FICTION: Kieron Smith Boy,by James Kelman Hamish Hamilton, 422pp, £18.99. An outstanding, living, breathing novel that powerfully documents the life of a Glaswegian boy in his own voice, writes Eileen Battersby.
YOU FIGHT and run and play football and try to keep up with your big brother, that nasty jeering lad who's so full of menace and threats, who wants no part of you, who hits you and says he's going to kill you. You go to the library; it's more fun than school. School is not great. You love your grannie and your granda, and he's got cats, and you'd love a dog but you'd never be let one, and your da's away in the navy and your maw just wants you to be better, to be different, to be more posh cos she's a snob, and she's always saying "don't do this" or "don't do that".
There's the smells, the hurts, the needs, the wanting to be bigger, tougher, the discovery once you change school that you're not as good a swimmer as you thought you were, in fact you're hardly a swimmer at all, and there's that bother, the niggling bother, as to why have you got a Pape's name when you're not a Pape. Then there's the paper round and the enemy, the various dogs out to get you.
Welcome to the world of Kieron Smith, young Glaswegian, dreamer, lonely brother, grannie's wee lad and merely the second child of parents who make more of a fuss over Mattie, their other son. Welcome to the busy, lonely, often hurt world and always exact world of Scots city writer James Kelman's wonderful, living, talking and telling new novel. This is what happens when a writer conjures up a character who leaps from the page, alive and remembering and hurting, who needs to share his world; to tell his story, your story, our story, without a hint of artifice, or condescension or sentiment.
No, nostalgia is not having an outing; there is no sensationalism, no specific crime, he experiences the sway of a crowd at a football match, there's the shouting. The noise. He hits the water in the swimming pool. It is a record, not a confession. But the passion is there; the longing, the anger and the wonder and the need to tell. It's real and it's true because Kelman possesses the gift, the gift that makes the real writer: he knows how people speak. We don't make speeches, we talk in a code that's tight, concise, full of signals, dissent - direct as machine-gun fire, orders, opinions, directions, questions.
This is why James Kelman, author of two genius works, A Disaffection, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize, and How Late it Was, How Late, which so excitingly and deservedly and contentiously won the Booker Prize in 1994, having almost caused - in fact did cause - critic Germaine Greer to throw one of her many famous televised TV tantrums as she heaved and fumed against what she saw as the inarticulate obscenity of Kelman's prose. That book wasn't obscene and this outstanding, living, breathing new one is even less so. The only obscenity is the everyday hurt done to one boy, this boy, every boy who gets ignored and picked on and doubted. And the touches of genius. Uncle Billy does not come back from Liverpool or London. He returns from England.
THIS IS THE story of a boy who played by the river, played in the park, who saw his grannie's home as home; who, when he needs a form signed for the local library, doesn't ask his parents, he takes it to his granda, the man with the cats, a big one and a small one; the man who taught him card tricks. "He had cards and showed me how to shuffle them and keep ones to the front or else to the back. My brother sat down beside us. My granda brought him into it and showed him as well. Then my brother said I was to go home because maw wanted me to go a message. He gived me a real angry look and with his fist just what he would do to me if I did not go, when we got home, he was going to mollicate me. I hated him. He said things and then I got angry and he just laughed, and he did it when people were there. And he punched me if nobody was looking. That was him. I did not like him or else what he said, I did not care, he was telling me to go home, I was not bothering with what he said. I was not going home for him, he was not the boss. Till then my grannie says, Ye better go home son."
Kieron tells everything but it does not add up to a litany of complaints - the narrative does not develop into a catalogue of hurts and humiliations as endured by one small boy. Kelman is too shrewd, too skilled for that. Instead he has reached out and attempted to place an individual's consciousness centre-stage. That consciousness and its multiple, competing sensations tell the story, there is no other viewpoint, although there are voices, the voices as heard by Kieron on the soundtrack of his life. It all gets upset very early, from the opening sentence: "In the old place the river was not far from our street. There was a park and all different things in between." So you know there's been a big move, an uprooting. This boy had some sense of the familiar, of a home place that ended when his family moved away from the old house and the kitchen where the mice scrambled across the table, a move that took him away from his real home, his grandparents. Always in the background is his mother's determination to better her family.
IT IS A big novel, very long and intense - intense because, once you begin reading it, you can't put it down. The voice holds you and as it records the everyday, the random, a world emerges and you become caught up in the boy's thoughts; you see the images that make up his memories. Also, and this is crucial and indicative of Kelman's deceptively subtle, deceptively crafted art, Kieron moves from being a very young boy to a slightly older, wiser boy. There is a shift in the language, perhaps only a slight tilt, but it is there. The one thing that irritated me in the reading was the use of asterisks. If you're going to use a swear, why not just use it - you can't blank out the sound. You'll hear it anyhow.
And it's not as if there is that much foul language. However, just when it seems there's been on asterisk too many, Kelman's intent becomes clear, emphatic. Kieron, having been moved on to a school he never wanted to go to, is tapped on the shoulder by the boy sitting behind him. It starts as fun but Kieron gets irritated. But the tapping persists. The boy mimics Kieron, who festers. "He stopped it for a wee while then done a couple of more taps. They were not that sore but just how they annoyed me. I turned round to him, Fucking chuck it. I shouted it loud and everybody heard . . . " Kieron describes Mad Marty, the Algebra teacher, exploding into vivid disbelief. "His eyes went wide. It was complete silence till he said What was that! Come out here. Did I hear you right . . . What did you say boy?"
It is the moment of rebellion, the defiance of becoming that bit older. But in fairness to Kelman, this book is almost impossible to review, because it is simply too good - the handling of the illness and death of Kieron's grandfather is underplayed, yet profoundly moving.
Why? And how? Because he is either inspired or incredibly, instinctively clever, or probably both. He breaks the rules - or perhaps he is simply doing as he pleases. It all adds up to a masterclass in evoking the texture, the experience that shapes an individual; here is boyhood within the context of a specific class and culture. Ross Raisin's marvellous debut God's Own Country was a revelation; Kieron Smith, Boy reiterates the proven flair of a singular imagination. It is also a practical demonstration in how to make art look as if it is not art at all. James Kelman is not beating up the contemporary novel - he is simply showing how it's done and shoving the bar that bit farther up and out of reach for most British writers. It would take an African or an Indian voice to match the sheer energy that sustains this daring, involving journey.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent ofThe Irish Times