In earlier novels the voice he created was drawn from working-class Glasgow His narrative was grainy with a West of Scotland music. John Knox, the father of English prose in Scotland, was obsessed with challenges to authority So is James Kelman But Kelman, unlike Knox, is a committed stylist The relationship between voice and narrative fascinates him. In earlier novels the voice he created was drawn from working-class Glasgow. His narrative was grainy with a West of Scotland music. Many younger Scottish novelists learned from this. Irvine Welsh's best work demonstrates a remarkable ear for demotic Edinburgh speech and has, again, a rebellious note. That note can be tracked far back: 400 years ago, King James VI and I was appalled at how "Jack & Tom & Will & Dick" would readily condemn his authority. James heard in Scotland a threatening underdog growl.Scotland has other voices too, though, and no ambitious Scottish writer wants to be trapped in one Kelman has been working in Texas.
His new novel is not set in Scotland, nor does it use Scottish vocabulary. Yet readers who found Kelman's Scots demotic hard going may find the "translated accounts" of his surprising new style just as taxing.This novel has no named characters It is set in an unnamed country with a repressive regime. We hear of political killings, imprisonment, abusive and gentler sexual acts Sometimes it is hard to know who is doing what. Peculiarities of voice make the strongest initial impression.
The reports of several first-person narrators are presented as if awkwardly translated. Sometimes the translation appears to have been done by machine, and early sections incorporate swathes of mechanical gobbledegook.This can be a bit like reading text from a broken computer printer. Kelman's point seems to be that in our world of what this novel calls " wwwdotcom", every voice we encounter sounds somehow machined. Capitalist admin vocab ("All have aims and objectives, targets they must achieve") gets mixed up with partly garbled accounts of atrocities.The prose naggingly conceals as much as it reveals: "Sexual activity.
