In the beginning was the word

ANY halfway decent literary festival starts off by asking a few simple questions: what matters about our culture? How did we get that way?

A good one, determined not to be parochial, will ask those questions of other cultures too. An outstanding one will do all of this while at the same time offering events that take risks on their audience's willingness to tackle subjects they might never have expected to find on the programme in the first place.

Word 08, the writers' festival at Aberdeen University, got off to a fascinating start on Friday with an event that tackled both the first two questions at once as Rosemary Goring (author of Scotland: The Autobiography), Magnus Linklater and Tom Devine elegantly explored the roots and consequences of the recent explosion of interest in Scottish history.

In her anthology, Goring emphasised that she had tried, wherever possible, to give a voice to those often ignored by conventional history. Her conclusions? That little in the Scottish character has changed over the centuries – we're still a fraught and thrawn lot, admiring success but being surly about it too. "The one thing that shines through," she said, "is that we're a nation of story-tellers."

As if on cue, the next event was with James Kelman, as thrawn and uncompromising a writer as you could wish, occasionally surly about success and yet also a story-teller of genius, able – as in his latest novel, Kieron Smith, Boy – to imagine the insides of minds as different from his own as that of a four-year-old child.

Kelman doesn't make things easy for his readers. "Most plot-driven fiction," he declared, after an engaging reading, "is mediocre."

Instead, the Kelman method of story-telling relies on an insistent, obdurate honesty. Is that a Scottish trait? I'm wary of such claims, yet just consider the evidence from the Word programme, including Janice Galloway (the biggest possible tick for raw emotional honesty in her bravura reading from her memoir-cum-novel This Is Not About Me) and Alasdair Gray. He gets another tick: a witty updating of Goethe's Faust, which he read as a two-hander with his biographer, Rodge Glass, is clearly done with bigger concerns than his bank balance in mind.

Interestingly, even the more commercially-minded Scots at Word 08 seem cut from a similar cloth. Mark Millar, the hugely successful Scottish graphic novel writer, told his audience that British writers in the medium tended to take more risks than their American counterparts. And Hardeep Singh Kohli similarly showed a similar contrariness in scorning the work in television that most people know him for. He was, he said, "disgusted" with himself for the hissy fit he threw in Celebrity Apprentice.

But he was also disgusted at working in such a superficial medium that TV insiders assured him that his stroppiness on the show had made for great television and would actually boost his career. For such resolutely Scottish levels of disgust and honesty, two ticks for him.

In that opening event, Tom Devine had pointed out that we're even getting more honest about Scottish history too – at least in universities, even though not on the school curriculum, where it still has a too-shadowy existence.

But what will honesty about Scotland's past actually mean? According to both Devine and Goring, it might involve junking nationalist myths, showing the deep levels of interconnectedness between England and Scotland. There was a small, but perfect example of this in the story of the most valuable book in Aberdeen University itself.

An event about a 12th century illuminated manuscript – the Aberdeen Bestiary – might not sound irresistibly compelling. And when one starts off – as I also did with the superhero stories of Mark Millar – from a position of near-complete ignorance, hopes can never be high.

Yet both events epitomised the programmatic risk-taking mentioned at the start: in both, clear, confident exposition opened up the subjects and shared the fascination. It's what we go to book festivals for.

Even a non-medievalist can see that the Aberdeen Bestiary is a work of beauty. It's also an insight into the medieval mind, full of fables, some going back to Roman times, explaining and illustrating the wilder things in the world – unicorns; blue panthers that could rise from the dead with a scent that would lure all animals to follow; realistic-looking apes; tigers that could only be captured by throwing them a glass ball; elephants that could only be killed by pythons. Like superheroes in a way, they each stand for some human virtue or vice.

In gold leaf, lapis lazuli and the brightest colours, hand-painted by monks 800 years ago, they look like dreams. For this is a book that is worth millions, a collection of fables that is one of the true treasures of Scotland.

Except it's not Scottish.

Professors Jane Geddes and Michelle Brown traced back a history that probably began in a Yorkshire abbey (best guess: Bridlington). It was owned by the English kings until they became Scottish, when James VI's Scottish librarian probably gave it to a friend in Aberdeen who was regent of Marischal College. In Aberdeen's festival of books, those monks produced by far the brightest and the best. Let's hope that Yorkshire doesn't want it back.

Film of comic proves big draw

IN THE world of graphic novels – comics, if you like – Mark Millar, of Coatbridge, is the Scottish king. Hollywood moguls are clambering over each other to sign him up, particularly since the buzz about the film Wanted, based on his graphic novel of the same name and starring Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy, is that it is likely to make back at least four times more than the $110 million (£56 million) it cost to make.

All of which vastly increases his leverage for making his next film, Kickass, to the point at which he has control as to who directs it. He chose Matthew Bond, who is married to Claudia Schiffer, and he was with him the other day along with Jane Goodman (whose husband is Jonathan Ross) at a casting session.

They were looking for a girl to play the part of a foul-mouthed 11-year-old killer, and the session took hours. On the train home he phoned his wife.

"I've been looking at videos of young girls all afternoon," he told her, not realising until too late how it would sound to his fellow passengers. "Some of them were quite good for 11 year-olds, but I think I've found the right one. She's quite flexible, but if there's anything she can't do, we can always just get a midget."

UNLIKELY, but true. James Kelman, remembering his earliest days as a bibliophile at Govan library: "If there was a new Enid Blyton, I'd always be first in the queue."

ONE of Janice Galloway's pet hates is people who automatically assume that everything she writes about is based on her own experience. Surely, she thought, nobody would make that mistake about her last novel, Clara, in which her protagonist was the 19th-century virtuosa pianist Clara Schumann, whose composer husband Robert ended up in an insane asylum. But no: "That passage about the mad husband," she was asked after one reading, "is that based on your own life?"

To emphasise the ambiguity about writing in the first person, her next book – part-novel, part memoir, is entitled This is Not About Me. Shame, then, that some poor soul, writing up the programme for the Nairn Festival in three weeks, took it down as This is ALL About Me.

IF ALEX Salmond is serious about wanting to do anything about the atrocious Scottish diet, he might give Hardeep Singh Kohli a ring. Doing a Jamie Oliver north of the Border is, he revealed on Friday night, a big ambition. "Anything I can do for my country, I will," he said. These are hardly empty words, because one of his next projects is co-writing a series for BBC 1 about traffic cops with John (Only Fools and Horses) Sullivan. Although it's not set in Scotland, the series is to be entirely filmed here, with Glasgow standing in for an English city.

FINALLY, more Mark Millar. Britain's best-selling comic book writer was still signing books and talking to fans two hours after his event finished. But there's a reason he's so generous with his time. Back in the mid-1980s, talking to Watchman creator Alan Moore at the end of a signing queue was what started him off on the path to riches.