I've been musing on what would constitute my perfect literary festival. Beryl Bainbridge, Miss Jean Brodie and Bertie Wooster would all need to be involved
Thank heavens for the Royal Society of Literature. I was privileged to participate in an Iris Murdoch event there this week, to further my lifelong mission of publicly celebrating and promoting the work of this astoundingly gifted thinker.
The walls at Somerset House had been Farrow and Balled until they throbbed with elegance, the crowd was avid, the panel erudite. It included Dame AS Byatt, another object of my worship – The Children's Book is a masterpiece. Someone had warned me about a regular attendee, a lecher and Murdoch fan who might manifest in a haze of spiritual ardour and sob throughout.
It was such an apt setting for literary appreciation that I fantasised about possible future events. A whisky taster paired with an increasingly elliptical lecture on Beryl Bainbridge, entitled The Blackened Fumes of English Farce. A Spark of Malice workshop in which schoolgirls develop seemingly whimsical but ultimately sinister haikus in the style of Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie. In support of women's history month I'd include events dedicated to Janet Frame, Penelope Fitzgerald, Octavia Butler, Edith Pargeter, Angela Carter and Doris Lessing. She'd get a year-long retrospective, as she is a genius who won the Nobel prize 40 years late.
My top notion is for a tweed-themed Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse night. The two go together like, well, whisky and arsenic. A daft proposal behind the rhododendrons, patricide in the folly and tea on the patio. Delightful young Bertie Wooster and shrewd old Miss Marple reading out scenes from Mary Renault's The Charioteer and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness while Jeeves darns some under-trousers. Do stop by to say "What ho, auntie," won't you? I'll be the one in jodhpurs.