Give or take a dead Scotsman

Liam McIlvanney

• You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free by James Kelman
  Hamish Hamilton, 437 pp, £12.99, June 2004, ISBN 0 241 14233 4

‘Ye just battered on, that was what ye did man ye battered on, what else can ye do?’ Grim tenacity, the will to struggle on through difficult terrain, has long been a characteristic of James Kelman’s protagonists. More recently, it’s been a virtue demanded of his readers. Kelman’s last novel, Translated Accounts (2001), was a fractured political allegory in blurry translatorese from an uncertain number of nameless narrators. And the Judges Said (2002), his recent collection of essays and talks, was a chalky wodge of polemic, a Long March of humourless prose. It was time Kelman produced a book with some of the gabby wit and digressive brilliance of The Busconductor Hines (1984) and How Late it Was, How Late (1994), and the good news is that he’s managed this. ‘I just cannay tell the damn story,’ is his narrator’s promising early announcement: ‘I have to embellish.’