has remained permanent friends. ‘I couldn’t live without Esther [Freud] even though I hardly ever see her’. As for his work: ‘I sometimes have this horrible fear that because Birds Without Wings was the best thing I’ll ever do in a sense my career is over, as I don’t think I can do anything better. So why not write poetry? Why not go and play concerts instead?’

However, he affirms: ‘I know I’ve got two or three novels left in me yet. I want to write a book based on the life of my great-grandfather, who was condemned to wander all his life because his wife wouldn’t divorce him because she was so religious. So he never could start again. He ended up in a tiny green shack in the rocky mountains. But it needs a plot.’

He also wants to write a book about a charismatic eco-fascist who thinks we should all go back to nature. ‘ If there’s one thing humans aren’t suited to it’s going back to nature. It would be my version of Lord of the Flies. I thought of setting it in East Anglia because that’s where I live. At the time I want to set the novel, Norwich was full of lunatics.’

Louis de Bernières’s eschewal for rules, evident in his disdain for the army, also emerges in his writing habits, often writing what he wants, when he wants. These days, however, he is more disciplined. ‘There was a time when I would wait for inspiration but then I found that if I sat down and worked, the inspiration came anyway.’ He finds it important to maintain activities aside from the writing: ‘I do a lot of gardening, carpentry, and throwing children around a lot is a great hobby. I always felt that if you live too much in your own head you go mad and disconnected. It’s very important to stay connected with the earth and with things and with people.’

I write this in a town bordering England and Wales, east of the River Wye and north of the Black Mountains, as the sun shines over a festival where there are strawberries and stir-fry to feed the body and stories aplenty to feed the mind. Jacqueline Wilson has just been sitting beside me wearing a blue top embroidered with the silver words ART IS TRUTH. It is a slogan pertinent to festivals the world over, for beneath the billowing canvas of tents, writers explore, challenge and present versions of the truth from a myriad of perspectives.

Not all of the world’s border crossings are as peaceable as this idyllic terrain. Far away, at the Israel-Palestine border, four festival attendees were held for five hours during the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), the week-long festival supported by the British Council and UNESCO, with international authors touring Jerusalem and the West Bank. The police intervened on the first and final nights of the festival by closing down the venue, the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem.

From Manchester to Mumbai, the festival circuit has gone global including the Jaipur Literature Festival, Galle Literary Festival, Vancouver International Writers Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival and in Dubai the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature. Hay has exciting new initiatives: adding to its portfolio of Hay-on-Wye, Cartagena, Alhambra and Segovia are Beirut 39 (celebrating Beirut Unesco World Book Capital 2009 and 39 of the best Arab writers under the age of thirty-nine) and the Storymoja Hay Festival Kenya.

The imagination can also be a passport to places beyond the realms of our own experience, a lesson learned at festivals which have at their core the concept of storytelling. At Hay last year the events I chaired offered a journey through the ganglands of South London (two former gang members, Elijah and Maddox, joined us on stage to discuss their experiences, chronicled in Tim Pritchard’s thought-provoking Street Boys); a Russian prison and St Petersburg (author Tig Hague talked about his hair-raising nineteen-month stint in jail in Zone 22, coupled with author Edward Docx reading from his beautifully written Self-Help); the landscape of New York City post 9-11 and war-torn Serbia (Joseph O'Neill’s beguiling Netherland and Sasa Stanisic’s compelling novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone); the mind of a ventriloquist dummy (By George by Wesley Stace), the airfields of Pakistan (A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif) and the tortured mind of a bullied teenager (Submarine by Joe Dunthorne), thus showing the breathtaking diversity which descends upon the small town of Hay-on-Wye each year .

‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself,’ said Theodore Roosevelt, who I called upon for courage whilst chairing a sold-out event at this year’s Hay Festival with two distinctive and powerful voices, Sadie Jones, prize-winning author of The Outcast, and Matthew D’Ancona, author of the haunting Nothing to Fear, whose novels show how, even on such a sunlit day, a human being might become unhinged by fear. It is a motto D’Ancona’s characters have not yet learned, for they are scared of darkness and death, loneliness and intimacy. The theme of fear was a catalyst to a discussion ranging from how art offers the freedom to fail, to how creativity is using pain to good effect. ‘Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood,’ assured Marie Curie and indeed – as an enthusiastic audience agreed – both gripping novels shed insight into that primal human emotion.

The festival thrives on the sparks that fly from interesting juxtapositions, from conversation both on and off stage, but there is also a powerful dialogue between contemporary and past writers. The ghost of Kafka haunted the Dream Stage for an hour, as I talked with the entertaining comic writer James Hawes about his debunking of the ‘Kafka myth’.

