A PROPHET says the Bible, "is not without honour - save in his own country." Perhaps day if St Matthew had spent a day with William McIlvanney in Glasgow he'd have changed his mind. For unlike many born the wrong side of the tracks, McIlvanney has never turned his back on those whose lives were his original inspiration. He still lives among them, writes of them and for them. And they love him for it. His new novel, The Kiln, was already at Number 5 in the Scottish best sellers list before it even hit the shelves.
One of four children, born the son of a miner in Kilmamock, in south west Scotland, William McIlvanney first found national fame in 1975 when he won the Whitbread Award for Fiction with Docherty, a fictionalised portrait of his grandfather and the Ayrshire mining community of Graithnock in the early years of this century. No northern nostalgia in the Hovis advert tradition here, but raw social history transformed into poetic masterpiece.
In those days McIlvanney was still teaching and although it's many years since he faced a classroom of unruly or questing 17 year olds, there's still a chalky quality about him. Short, greying hair that won't lie down, home trimmed moustache and a suit that has been, one suspects, doing the rounds for decades. But beneath the general grey, blue eyes shine with the intensity of a Bunsen burner. You know this is a man who will listen, who will not be judgmental and who, in his ability to identify with whoever confides in him, takes on the burdens of the world while buying the person a drink.
The Kiln chronicles the life of Docherty's grandson. Although written in the third person, it appears to be autobiography in all but name. "I feel quite comfortable that fiction might steal from autobiography. A lot of biography and autobiography are forms of fiction. You select. You edit. Although there are things in the book which are a version of things that happened to me,' there are whole tracts that are totally invention."
The Kiln is a coming of age book written from a coming of old age perspective, as if the memory of the hope that was will outweigh the loss that is. The kiln of the title is not only the searing heart of the brickwork where Tom - school behind him, university in front of him - takes a holiday job in the summer of 1955, but the unforgiving crucible of adolescence itself, as with the discovery of love, sex and power in all their contradictions the boy becomes the man. Around the hub of this alchemical few weeks the narrative moves along the shadowy paths that map the last 40 years, illuminated by the death of a brother. Although his own brother Neil did die of a cerebral haemorrhage 20 years ago, this was far from being the book's driving force. It is largely, he says, a device.
"When somebody you really care about dies, it's like shooting a flare; it illumines your life in a livid way and makes you reassess. Too often contemporary culture avoids facing darker issues. I think you should face them. You have to face them with a certain amount of gallows humour as well to obtain an equilibrium." Humour for McIlvanney is "like anger with the fuse - doused but still smoking. It's a way of controlling things. You control the bad things with laughter."
The Kiln is indeed very funny - usually at the hero's (McIlvanney's?) expense It is also brave. The twists of its convoluted, fragile shell conceal a more vulnerable centre than anything he has exposed before. But this is not a man to take the easy option. After the success of Docherty (followed up, in terms of style 10 years later by The Big Man) he held two fingers up to literary fiction and turned to crime - that is, the writing of crime, which was then seen to be just as bad. For McIlvanney however it was a natural extension of his territory.
"After Docherty I had a kind of contemporary starvation. I had spent five years involved in aural and reading research. I wanted to write about the present again and write about Glasgow. I have known it since my teens and it has always fascinated me and at that time it seemed under fictionalised. I wanted to be able to bounce all over the city and thought a good way to do that is to have a detective."
Enter Jack Laidlaw, who by rights should now be a household name. Although by no means a traditional whodunnit, Laidlaw became an instant popular success. Among its admirers was Sean Connery, who took a film option on the book (and is still a huge fan). But in the way of these things, it never happened. Instead Taggart happened - both names taken from large shipbuilding concerns on the Clyde. McIlvanney is tight lipped on the subject but when STV's series hit the screen some years back the Glasgow Herald, reflecting the sense of outrage felt by McIlvanney's readers, was in no mood to turn a blind eye and let rip. Ordinary Glaswegians showed where their loyalties lay by awarding Strange Loyalties, the third of the Laidlaw series, the Glasgow Herald's People Prize. "Of all his many awards it's the one McIlvanney most values."
William McIlvanney in no sense sees his two strands of writing as inherently different. Indeed place, characters and events all interconnect. "It's the texture of the writing that determines who reads them. I don't think anyone would say that the Laidlaw books are traditional detective stories. But it seemed to me that the whole point of writing a detective novel was that you had an accessible, popular form which could put on weight. You don't always have to fight "as a flyweight. You can fight as a middleweight."
FIST fighting is a theme which runs through all McIlvanney's work, most famously in The Big Man, filmed in 1989 with Liam Neeson as Dan Scoular the bare knuckle boxer. In the poverty stricken mining communities of Scotland using your fists has always been a way out of the ghetto. McIlvanney did it another way. But he is not a man to take this experience second hand, no more "than his detective alter ego. "Policemen are the shitty urban machine humanised. Everybody else hearing about a horrendous murder can put it in the bin and say `oh how terrible'. But policemen have to wade through the mayhem of people's lives."
The same could be said of McIlvanney's writing. But moralising is not his style. All he wants is to tell the truth and the reader to turn the page. At the suggestion that with the complex structure of The Kiln McIlvanney might have dipped into the shallows of postmodernism, a verbal left hook is delivered with the ferocity of a man fighting for a cause, his life. "Post modernism is a cheat. The reader is rendered virtually irrelevant. The writer just says, `I'm just doing this anyway'. A genuine relationship between writer and reader is the only reason for reading a book. What postmodernism does is to say `I play solitaire and you watch'. I don't want to watch you play solitaire. Talk to me, talk to me." And it's clear that people do. At bus stops, in bars, Just walking down the street or crossing the road.
The introspection of The Kiln is far more political. "I think that with the advent of the un blessed Margaret [Thatcher, whom he finds it impossible to name] I realised that a lot of things that I had thought were absolutely entrenched in our society had been taken away. Society had shifted around me so much that permanent landmarks had been erased. It was also an attempt, I suppose, to understand, however partially, what had happened. Not just to me but to Scotland, to the nature of the kind of lives we lived. When the certainties outside perish you have to scour yourself to the bone.
