Exploring a post-Beckettian world

The advance description of James Kelman's new novel sounded intriguing, to say the least. "The language used is an atypical English form, but akin to the basic translation that might appear within a department of an overseas 'foreign office' . . ." How interesting, we thought, how interesting. Now that it's here, however, it's obvious that "intriguing" is far too small a word for Translated Accounts (as, indeed, are "enigmatic", and even "ambitious").

Kelman has never been a man for the easy option, but this exercise in uncertainty demands nerves of steel from the reader: every approach to the narrative is blocked off; every assumption, however tentative, is undercut.

Where is it set? Somewhere. Maybe a country, maybe just part of a country under military rule.

Who is the narrator? Three, four, maybe more people whose accounts have been translated and may also have been "edited". Nobody has a name, and no names are mentioned.

What happens? Nothing. Everything. Or, as somebody puts it, "new people come, babies are into existence, what their names may be, what is their gender, they have none they are babies, babies live or die, as children, boys or girls, live or die, men and women, elderly people, some live some are dead, colleagues not colleagues, it is continuation only, what are human beings, this planet Earth" - this last in a chapter whose prose periodically breaks down into computer gobbledegook.

So; no plot, no narrator, no characters. None of the old stalwarts of comfortable bourgeois fiction.

Which leaves: what? A post-Beckettian universe where life is reduced to essentials - war, cigarettes, politics, sex and alcohol, in approximately that order.

Conflicting versions of reality collide and contrast in a faceless continuum; faceless, because the reader can't say with any accuracy where the events are taking place. China? Eastern Europe? Africa? (The rhythm of the prose seems African to this reader, but no doubt I'm revealing some ghastly post-colonial prejudice by saying so.)

An obvious leitmotif running through the book, however, is fear, and with justification: much of the "action" involves arrest, torture, rape and one or another kind of violent death. There is food, but the narrators are always hungry; there are sleeping quarters, but everyone is perpetually exhausted.

There are arguments, betrayals, small kindnesses, acts of great courage.

There is devastating humour, as in a lengthy meditation on the pros and cons of "international legality inter as between the owner of one dog that has bitten one child and the parents of such child", a vicious satire on bureaucratic officialdom which, in page after pompous page, goes into hilarious contortions to absolve the state of any possible responsibility.

There are, too, visions of something better - "Such a freedom. The calmness of the water. The seabirds had vanished" - but they are fleeting, ephemeral and, it is made all too clear, illusory. Technically, Translated Accounts is a triumph: it's an easy book to admire, and a definite candidate for repeat reading.

Will it be a book to love? I really don't know. But here's a cheering thought: they'll never be able to make it into a movie.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist and critic