Dark times

Guest blogger Jethro Soutar reports from Noir Week in Gijón, Spain.

The Semana Negra in Gijón is Spain's premier noir fiction festival. As with film noir, the label is a broad one, allowing the festival to feature several strands: crime fiction, sci-fi, graphic novels and the historical.

The festival itself is just as inclusive. There are stands selling books and tents for book signings, talks and presentations, but there are also fairground rides, bars and barbecues, music stages, craft stalls, African peddlers of fake watches and hand bags, Chilean hot dog sellers, Cuban mojito makers, buskers, Occupy-style political forums and everything else besides, all making for a riot of colours, smells and sounds.

The festival's detractors claim the Semana Negra has lost touch with its literary roots, but Paco Ignácio Taibo II, a Mexican writer and the festival's organiser for most of its 25 years, disagrees. 'A festival is supposed to be popular,' he says. 'People come for the ferris wheel but they end up joining in with the expositions and talks - they might head for the rides but they have to pass the books first.' Indeed the site is a little like the Olympics in reverse: instead of having to pass through Westfield shopping centre to get to the events, you have to pass through the events to get to the consuming.

Another major reason the festival is so popular is that it's all free. Or at least the book events are free: you have to pay to go on the waltzer, as well as spend money on food and drink and hotels and taxis. The organisers were able to argue that for every euro of public money spent on the festival, fifteen are spent by visitors to the festival. Nevertheless, the Semana Negra very nearly didn't take place due to major cuts in public spending.

The economic crisis formed the background to a round table discussion on Tuesday evening entitled 'Europe - Literal or Noir?' An international panel of writers, journalists and, in my case, literary translators, discussed the relative merits of journalism and fiction in telling the narrative of the economic crisis.

The consensus was that journalism remains the best outlet for objective analysis and calling the power's that be to account, and that troubling times push readers in search of fact rather than fiction. However journalism is undergoing its own crisis and several hacks reported the limited space and resources they were being afforded to investigate matters, not to mention the vested interests of media moguls.

Novels are freer to go places non-fiction cannot, even sometimes dressing fact as fiction in order to get real stories told. Fiction can also do more than journalism in terms of delving deeper and getting messages across, providing readers with scenarios they can relate to or that enable them to connect big questions with the daily realities of their own lives. However, writing a state-of-the-nation novels is no easy thing and it was felt that it was probably too soon for the great crisis novel to appear.

But there are encouraging signs. I put forward John Lanchester's Capital as a worthy attempt to grapple with the complexities of London's socio-economic plight. A French colleague cited Les visages écrasés by Marin Ledun (yet to appear in English), set in a call centre and inspired by the spate of suicides at France Télécom-Orange, and Dominique Manotti's Lorraine Connection (published in English by Eurocrime with a translation by Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz), which deals with a strike breaking out at a Daewoo factory.

From Spain, Accesso no autorizado by Belén Gopegui drew praise, the story of a hacker who infiltrates the Deputy Prime Minister's computer and is confronted by the power banks and corporations hold over politicians, along with Cenital by Emilio Bueso, a novel that imagines oil running out in 2014. (Neither Spanish book has yet been translated, though City Lights published Gopegui's previous work, The Scale of Maps).

We live in dark times - noir times - but literature, and festivals such as this, can shine light on what's happening and offer a ray of hope for the future.