A dark and dramatic voice

Scottish writer James Kelman's work has drawn on his native Glasgow forthree decades now. But his latest book of essays has taken him in a newdirection, he tells Kevin Barry

If James Kelman has perfected anything in his writing, it may be the art of the bristle. His new book, And The Judges Said, a collection of essays, could be seen as a single, extended, 420-page bristle, in which the author's hackles are variously raised by racist police, byan arts world elite, by injustices at home and abroad, and sometimes even by the English language itself, packed with its value judgements and insinuations.

Kelman's furiously-worked fiction, meanwhile, has been delving deep into the bruised ego of his native Glasgow for an outraged 30 years now. His reputation is secure - there are many prizes and plaudits under the belt. He's currently a professor of creative writing at Glasgow University and in person turns out to be far from the expected firebrand. He's a courteous and quiet-spoken chap. There is anger there, but it's carefully modulated. In his conversation, the word "they" comes up a lot, and seems to be a catch-all for the establishment in politics, the arts, and business.

"Culture is part of the tourism industry now," he says. "Things are geared towards entertainment. There are lots of spurious debates about the arts, but really what they want is for art to be decoration and writers to be entertainers. If you engage in literary fiction, so-called, that's considered not to be entertaining. Which is a puerile view, you know - can you say Joyce isn't entertaining? They just don't want any challenge to the way things are."

Kelman's latest novel, Translated Accounts, which is out in paperback this month, certainly stirs things up. His preface introduces it thus: "These 'translated accounts' are by three, four or more individuals domiciled in an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation . . . they have been transcribed and/or translated into English, not always by persons native to the tongue."

It's as cosy a read as it sounds. Icy slivers of testimony and interrogation - the prose sometimes impenetrable, often darkly poetic - accumulate and coalesce to form a nightmare landscape. Reaction has been varied, some have reached for their critical rifles, others suggest it may be a breakthrough.

"The longer you're involved in fiction, the more you want to try different things, the more you're forced into certain areas," he says. "You're pushing narrative boundaries all the time for yourself, to write things not possible to write otherwise. Formally, the book was very difficult. There were a lot of constraints."

Translated Accounts pulls off the considerable trick of making his previous milieu seem almost idyllic. The traditional Kelman gallery has been a line-up of rattled Glaswegians, sentimental misanthropes, mostly, who tend to be big drinkers, heroic smokers, and problem gamblers, and who wander about the place vaguely mesmerized. These have now been left aside as he scratches around the lives of a greater dispossessed, their voices almost disembodied in the book's strange atmosphere, a dense, millennial skank. Writing this stuff, did he not think he was going a bit mad?

"Well, there's always an internal logic to a story and you're trying to stay with that. It's tricky when you're involved with a piece of work that's like a piece of abstract art, maybe. There's nothing you can sketch out and conform to. It's like working as a visual artist or musician, all of the coherence of a thing comes from within itself. It's valid to talk about how you'd feel you're going mad, because that's what happens in these kinds of logics, at some points it makes sense and is coherent, at other points it isn't."

You imagine Kelman is the type who'll try to push things over dangerous and murky terrain. If a voice begins to work for him in a story, does he then trail it to an obsessive degree?

"If it is a voice, it can only be obsessive. It's a voice and it's not your own and although you created it, you can't describe it, you're within the thing. It is obsessive, because you have to disregard things that are external to it. And that is grounds for madness really!"

He says fiction is a hard slog for him now: "It's rare for a story to come to me in the way it would when I started off writing. When you start you have things that wake you in the night, a dream or something that you really want to work on. The more you do it that's less the case, you have to say, okay, today I'm going to write, you can't afford to sit around waiting for ideas."

It took him until his early 20s to realise that making stories was something he had a right and a responsibility to. He bought a notebook and wrote his name on the front followed by the sardonic legend "aspiring author and millionaire". He was first published by a small US press in the early 1970s, a time he believes crucial shifts were taking place.

"Coming out of the 1960s, into the early 1970s, there was a realignment. There was an alignment of the Right. Look at ways in which the state started to handle security . . . how it started to look on its own citizens. They decided to take control more."

He has always been politically involved, as the essay collection illustrates. "A lot of the essays came about through campaigns that I was involved in. The campaign would come first, in a sense, it's not as if I set out to write an essay.

"Usually I've taken a low profile. You get involved as an ordinary activist, booking halls, rounding up a crowd. It's not being involved as a writer but as a human being."

Much has been made of the current rude health of Scottish writing, but he doesn't believe this is due to any change in the cultural climate.

"Scottish contemporary writing has a high profile because there are writers doing the work, not because it's backed in any way. Scotland is still very wary of writers and doesn't welcome them, not unless they play the game. You can't work in theatre here, or television, or film, unless you're willing to work under a lot of constraints, not all of which are aesthetic. Some are political."

Glasgow was supposedly made newly vital after being designated European City of Culture in 1990, but Kelman was wary of the scheme. "It's all about co-opting artists into being unpaid members of the tourism industry. And if you don't do it, you are regarded as being unpatriotic and all this stuff. It was horrible in Glasgow. A lot of the artists started competing with each other to get, you know, five hundred quid for a project. It was pathetic really. There was a big struggle against the whole thing here and I got involved in that."

He's keen to get back to fiction again. He sees his work as being primarily involved with drama. "I'm happiest with drama, wherever the hell it happens, be it in a novel or a play or a short story. That's what interests me. Look at the great practitioners of prose fiction over this last 150 years, and they've moved ever closer to the immediacy of drama. Whether that's Joyce or Beckett or Kafka or Gertrude Stein, what their work is moving to is . . . no reportage, no indirect narrative, nothing that stands between the thing itself, the work of art, and the reader."

He never works with a map."I'll just see what happens when I sit down. I just want to be involved in working on some stories again. I'm kind of looking forward to it."

And The Judges Said, collected essays by James Kelman, is published by Secker & Warburg this week