No truck with the occupier

The Arts:James Kelman is recognised as one of Scotland's most influential writers, but success has not deflected his ire from 'bastards who think they own the language', he tells Theo Tait.

BOOKER-WINNING novelist James Kelman has been called "an illiterate savage", but in a period often described as a golden age for Scottish literature, his depictions of working-class Glasgow have made him one of Scotland's most influential writers. His Glasgow-set novels, such as The Busconductor Hines(1984), A Disaffection(1989) and How Late It Was, How Late(1994), are the stories of angry outsiders, bus conductors, teachers, petty criminals, all of them chafing against the indifference of authority: employers, policemen, headteachers, the DSS.

Kelman is most famous for replacing what he calls the "standard third-party narrator" - the "voice of God" and its implicit values and pieties - with a defiantly working-class Glaswegian register, a stream of consciousness that refuses to explain or speak over his characters. In this, he has been acknowledged as an inspiration by the likes of Alan Warner, Duncan Maclean and, most famously, Irvine Welsh.

At a rendezvous under the clock at Glasgow Central, fresh off the train from London, Kelman is punctual and polite, but extremely cagey. He has reasons to be cagey: by his own account, he has encountered hostility throughout his writing career, which began in the late 1960s. When he won the Booker Prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, he was attacked from all quarters. One of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, called the book "a disgrace" and said it was "crap, frankly". Simon Jenkins described him as "an illiterate savage" in the London Times, saying that he had done no more than "transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk". The burghers of Glasgow accused him of giving the city a bad name.

When A Disaffectionwas shortlisted for a prize, one judge asked if he ever revised his work "or did it just come out?". ("It jist comes oot, ah says, it's the natchril rithm o the work klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes.")

Kelman is not surprised by any of this. In his essays, he sees himself as a post-colonial writer, and regards African and Caribbean writers as his peers. In an "occupied country" such as Scotland, he has written, "the intellectual life of working-class people is colonised. In a colonised country, intellectual occupation takes place throughout society". Not least, he thinks, this is done through literature, which is controlled by a "coterie" of London-based people who are "very close to power".

When he tried to write about his own experience, he found that it had "never been done". "Whenever I did find anybody from my sort of background in English literature, they were confined to the margins, kept in their place, stuck in the dialogue. You only saw them or heard them. You never got into their mind."

Writers like himself are "suppressed and censored", because they remind those in control of things they'd rather not acknowledge. "These bastards think they own the language. They already own the courts. They own everything. They want to block your stories, and they will, if you let them."

What is less clear is how Kelman squares this implacable hostility with his own considerable standing. He is published by Penguin and Random House, has been awarded prizes, is respectfully reviewed, and has held teaching jobs at prestigious universities. After spending a couple of hours with him, I'm none the wiser. Throughout the interview, he alternates between giving studiedly uninformative answers and lecturing me on politics.

I START BYasking him about his influences as a writer, thinking this uncontentious. He has said that, in the absence of British writers doing what he wanted to do, he looked to American realists for inspiration, and to an "existentialist tradition" which begins with Gogol and Dostoyevksy, and goes through Kafka and Camus to Beckett. Would he like to say a bit about that? The question doesn't go down well. Kelman seems offended by the sense that a mature writer like him would need influences.

"You don't really get influenced when you're an older writer," he says. "Well, I don't anyway."

Worse, he seems to think I'm implying that he would need a sort of crutch from quality literature to let him do his work. "You don't have to assimilate the superior voice to write stories, you know. You don't have to negotiate your way out of your own culture."

But weren't there any English writers that he might have had something in common with? What about authors of the generation before his, such as Alan Sillitoe or Barry Hines, who set their stories in industrial working-class backgrounds and use a lot of dialect? Kelman takes issue with the use of the word dialect, which he says is "an elitist term". I say there's not necessarily a value judgment implied in the word, putting the old argument that standard English is just another dialect, but one with an army and a navy. No dice.

"It's an elitist usage, and it's a way of inferiorising people," he says. "I don't see that as contentious at all. To me, that's a fact . . . Probably the reason why you would equate me with Alan Sillitoe is to do with your perception of working-class experience."

But as Kelman eventually admits, he hasn't actually read any of Sillitoe's books, so he's not in a good position to judge this.

