This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“Last day, team,” Sukie the Director briskly informs her troops, paid and unpaid — it is 9.30 on the final morning of the Barchester Literary Festival — “and I’d like us to go out with a bang. As you know, we’re all very excited about … ” — and here she names a veteran actress whose ghostwritten memoirs are one of the highlights of the programme — “and the tickets for the Barty Dibber event” — Mr Dibber makes sporadic appearances on Gardeners’ Question Time — “are going extremely well.” (This is a lie, by the way.) “Abi, darling, could you be an angel and collect I.B. Littlejohn from the station?”
Nothing loath, Abi prises her debased Volkswagen Beetle with its defective exhaust out of the clogged festival carpark and heads for Barchester station. Sadly, there is no sign of the celebrated novelist I.B. Littlejohn, who has opted to drive to his event but omitted to tell anyone.
After a half-hour spent yawning on the platform — Abi has averaged five hours sleep a night for the past week — she crawls back to the Green Room to find that the bottled water has run out, there are no sandwiches, the Waterstones delivery hasn’t arrived and that Sukie is absolutely furious.
And how did Abi, a meek yet resourceful thirty-something with an English and Creative Writing degree from Leicester University, end up in the exceedingly specialised redoubt of literary festival management?
Disgruntled authors are far ruder than West End model girls
Curiously enough, a love of literature is about the worst qualification imaginable for the job of ensuring that writers turn up on time and shepherding them on and off stages, but happily Abi used to work in consumer PR, arranging instore appearances by girls dressed up as flower fairies, and logistical arrangements of this kind are her meat and drink.
Back in the Green Room, several other crises have declared themselves, in particular the news that the taxi sent to collect the actress has gone to the wrong hotel. Having dealt with this, Abi finds to her horror that Sukie has deputed to her the unenviable task of explaining to I.B. Littlejohn, now being interviewed in the “media room” (a converted garden shed) by Radio Barchester, why there are no books available for him to sign.
So Mr Littlejohn will stagger forth to greet his 27-strong audience with the assurance that all of them will certainly head straight to Amazon to order a copy of Last Bus to Blackley, which the Sunday Times recently described as “eminently readable.”
If there is a disadvantage to this peripatetic and rather piecemeal life, it is that disgruntled authors are far ruder than the West End model girls and that job security is non-existent.
In eight hours it will all be over; the Green Room will be shut up; the volunteers return to their homes and Abi can drive off to her parents’ house in Andover to unwind and await the receipt of a £400 bank transfer and the (possible) fulfilment of Sukie’s half-promise of a similar engagement next month at Grange-over-Sands.
