James Kelman / Features / Untitled Books

‘I don’t see it as criticism at all, it is a simple prejudice and like all prejudice it begins and ends in ignorance.’

James Kelman

James Kelman has always cut a divisive figure in British literature, inspiring fierce admiration in some and angry derision in others. Now, with a new collection of short stories, Viola Fort finds his fighting spirit undimmed.

James Kelman is a difficult writer to place. Most often pigeonholed as a Scottish writer with a narrow world view that extends little beyond working-class life in Glasgow, he, by contrast, identifies himself most closely with post-colonial writers from Africa and the Caribbean. His writing has received numerous awards, including the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1994 Booker Prize for How Late it was, How Late, but has noisily divided critics and provokes unusually strong reactions. He is outspoken, but famously difficult; political but private. What can largely be agreed upon is that he is Scotland's most important modern writer

His new collection of short stories, If it is Your Life, only serves to complicate any easy understanding of this implacable writer. Of these nineteen tales, written in his distinctive, scouring prose, few employ a traditional plot or narrative. They have a life of their own, refusing to follow the expected route to neat resolution we have come to expect from short stories. They are melancholic, unreliable, meandering. Many of them are only a few pages long, and start and stop without warning.

The stories are narrated by their protagonists, an unruly series of characters who ruminate, recount and philosophise in a voluble, wry stream of consciousness. In 'Tricky times ahead pal', the homeless narrator loses a leg to amputation and then suffers the chaotic, laconic bureaucracy of the social security office, maintaining a bemused detachment all the while: 'To the embarrassment of the staff responsible for administering the aesthetics I clung on to my dreams. One concerned the possibility of one-legged midfielders plating in a World Cup. Would I ever play football again! How embarrassing. Can we even describe such nonsense as thought?' In 'A Sour Mystery', Mike meets an old girlfriend for a drink and recounts their elliptical conversation while mournfully pondering the mysteries of women, a recurrent theme in many of the stories. Women frequently figure as steely, unfathomable, remote, the better to highlight the inevitability of their men's weaknesses.

Kelman eschews authorial interference, instead returning the stories to their subjects who in turn speak not for an audience but themselves. In nearly all of them, there is a disconnect from reality, as though the narrators, all male, are merely skipping of the surface of life like a skimmed stone, carried along by their own thoughts and remembrances, which flow at an altogether different pace to life around them, like an out of sync movie reel.

The use of phonetic accent, idiom and free approach to spelling and grammar, used here as much as in previous novels, gives Kelman's writing a distinctive style, but has also riled his detractors. Simon Jenkins once referred to him in a Times article as 'an illiterate savage,' and likened reading his work to being trapped in a train carriage with a drunk Glaswegian, while one of the Booker judges furiously dismissed How Late it Was, How Late as 'crap, quite frankly'.

The loquacity of the writing also famously led one critic to ask whether Kelman ever revised his work, implying his characters' stream of consciousness was little more than his own. In fact, his working method is precise in the extreme, every word, ever comma, carefully weighed and deliberately placed.

How does he react to such criticism? 'I don't see it as criticism at all, it is a simple prejudice and like all prejudice it begins and ends in ignorance.' The critical preoccupation with his use of demotic Glaswegian on the page has largely overshadowed public reception of his work, which has tended to focus on the challenge he poses to readers, his difficulty as a writer and the excess of foul language. If this is what most exercises his readers, it is also what Kelman most staunchly defends. 'Why should I use someone else's language? I begin from myself. I am a Glasgow man. I didn't decide to be a Glasgow man. The stories I write are my stories. They wouldn't exist in somebody else's language.' The value or function of translation is another matter altogether, he clarifies, but 'I don't think people in Scotland, Wales or Ireland use 'British' in the same way people do in England, not as a general rule. 'Britain' is synonymous with "Greater England", where everybody knows their place and thank ee kindly master.'

Outside of Britain, Kelman's reputation is not informed by this suspicion of non-standard English and as such receives a warmer reception. (Though critics have for the most part been fair in this country, their response is largely an academic, unemotional one; they appreciate rather than admire.) It is unsurprising then, that he in turn feels more closely allied with non-British writers, and literary traditions that do not circumscribe an accepted lingual norm. 'I do feel kinship with writers whose work is part of the struggle against the forces of colonialism and imperialism. We see this in how they use language, impressing within it their values and value-systems. The mainstream Anglo-American elite describe these languages as "vernacular",' he says, a term he regards as inferiorising. 'What do you mean by "vernacular". Do you mean my language, the language of my community? Is this what you mean by "vernacular"?'

In many ways, Kelman's writing is demanding of the reader. It is melancholic, brooding, often angry. It is concerned with the difficult and the dispossessed, marginalised characters occupying the edges of society, frequently slipping through the cracks. There are shades of Orwell and Kafka, and the strong impression that his writing is politically motivated. He disagrees; 'I try not to let anything affect my writing. It isn't that "I feel political", I just go about my work; others perceive this as political.'

Do writers have a responsibility to make political or social comment? 'Responsibility to whom? In the U.K. people are encouraged to enter into the Band Aid-BBC School of Politics, Let's Put on a Red Nose and Sing a Song for Haiti. It applies to writers and artists generally; their primary responsibility is to the system itself, which rewards obedience and allows their "career" to blossom. Good art does not reflect life except in trivial of ways.' Are there any writers who are succeeding in responding to the increasing intrusion of reality in life, or are most maintaining more traditional narrative models. '"Traditional narrative models" are at the heart of the mediocrity known as Contemporary English Literature,' he quips.

I ask if he is optimistic about contemporary culture, and literature in particular. 'This is a difficult time', he replies. 'There has been a dehumanising process in line with globalisation and the freedom of movement allowed capital. Young people are now having to be convinced that it is wrong to torture and torment those weaker than themselves. It isn't what they see roundabout. People are inured to abuse; physical, sexual and psychological.

'Most businesses, whether in the public or private sector, operate by a process of harassment and bullying which is a fair reflection of the interaction between countries. It is institutionalised; we have departments whose employees are paid to torment their colleagues. This department is known as "Human Resources". Elsewhere the public are encouraged to snoop on their neighbours and report unconventional or unusual persons to the authorities. Ordinary citizens are guilty until proving otherwise. The conditions for fascism have been in place for a while. Some might argue that it is already here,' he says.

Not exactly optimistic then. But it is precisely this anger, suspicion of the state, and sense of injustice that sharpens his writing. His first book of stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel appeared in 1973, and he has published steadily ever since. Have things improved or declined since then? 'Improved or declined for whom?' he asks. 'The elite always find a way. Most of what the old labour movement fought and died for has been clawed back, the common good, welfare and education.' He's a grandfather now, and, he says, he acts like one; 'accident-prone, grumpy, and a compulsive writer.' Is there anything particular he still wants to achieve? Certainly: 'A winner on the first day of the Cheltenham spring meeting.'