Hay Festival 2008

A growing breed of naysayers and critics are now reminding us that the Festival used to engender cuddly relationships, not only in the spiritually nutritious communion of reader and writer, but also between the event itself and the town it had chosen to live in. It was intimate in both mystical and mechanical senses. Now, we have a rather sophisticated festival of publishing, and not what might be taken for a festival of literature, or literary festival, as it was once described. I think there's a difference between the last two, but it's probably easier to understand Diane Keaton telling Woody Allen in Love and Death, that she's scared, but not frightened of dying. Or is it the other way round?

Anyway, the mysticism between producer and consumer is purportedly still present in Hay, but it feels like a different kind, almost characterized by decree and not consent. The mechanics of the event are unrecognizable from the past: before, it was like the Monaco Grand Prix, a track partly in town, with the locals almost as close to the action as the spectators and stewards; now, it's along the sterner lines of the Shanghai International Circuit, built on larger piles of corporate money, but with at least one obvious difference: instead of being raised on reclaimed swampland, the Festival is beginning to look like a refugee village thrown up before the reclamation project was finished. Given that the present site has a lease stretching close to infinity, there will always be the danger of an abrupt return to soggy nature, unless the event can be rescheduled to a safer slot, maybe the middle of February. It's also sad that the racing allusions aren't entirely accidental. If anyone has paddled away from Hay-on-Wye this year still believing the two 'ideas' of publishing and literature to be closely related components in the exercise, they should remember that the 2008 Festival brochure awarded "top writer" status to.....Jeremy Clarkson. Whoever compiled these programme notes seems to have an attenuated idea about what makes a genuine literatus; either that, or they have real advertizing balls and a lack of familiarity with other authors, because that's what's needed to put such glossy hokum before the public without fear of physical reprisal.