James Kelman’s new novel begins with frustration. The central character, Jack Proctor, is a writer interrupted as he tries to finish a sentence. The person from Porlock in this case is Hannah, his otherwise supportive wife. Hannah is “hovering” but Proctor is not like that other authorial Jack, the stymied, axe-wielding Jack Torrance from Kubrick’s The Shining: this Jack loves his partner.
He misses her badly after he travels to work as a writer-in-residence at an unspecified location, possibly in Ireland. He has problems with the schedule – maybe he’s in the wrong town? He’s not chuffed with his accommodation, he’s gauche and whiny and his temperament is (check that surname again) intensely anal. He’s Victor Meldrew crossed with Timofey Pnin; Jack is a coot and a hoot.
Proctor has won the “Banker Prize” 15 years previous – read Booker – and so, as with Pnin, can be understood as the author’s self-portrait as glimpsed in a funhouse-distorting mirror. We hear “he’s the guy who won the prize for bad language!” We suffer Jack’s humiliation at being mistakenly called “Jock”, his annoyance that he’s said to write in Lallans. The organisers try to reassure him they are friendly people but Jack’s having none of it: “Who to? friendly. Friendly to who? whom?” He wants to get on with his “f**king novel”. Jack amuses us, he sounds like Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas: funny, how?
Jack knows he’s a “mean old s**t, a selfish bugger” but his quotidian trials are endearing, often mordantly side-splitting, as when, exhausted, he considers wearing his best suit to bed while contemplating a sudden death: “Imagine the undertaker, ‘Your husband was ready Missis Proctor, take consolation from that’.”
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Money is tight and Jack’s quality/experimental literary life is harsh. The poor guy seems to live on Cup-a-Soups. In despair, he considers writing a zombie potboiler. He takes issue with the pretentions of poetry and defends prose against the putative higher status of what he calls “poultry”, and the “reverential hush” around those engaged in the “graceful activity” of “poultry”. He’s no fan of academics either: watching a professorial type load up a breakfast of hash browns and black pudding, sausages and sourdough toast, he concludes “elderly academics respect free food like no others”.
But what really gets Jack’s goat are critiques of his “liberal use of the Anglo-Saxon”. Jack flails at the many times he’s endured this attack. He asks of his own books: “Why did I write the f**kers?” His irritation spirals; he pisses off a young rival with a two-book contract. And he says “yes” too often: “I was too polite man that was my problem; if people asked me something I aye replied”. He needs to learn to say no. Redemption comes in the form of Hannah. He misses her, remembers their first nights: “Oh man naked bodies are so wonderful. That was it, that was youth. All these stupid pyjamas. Throw them to f**k man, get rid of all that junk.”
But God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena is more than just a wild rant at campus shenanigans. Kelman slyly outlines his general thinking about creative writing and art. He compares composition to a series of sketches for abstract paintings. He stresses that “I aye liked listening. Maybe that is what writers do.”
And he’s with the isolationists: “Hamsun on the wee island… boats on the Hudson with Trocchi, Arctic ice with Jack London, Mexican high jinks with Malcolm Lowry.” He’s generous to good editors: “they challenge you on why you do one thing rather than another”. In his advice to pupils, and by extension to his readers, Kelman’s Jack teaches what makes us turn a page. The writer as tightrope walker whose story is “falling apart, will it work, will it work, will the writer pull it off…whoa, yeah, he does… we can all sigh in relief, what a story!”
Other presiding spirits hovering benignly such as Myles na gCopaleen (”wasn’t he the boy”) in Skibbereen, “or was it Clonakilty”, and Heinrich Böll, understood as Jack/Kelman’s artistic template, hiding out on Achill Island.
The book asks: “Where has a slow-moving once quickdraw writer got to go?” In answer the afterword suggests west Cork at Mizen Head. As with Chris Paling’s recent A Very Nice Rejection Letter, Kelman is great on the cranky vexations of a writer’s life. “Precision is a life sentence,” Jack tells us. Kelman expects no remission, no release date. As he concludes wearily: “Who gives a f**k, away and buy the book”.
