It makes yer head go

David Craig

  • The Good Times by James Kelman
    Secker, 246 pp, £14.99, July 1998, ISBN 0 436 41215 2
  • Near Neighbours by Gordon Legge
    Cape, 218 pp, £9.99, June 1998, ISBN 0 224 05120 2

James Kelman’s style is so mesmerising that after a few hours’ immersion I find myself thinking in it – an experience which is both intriguing and infuriating, although the former prevails. The voice which chats and muses and reasons, and girns and deaves, and argues and contradicts itself throughout these stories, reaching us like the grumbling and bubbling of a burn flowing under grass or heather, is not a transcript of Glasgow speech, or not only that. It is an amazingly subtle vehicle for an intent brooding on the way we live, under the most usual circumstances, in situations and states of mind that are always mundane, complex and unsettling.

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