Author who won residency on Jura admits he could not be bothered to walk to Orwell house

AN AMERICAN author who won a prestigious opportunity to follow in the footsteps of George Orwell has admitted he did not visit the author's home because he could not be bothered walking there.

Philip Gourevitch, the editor of the American literary journal the Paris Review, beat off competition from a host of acclaimed international writers to be awarded a sponsored writing residency on the Isle of Jura.

But the author, speaking on the first day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, surprised a sellout crowd by admitting that he did not take the opportunity to visit Barnhill, where Orwell wrote his dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, because he was unable to drive his car to the front door.

Gourevitch made the sheepish admission in a discussion about Orwell with Will Self, the English novelist who had taken up a previous residency on the 142-square-mile island.

Self was moved by his visit to the farmhouse, which his legendary literary predecessor rented in 1946, and asked Gourevitch for his impressions.

The American replied: "I haven't been to Barnhill. I drove up to the end of the road in a downpour and the guy who controls the gate wasn't around. I couldn't find anybody to open it so I could drive up there."

A visibly perplexed Self responded, to loud laughter: "The thing to do is to walk. You are not actually allowed to drive beyond the gate. Orwell himself managed to walk there and he had tuberculosis."

Self said the effort of a short stroll beyond the gate was more than compensated for.

"The juxtaposition between the lived-in feel of Barnhill and its illustrious literary history profoundly moved me and I'm not a man who's easily moved.

"In the upstairs bedroom where Orwell clacked away on his typewriter there was a distinct atmosphere."

Despite this, the author, broadcaster and cultural commentator suggested that the late writer's magnum opus was largely inspired by the dystopian novel We, penned in 1921 by Yevgeny Zamyatin, which used science fiction to satirise emerging repression in the Soviet Union.

"I don't want to diss Orwell, but I had the opportunity to write an introduction to Zamyatin's We and it's all there," said Self.

"He changed it in certain vital respects and it was his own book, but Zamyatin had really got Soviet totalitarianism to an absolute tee within six years of the October Revolution. He was really ahead of the game."

Gourevitch claimed that there were Orwellian aspects to Bush's regime in Washington.

"There is the language they use, the way that spin works, the way that euphemisms are used and the way that exporting democracy turns out to be nothing of the sort."

The New York-based editor and Self won month-long writing residencies on the island in a collaboration funded by the Scottish Book Trust, the Isle of Jura Distillery and the Scottish Executive.

Meanwhile, the Book Festival heard that Tony Blair is almost certainly doomed to failure in his quest to bring peace to the Middle East.

Lord Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader and Balkans peacemaker, made the claim during another keynote event.

The former chief international envoy to Bosnia used the address to claim that Blair faces a near impossible task in his new role as Middle East peacebroker because of America's refusal to take Israel to task. Ashdown said the former Prime Minister needed a cast-iron assurance that the US would force Tel Aviv to respect international law, but claimed he was unlikely to get it.

Musing on Blair's new role as a special envoy for the UN, the EU, the US and Russia, Ashdown told a sellout audience: "Can peace be brokered in the Middle East? I think it can, but it can only be built if Israel realises that it must observe its international obligations, including those laid down by the UN.

"The only force that can make them do that is the United States. As long as the US goes on supporting Israel in whatever excesses it conducts then there cannot be any resolution to the region's problems except through a terrible conflict. If Blair has got a bankable guarantee that the US will rein in Israel it may be doable, but I suspect he hasn't, and if that is the case he will be in a very difficult position."

The former party leader, who was quizzed by his current successor Menzies Campbell, outlined the point made in his book Swords And Ploughshares that the failure of US-UK policy in Iraq and Afghanistan should not discredit the policy of intervening in failed states.

"We should not be distracted by our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.