Word festival puts Scotland on the line

ABOOK FESTIVAL that begins with Richard Holloway and ends with Irvine Welsh promises something for everyone. Now in its fifth year, Word, the festival based at the University of Aberdeen, has what may be its richest programme ever. What’s more, artistic director Alan Spence again worked some magic with the Aberdeen weather, and the old quadrangle of Kings College was bathed in spring sunshine.

The sun filtering through the long windows of the main auditorium seemed to encourage a relaxed atmosphere. University Principal Duncan Rice found to his surprise that he was wearing a tie with butterflies on it. No fewer than three writers burst into song at the podium.

More importantly, in a world where book festivals are becoming a literary milk round for promoting new titles, many writers felt sufficiently comfortable to read from unpublished work, often for the first time.

One of these was not Richard Holloway, whose lecture was remarkably similar to the one with which he closed last year’s Edinburgh Book Festival. Nevertheless, it was new to this audience, who appreciated it for what it was, a sparklingly erudite analysis of the kaleidoscope of religious paradigms in the postmodern world, and the possible ways in which we approach them.

The former Bishop of Edinburgh, now head of the Scottish Arts Council, spoke of those dissident thinkers - once called "heretics" - who "disinfect society" by asking difficult questions and challenging prevailing paradigms. Perhaps he is one of these himself, coming from a unique place of theological knowledge and ecclesiastical experience, to challenge religious complacency with his own brand of transcendent humanism.

A dissident of a different kind was celebrated by the poet and professor of creative writing Robert Crawford, in a similarly erudite lecture which sought to "reintroduce" the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. While MacDiarmid’s name is still a legend in Scottish literary circles, Crawford pointed out that the poet’s work is barely in print today. A figure associated with nationalism, chauvinism and parochialism, he has fallen out of fashion, "a dusty icon, or an icon killed with iconoclastic respect".

Crawford suggested looking beyond the MacDiarmid of his later years, the belligerent nationalist who listed "Anglophobia" among his recreations in Who’s Who. Instead he brought us MacDiarmid in his twenties and thirties, deeply aware of European modernism, a poet with an international outlook who wrote bewitchingly tender lyrics in Scots, while introducing the readers of the Montrose Review to Woolf, Eliot and Joyce.

These two bristling intellects established a powerful theme for the festival, that of taking a step back to offer a clearsighted analysis of our culture and ourselves. Andrew O’Hagan has done this in his fiction and journalism, writing about Scotland, sometimes critically, from a base in London. At Word, he read a new story set in Glasgow, full of humour and insight, which was recently published in the New Yorker. Colm Toibin looks at the distant world of Henry James in his Booker-shortlisted novel The Master, drawing us into it with his quietly lyrical prose.

David Mitchell, another Booker-shortlist author, read for the first time from his forthcoming novel Black Swan Green. In contrast to Cloud Atlas, which bridged centuries and countries with scintillating accomplishment, this concentrates on a single year in the life of 13-year-old Jason Taylor, growing up near Malvern in 1982. There was a surprise, too, for readers of AL Kennedy’s work when she read for the first time from her next novel, set in a former prisoner-of-war camp in the aftermath of the Second World War, which contrasts markedly in its subject matter to her previous books.

The organisers of this year’s Word excelled themselves in the thoughtful pairing of writers whose work chimed with and complimented one another: David Mitchell with friend and fellow prose virtuoso, Hari Kunzru; AL Kennedy with another writer as visceral and perceptive, Jenny Diski; Anne MacLeod, whose new novel The Blue Moon Book deals thoughtfully with love, life and language, with Sian Preece, whose warm clear-eyed fiction often looks back at her homeland of Wales, though it is written in Aberdeen.

None were better matched than Tom Leonard and Bill Duncan, a pair of dissidents who, in different ways capture elements of the Scottish psyche. Leonard is a master of the Glaswegian demotic, and a great experimentalist with language. In fine fettle, he read from new, unpublished work dealing with issues of terrorism and personal freedom, angrily political but balancing that with moving personal poetry and sharp humour. Meanwhile, Duncan, with a wry humour, brings us in The Smiling School For Calvinists and The Wee Book of Calvin, a new vision of Dundee, blending the real and the fantastical.