The grandest literary ghost haunting the delightful Segovia Hay Festival was Antonio Machado, who taught and lived in the small city north of Madrid one hundred years ago, and whose footsteps I traced past the vast pillars of the Aqueduct, the Plaza Mayor and the San Quirce church. Machado’s plaintive metrical feet were haunted by the untimely death of his wife from tuberculosis, the Spanish Civil War, and by landscape, which exerts a strong influence in much Spanish poetry, as is clear after four days of engrossing lectures. The festival also paid homage to Octavio Paz, a decade after his death, in two events exploring how nature – sea, fruit, light – is a poetic reflection on his childhood, time, the body and spirit. The panel recalled the relative merits of Paz as poet and essayist; the moment he had an epiphany whilst gazing at the moon; and that ‘nobody uses semi-colons quite like him’.

The act of translation and transition – both linguistic and geographical – is at the heart of festivals. The etymology of translate is ‘to carry across, to bear’, and indeed we see what is lost and what is gained in translation. Headphones provide simultaneous translation from the original language, although it is telling how much meaning can be gauged from the texture, sound and intonation of words. The festivals reveal how the greatest writing can transcend its place and particularity and reach a universal audience.

The pink-shirted, snowy-haired Mario Vargas Llosa, speaking beneath a ceiling painted with angels and harps in the capacious Teatro Juan Bravo described his yearning to escape from his childhood town in Bolivia. It was reading books that ‘tremendously expanded [his] horizons’ and stopped him ‘dying of boredom’ at his military school. Through reading Sartre he came to believe that literature itself is a form of action, words are actions, fostering sensitivity, exacerbating motivation. ‘I look in the mirror and wonder if I would have been the same person if I had not read Tolstoy, Faulkner, Don Quixote. No, I think those stories have made me what I am.’ He extols the virtues of literature to ‘break provincial barriers’, create fraternity with those unlike ourselves, and enable us to change for the better.

His dream to be a storyteller, ‘the oldest vocation in the world’, was realized in the Amazon rainforest, where he saw how the entire community was held together by myth and stories, allowing people to know that they were not alone in the immensity. His decision that he would live by his pen was a psychological turning point, but ‘if I wait for inspiration I could wait forever. When you are not born a genius you can fill in the gaps with discipline, hard work, stubbornness, obsession. I work in a very disciplined way. Flaws can become virtues if you have determination and Flaubertian passion to break limitations’.

‘Insecurity is my greatest enemy,’ he confessed. A stirring voice from the audience wished to know more about his notorious real-life enemies. Vargas Llosa insisted that writers, like everyone else, have friends, enemies, phobias. He drew a distinction between ‘the public figure’ of the writer, and the ‘deep, repressed, irrational being, that core element of dark personality, that is released out of the cage when writing’. Audience questions can indeed be a highlight of the festivals.

Hailing from a landscape closer to the Welsh roots of the festival was the voice of a writer with a gripe to air. As co-founder of Friends of the Earth, Robert Minhinnick has a keen sensibility for the natural world, using the powerful image of the sea, ever in flux, to pose the question: are we able to change ourselves or are we stuck? However, ‘Most people who review novels are middle-class English people and they would inevitably describe a Welsh seaside town as “tawdry”, but I have lived close to that environment and I know it’s much more than that. This is the problem with that class system of British reviewing’. His interviewer, festival director Peter Florence, asks: ‘Do you see yourself as a transnationalist?’ As the Spanish sun shines outside the packed auditorium, Minhinnick muses: ‘As a writer you should never define yourself because that is to diminish yourself. I would like to think that people thought I came from nowhere’.

The same sun warms our disparate countries and it burned generously in Mumbai. Less reliable was the electricity supply. At the Kitab Festival the power cut out in the midst of a reading, bathing us in darkness, but candles were soon produced, endowing the room with even more atmosphere. Setting alight the festival with their words were writers including Amit Chaudhuri, Sonia Faleiro, Shobhaa De, Geoff Dyer, Toby Litt, Helen Simpson, Philip Hensher, and Esther Freud. It is such unexpected mishaps – the element of unpredictability rearing its head in plans; chaos amidst the order – that can cause both the pain and pleasure of a festival.

Wherever in the world, be it West or East, across land, water, desert and rainforest, what is shared is the impulse to tell stories. ‘The essence of human tragedy is in loneliness’, wrote Thomas Wolfe, and it is the epigraph to Matthew D’Ancona’s novel. Literary festivals can be a brief respite from the solitude as writers honestly reveal the fears and fascinations at the heart of the writing life, politicians debate what might make a better world, environmentalists discuss ways to save our planet, and comedians tickle our funny bones.

As we sat beneath the great stone arches of a Segovian church, Michael Ondaatje described how he drew strong literary inspiration from other arts; that it is possible to learn much about how to structure a novel, for example, by examining architecture, as painting, too, inspired the poetry of Octavio Paz. Indeed, the most powerful festivals are those which interweave art forms: at Hay the words which pervade the day give way to evenings of music, with stunning performances from among others the Amit Chaudhuri Band, South African legend Hugh Masekela, Asian Dub Foundation, Jane Birkin, and a dazzling display from a group of Kenyans, who fused elements of drama and music to explore the concept of tribe. Such intermingling serves to shed greater truth into the mysterious workings of art.