The International Literary Festival

The best literature rises above preconceptions to give readers something new.

I often find that when literature is viewed in terms of genre, the debate becomes limited. Genre is often used as a derogative term, one that removes any depth or complexity from a work of literature.

When Margaret Atwood presented the world premiere of Year of the Flood at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, her site specific work – a staged reading in a nearby church with a choir and actors, including the former Bishop of Edinburgh in the role of a religious cult leader – represented what all great literature does and what Canadian literature does with remarkable regularity: challenges our expectations, plays with conventions, and tests, and often breaks, the rules and limitations of genre in fiction.

Atwood’s new novel is rooted deeply in the most reviled of genres – science fiction. But her use of its tools, allied with multiple contemporary reference points (helped by a timely dose of swine flu) enables her work to rise above the genre’s self-imposed limitations.

And this was happening all over the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year. The iconic Douglas Coupland was back, again un-nerving us, capturing the glare of contemporary society, standing at the frontier of our culture as it morphs and mutates, and forcing us to re-evaluate our preconceptions. Gil Adamson, the acclaimed poet, presented her first novel, The Outlander, where she takes the western chase genre and subverts it through her female protagonist, forcing us to reassess the rules of the chase. Patrick Lane, another major figure in contemporary poetry, broke out of the box to present his first work of fiction, and, like Adamson, used his poet’s craft to give depth, complexity, and imagery to his narrative.

And this not solely from authors of stature, like those above. The next generation coming through are fighting against these expectations, undermining preconceptions by presenting voices from outside a genre’s field. Joseph Boyden builds upon this in his second, prize-winning novel Through Black Spruce, placing within the urban narrative genre a voice preconceived to belong to the natural, pre-modern world; Vincent Lam and his brilliant collection of stories Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures plays with our expectations of the medical drama and of the short story collection, presenting interlinked characters and manipulating the narrative perspective as we move through the stories.

The most remarkable fact is that this is happening year after year: the authors presenting at book festivals in Canada and overseas are continually producing work of complexity and subtlety, engaged and perceptive, rooting the human condition within the historical and geographical landscape as the tides of national and international cultural narratives ebb and flow.

With the appearance of new authors like Vincent Lam, Dan Vyleta, and Jalpreet Singh, the conformities, limits, and tropes of genre fiction and narrative norms (and cultural norms) will be reinterpreted and challenged again.

The main aim of book festivals, like ours in Edinburgh and the wonderful IFOA, is to continue listening out for these new voices, continue to give them opportunities to speak, and continue, in our own way, to challenge and break the limitations of genre.