Common Sense

Sally Mapstone

• Translated Accounts by James Kelman
  Secker, 322 pp, £15.99, June 2001, ISBN 0 436 27464 7

James Kelman’s fifth novel, Translated Accounts, is also his first to be delivered entirely in English. In the three novels he published between 1984 and 1989, Kelman mixed Scots and English, with Scots used to convey characters’ speech and states of mind while English handled action and certain, often more formal, types of discourse. This approach reached its most radical realisation in How late it was, how late (1994), Kelman’s last novel before Translated Accounts, in which the dominant voice is the Glaswegian demotic of its blinded protagonist, the minor criminal and drunkard Sammy Samuels, but Sammy and his interlocutors and opponents can easily switch linguistic codes. In his grotesque interview at the Department of Social Security, Sammy is at risk of being cornered into making incriminating or contradictory statements on how he went blind – it happened after a fight with a group of policemen.