Moving on to his new novel, Kieron Smith, Boy, which tells the story of a young boy's life in postwar Glasgow from the ages of around five to 13, I ask whether his own family's experience was at all similar. Like the Smiths, the Kelmans moved out from the city centre to one of the big housing schemes on the outskirts. He says they share that history, as well as a general experience of a Glasgow "working-class Protestant background", but that the Smiths are "very different from my own kind of family".

One of the main narrative hinges of the novel is Kieron's parents' decision to send him to the "the good school". He is separated from his friends, and finds himself surrounded by posh, unfriendly children, forced to do algebra and play rugby ("a man's game", unlike football). Kelman explains that he was likewise sent to a senior secondary school, which he found painful.

"There is a definite sense of that in this novel," he says. "You know, where the streaming rules separate . . . It would be the same in any working-class culture where some kids are streamed into becoming a kind of student middle class. Certainly that's what happening in this novel: he's being separated from his contemporaries and his friends and peers . . . You come out of the education system knowing your place."

A MAJOR THEMEof the book is the attempts of parents and teachers to "correct" Kieron's way of speaking, a constant, oppressive campaign to make him speak the queen's English. I ask Kelman whether a child with a similar language background would have a better time nowadays. He thinks not - whether you're from Scotland or the English midlands or Yorkshire (northern England), "your position in society is more or less a function of how you speak. It's inferiorised . . . it's just very blatant. If you check out the average mainstream radio station and you come from Yorkshire or Lancashire, you're used to being made a fool of because of the way you use language. You know, you're the butt of a lot of jokes."

Is that really so true any more? Does he not think that, in recent years, the UK has got much better at putting a range of voices and accents on the media? Call it tokenism if you like, but don't they at least try, on BBC TV and radio, to take cultural diversity seriously? "I don't know. That's great news," he says, sarcastically.

Would the Booker controversy happen in the same way today? Wouldn't people be a bit less willing to write him off as a savage? He thinks not. "I don't see any difference now."

Kelman seems surprised that I keep asking him about his life and background - the background of his novels - and puts it down to bourgeois bigotry on my part: "The way you're kind of framing it for me is almost premised on your own prejudice, on your own view of what literature is or what the norm is."

I deny this. On the contrary, I say, I think a lot of Glasgow novelists - Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Jeff Torrington - make their London-based equivalents look parochial and choked by comparison. He grudgingly accepts that he and his peers are a lot better than the Martin Amis generation. But there's no mistaking the atmosphere of gathering gloom. His replies become monosyllabic, his silences long and Pinteresque.

At one point, he says it's important to make a distinction between the American people and the horrors of the US government: "I would hope, for example, that people around the world don't think of people in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales as being represented by the f***ing queen or something, or Gordon Brown or any of these f***ing people - or as being supportive of a right-wing state like the Labour party's."

It's clear that he sees me, if not as an agent of this right-wing state, then certainly as a brainwashed minion doing its bidding. At times he seems almost upset on my behalf, by the crudeness of my questions, my constant attempts to pigeonhole him, and the thick haze of false consciousness surrounding everything I say. At particularly difficult moments, he smiles at me sympathetically, as if we're being forced to do something embarrassing together. Kelman seems happiest, almost genial, when re-educating me, explaining that the Labour movement was a stitch-up from the word go, and that the word "Hispanic" should never be used, because of its pejorative connotations (this was news to me, but it seems to be news to most of America too).

Feeling as if have nothing to lose, I ask him some more confrontational questions. What do you say to people who think your politics are a little paranoid? Answer: I'm not paranoid, I give "the facts"; reactionaries always try to paint those who seek social justice as conspiracy theorists. How does he think British politics changed in the aftermath of 9/11? Not much really. Afghanistan and Iraq were just another chapter in its imperialist history.

KELMAN IS RIGHT to be angry about many of the things he's angry about: conditions in the depressed areas of Britain's once-great industrial cities; its failure to offer anything like equality of opportunity; its long traditions of snobbery, metropolitan chauvinism and racism. But all the sense vanishes in his exaggerations. He makes modern Glasgow sound as if it's under occupation. In his essays, he makes English literature sound as if was written entirely by John Buchan and Jilly Cooper.

"Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all," he says. "We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers."

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