Return of a King: William Dalrymple at AWRF 2013

"Return of a King" is the title of his book, of course, but it could also be a tagline for William Dalrymple at AWRF 2013, back after a star turn three years ago at AWRF 2010. Mt. Albert Library's Robin Whitworth, who was there then and now, found that custom did not stale his infinite variety of charm and erudition.

Speakers at the Festival possessed varying degrees of fluency in their delivery; sometimes my enjoyment of a session was marred by hesitancy, monotonous voice, etc. When William Dalrymple cast off his jacket and strolled out from behind the podium, in full possession of the stage, I knew I was in the presence of a natural performer. 

He delivered a rollicking and entertaining history lesson, displaying total mastery of his material. A history lesson which America and its allies have failed to heed in their current engagement in Afghanistan. In 1839 the British launched an offensive out of fear of an imminent Russian takeover, and installed a puppet ruler in Kabul. Through ghastly incompetence and hubris on the part of administrators, politicians and the military (not least of whom was ‘our’ Lord Auckland), who ignored all expert advice, the occupation ended after a mere eighteen months. A massive retreat resulted in the death of over 18,000 who either were slaughtered or froze to death in the wintry Khyber Pass. 

Dalrymple has made a name for himself as an expert on the history of India, with a number of titles such as The Last Mughal, City of Djinns, In Xanadu, Sacred India. He claims to be the only author who has risked sniper fire to research the Afghan sources for this, his latest work Return of a King: the battle for Afghanistan,1839-42. 

--  Robin Whitworth

AWRF 2012: An hour with Stella Rimington

Fashion plate Robin Whitworth from Mt. Albert Library put on her best beige trench coat and went to hear Sean Plunket interview the ex-spy and current author of the Liz Carlyle thriller novels. Here's her report:
 
From the auditorium, you have an upward view of the stage and people’s feet are very much visible. Me being a shoe person, I do a quick character analysis of people from their choice of footwear. Dame Stella’s were sensible flats. What did I expect a spook to be like? James Bond glamorous? No. George Smiley grey and gloomy? No. In fact, slightly headmistressy in appearance. In character, warm, lively and forthcoming, with a good sense of humour, and not the least reluctance to answer any questions put to her by her interlocutor Sean Plunket, and later, the audience. She was asked what was the most important quality of being the Director General of MI5, and she said calmness, and indeed you got a good sense she would be unflappable in a crisis.

Another Dame, Judi Dench, based her portrayal of ‘M’ in the Bond movies on Dame Stella. Dame Stella concurred that Judi Dench had her off pat, even down to the way she holds her hands. She seemed to be quite charmingly flattered by this, and was looking forward to meeting this alter ego at a function for Dames on her return to the UK.

Dame Stella was the first female DG, and when she started in the service in 1967, there were no women. It was indeed a world of men in tweed jackets smoking pipes a la Smiley’s World. She stated John Le Carre was her favourite spy writer, and the most authentic. Intelligence work is largely unglamorous and unexciting; a lot of watching and waiting. In her own novels, she has added more action for her heroine Liz Carlyle than would be normal.

She started her writing career with her autobiography five years after her retirement from the Service in 1996, with little hope that she would receive clearance for publication. But the new era of openness, which started with her being the first DG to be publicly identified, continues, and there was only minor censoring. She had always read spy novels (“for relaxation, not to get tips”), and so her own series began. She is up to number seven, Geneva Trap, now, and has agreed to two more. She has to submit them for vetting before publication. She tries to keep them current. For example, Rip Tide is about radicalized young British Islamists.

She was there at the end of the Cold War, and said it was very strange to go to Russia and meet her KGB counterparts, these previous enemies, who were still very hostile. And of course the KGB is still active; “espionage goes on”.

Fatima Bhutto at AWRF 2011

I'm always proud to be a librarian when I spot the stylish silhouette of my colleague Robin Whitworth gliding across the crowded floor of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which she never misses so luckily I get to see her there a lot. She contributed this description of Fatima Bhutto's star appearance (for such it seemed to be among festival goers):
 
Treasa Dunworth, a university lecturer, very fluently conducted the session with Fatima Bhutto. It provided a personal insight into the basket-case country that is Pakistan. The slight and very attractive 28-year-old Bhutto certainly possesses the presence and authority that mark her as an heir to the Pakistani dynasty. However, when asked by an audience member if she has considered standing in politics she prevaricated, likening it to when people ask why she did not become a dentist: she does not want to.

It probably goes without saying that it might also be a death sentence for her, as it was for her father, grandfather, and aunt. She still lives, one would imagine somewhat precariously given her outspokenness, in the country now ruled by the man she deems responsible for the murder of her father. She works as a columnist, and is also active in encouraging women to enrol to vote. Given that one has to have an ID card to enrol, and this costs more than a week’s food, very few women vote in Pakistan.

Bhutto's recently published book Songs of blood and sword is both a personal and political history. There is much research on her grandfather, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was executed before she was born, and who is her greatest role model. Her father, Murtaza, followed in the same socialist footsteps, after he returned from exile, and was shot by police in 1996 (assassinated, she says). Aunt Benazir is accused of being directly complicit in her brother’s murder, and of selling out to corruption and betraying all her father’s principles by rescinding a number of laws that had aimed at social equity. Fatima and Benazir remained estranged up until the latter’s assassination.

Fatima related an anecdote about how when they were growing up, Murtaza painted his room ‘Communist red’, whilst Benazir’s room was black and white stripes, like a jail cell.

Fatima described her childhood as ‘quite ordinary’, in that her father did everyday things like taking her to school each day. But she did admit that for a child's vocabulary to include words like ‘junta’ was unusual. She talked of how it felt to be a Pakistani in New York (where she was at University) after 9/11. Her opinion on the burqa is that it as an Arab, not a Muslim, garment, and she would never wear one.

-- Robin Whitworth

AWRF 2009: Judith Thurman

Robin is Community Librarian at Mt. Albert Community Library, a person of great style both in her apparel and her reading, and perhaps a bit of a perfectionist. Who better than she to report on “An Hour with Judith Thurman"?
Biographer and New Yorker columnist Judith Thurman delivered the Michael King Memorial Lecture. She stood at the lectern and mostly read from her notes, in contrast with the usual Writers and Readers relaxed format of Q and A with an interlocutor. In my experience, biographers feed their audience’s curiosity for the lowdown on their subject, but Thurman vouchsafed not a jot of tittle tattle. Or perhaps she just assumed we had all read her books on Colette and Isak Dinesen, since they were published some time ago. Instead, she spoke about the search to capture the true essence of her subjects, which she said seemed more difficult the more documentation existed. She found Colette particularly elusive.

Very much a perfectionist, Thurman took seven years to research both her biographies, and expressed no plans to tackle another. As an illustration of her perfectionism, she read out each of her seven attempts to get just the right tone for an opening paragraph of an article on tofu that she was commissioned to write for The New Yorker.