BOOKS: A satirist, a philosopher and an uncompromising novelist brought some much-needed passion to the festival. By Colin Waters

It's been a bipolar seven days at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. A week of pessimism and optimism. The expression on Will Self's face - like a corpse sucking on a lemon dipped in napalm - was enough in itself to curdle your precious reserves of serotonin. On he came, tall, needle-thin, wearing jeans and a garish shirt, looking like the child-catcher dressed by Jeremy Clarkson.

"In the old days, there was a thing called the avant-garde. When an artist did something shocking, it had a point," he said.

"Thankfully," he went on, growing sarcastic, "those days are over. All the battles have been won, every man, woman and child is equally valued. There is no need to wake you out of your bourgeois torpor. You're not complacent and soon" - hint of theatrical menace - "you won't be bourgeois".

The audience tittered. What a card! Self began to read, two grotesque tales sharded with expletives and designed to unsettle. The audience yawned. Many of them - flossy-haired, well-fed and dressed in not-inexpensive knitwear - looked like they'd be more at home in a garden centre. They came alive again once Self took questions from the floor. The questions were rotten, and Self spat contempt. The audience loved it and queued to be punched in the face. No wonder he stalked out in a huff at the event's close. Round one to bourgeois torpor.

Before leaving, Self declared he found most writers pathetically optimistic. One writer he couldn't say that of was the previous night's headline act, David Peace. Peace was nervous when discussing his grim tales of corruption, much surer when he read. In this, the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike, he read from perhaps his most underrated book, GB84, fearing, he said afterwards, that the epochal industrial dispute was already sinking below the waterline of public consciousness.

Self's favourite living philosopher spoke on Monday night. John Gray is accused of pessimism because of his criticism of the Enlightenment "myth" of progress. Whereas sunny-hearted liberals promulgate the notion that civilisation is on an inexorable ascent to some sort of rational utopia, Gray argues this is a myth, that advances made in ethics and culture can be reversed "in the blink of an eye". Look at torture, he said. After Voltaire, governments did not argue for the torture of prisoners, despite what might have gone on sporadically behind closed doors. Now the use of torture, the political class tells us, is "more complicated than we previously thought". Gray spoofed the matter once in a magazine column where he suggested torturers might form a union and, with the stress of the job in mind, be given counselling. Few got the joke.

If an economist says something is impossible, Gray told us, it'll probably happen. One economist I think we can trust is Vince Cable, who used to shuffle numbers for Shell. On gaining that job, he told us on Monday, he was given an embroidery featuring an Arabic saying. Translated it read: "those who predict the future are liars, and are still liars even if proved right."

Cable's analysis of GB Plc's parlous condition - he likened the current downturn to a heart attack, whereas normal recessions are like bouts of the flu - was, in its terrifying way, a treat. In contrast, Cherie Blair's event the following night was purgatory. The EIBF prides itself on being a writers' festival, a site immune from mere celebrity. So why Cherie? She was given an EIBF platform purely because she is a "sleb"; as if to prove it, she read an execrable passage from her autobiography. And still the crowds turned out, many of them recognisable from the Self event. One suspects EIBF habitués trot from one reading to another, regardless of who's on, which doubtless accounts for the frequently passionless atmosphere of events. Sheena MacDonald, a woman I previously thought steely, asked simpering questions about what Princess Diana had been like and whether Cherie had recovered from her recent bout of swine flu, while taking questions from the floor from "Magnus" and "Bill". All very clubby, it was Edinburgh at its most insufferable. Round two to bourgeois torpor.

Indeed, all week there has been an ersatz aspect to the EIBF. Will Self attacking the middle class before an audience of chortling burghers. Vince Cable bewailing the bad behaviour of the banks in a tent sponsored by RBS. (Isn't RBS technically bust? How does that work?) Cherie Blair attacking journalists at an event sponsored by a broadsheet. Talk about a phoney war.

Thank Zeus, then, for some Glasgow grit on Wednesday. Many criticisms have been flung at James Kelman over the years, but no-one has ever accused him of phoniness. For 30 minutes he read with gusto an interminable pastiche of colourless leftist analysis lifted from his worst novel, Translated Accounts. Weirdly, you might think, it served only to amplify my admiration for Kelman. He's a real writer, and like all true artists, he does not give a damn what you think. Like Gray, he spoofed torturers. Like Peace, he raised the issue of why some historical episodes are remembered and others forgotten. Then he bared his teeth, biting down on the "Scottish literary establishment" seen at the Blair event and so long critical of his uncompromising work. "If they gave out a Nobel Prize for literature in this country, they'd give it to detective novels or kids stories with upper-class magician kids or some f***ing crap". Round three to Mr Kelman.