Future Imperfect?

Monday Evening

The majority of the "worlds" writers arrived tonight, and there's something quite inspiring about a group of virtual strangers, with something in common, getting together. For what...? Well, that will come clearer over the next few days. A writer, at least should approach something like this, without preconceptions. I'm reminded of a country house mystery, we're all meeting in the drawing room, and haven't yet realised the chambermaid's been murdered in the kitchen with a staple gun. Yet, if tonight's debate, "Future Imperfect?" discussing the planet-in-peril, is anything to go by, the victim is already tagged, it's US. Prof. Andrew Watson gave us a cautionary history story about blue-green algae who manufactured the oxygen that took over the atmosphere and destroyed all life on the planet; leading the way (much, much later) for our evolution. Giles Foden, whose next novel, Turbulence concerns the weather conditions at D-Day (a kind of gung ho "Perfect Storm" perhaps), is investigating another kind of evolution - for that event remains one of the key events in our living memory. An imaginative writer can do justice to D-day, but to humanity as the next blue-green algae? The subject suddenly seems too big and serious for art; yet at the same time, artists, writers, poets - though rarely bellwethers (aside: I was very pleased, a few years ago, when I found out that the "bellwether" was nothing to do with the weather, but referred to the practice of tying a bell round the the neck of a castrated ram to lead the sheep home) are still something of the written conscience of a society. We don't have to go as far as Harold Bloom, who reckoned that Shakespeare showed us how to be ourselves, to appreciate that art is like a cultural flouride, providing a slow, counteraction to our decay.

Earlier in the pot-banging maelstrom of Norwich Millennium Library (Q. at what point in human history did libraries not just stop being silent, but became loud?) Mimi Khalvati and Adam Thorpe read bravely above the din. Mimi read from her book, the Meanest Flower. A question from the audience to Mimi said, "I'm a bloke, I only buy flowers for my missus when she's ill, so they don't really interest me that much." Men should be more careful in their appreciation of the dark beauty of flowers, there was many a husband who didn't recover from a bit of digitalis (the poisonous foxglove) in the soup. Nature always has its way.