Ullapool delivers another book festival to cherish…
West Highland Free Press – 14 May 2015 by Michael Russell
Photograph: Charlie Hopkinson
MICHAEL RUSSELL attended – and was part of – this year’s Ullapool Book Festival. Here are just a few of the highlights…
Crime writer Val McDermid, arguably the top draw at this year’s Ullapool Book Festival, likened last week’s General Election result to the Reformation. Bringing the festival to a close, she said the “schism” that now divides an SNP-dominated anti-austerity Scotland from a uniformly-blue south of England really is on that scale.
“You have to wonder where we are going and how we get there,” McDermid added. “But that is one of the exciting things about being in Scotland right now. In England, people there are amazed at what has happened here because they don’t have the same sense of control over their lives or the same sense of political engagement. And it’s not just the chattering classes in Scotland who have this level of engagement — everyone is interested in it.”
McDermid, along with Ian Rankin, was the first to follow in William Mcilvanney’s bloody footprints (the creator of Laidlaw himself being a beneficiary of the revitalisation of the genre pioneered by PD James and Ruth Rendell). McDermid’s 28th novel, ‘The Skeleton Road’, starts with human remains discovered at the top of a Gothic tower in Edinburgh and, as is her wont, links recent events — in this case, the Balkan wars — with the dreaming spires of Oxford. Documenting social history is as important to her as creating gripping crime fiction.
