Dirt Road

James Kelman

(Canongate, £16.99)

Cancer, reflects Murdo, the 16-year-old narrator of Dirt Road, is not like a disease. “More like a bullet from a gun was how he saw it: you walk along the street one minute and the next you are lying there on a hospital bed, curtains drawn, nothing to be done, and nobody to help.”

He knows what he is talking about having seen his sister Eilidh die, five years earlier, and then his mother, shortly before the novel begins. Both had succumbed to the same cancer, leaving Murdo and his father Tom alone together, and trying to cope, not entirely successfully.

When Dirt Road opens, they are leaving their Scottish island home by ferry to visit Tom’s relatives in Alabama for a fortnight’s break. Things don’t start well. First, Murdo forgets to pack his phone. Then, when they have safely negotiated all but the last of the various stages of their journey and are but a bus ride from reaching their destination, he wanders off and only comes out of a daydream to see their bus – the last of the day – driving off down the street. “Murdo felt the worst ever he had.” Except the reader knows he has been through far worse. So has his father, who tries to hide his annoyance, and books them into a cheap motel for the night.

The story is only a few pages old by this time, but already we have a clear idea of what Murdo and his dad are like. It was the sight of an accordion in a pawnshop window that made the boy forget they had a bus to catch, because he is a musician, who can think of little else. The accordion is his instrument, but he can also play guitar, and sing. As a result of their impromptu stop-over, he stumbles upon a family playing music in their back yard, and is drawn into performing with a charismatic older black woman, Queen Monzee-ay, who recognises his talent. She invites him to take the stage with her in a couple of weeks’ time at a music festival in Lafayette, and the lure of music, as well as her attractive granddaughter, compel him to say he will. From that point, the rest of the holiday is overshadowed by private calculations of how he can honour this promise without the knowledge, or help, of his father. Probably correctly, he guesses he would forbid it.

The intensity of this novel, as with all of Kelman’s, draws you like a magnet. In recent works, there has been a gentler tone, a measure of protectiveness that distinguishes Keiron Smith, Boy, and Mo said she was quirky, from what came before. Nowhere is that more marked than here, as Kelman allows us into the thoughts of a sensitive, artistic, intelligent teenager who is on the cusp of adulthood and questioning everything. All he knows for sure is that his life will be devoted to music. So far, however, this fact has not dawned on his father. “The truth is Dad knew nothing about music. So nothing about Murdo.” As the holiday unfolds, it becomes as much a journey of father understanding son as of discovering the deep south and long-lost family.

Their Alabama relatives, Auntie Maureen and Uncle John, are superbly drawn, understated, as is Kelman’s way, to powerful, sometimes droll effect. Their ramshackle garden and homely house soon become the reader’s, and the rhythms of family life are punctuated by casual, meaningful conversations, in which little of importance, yet everything that matters, seems to be said.

In his basement bedroom, Murdo listens to music and escapes grown-up conversation. Kelman shows his father dealing with his son’s moodiness and unpredictability, desperate not to lose his confidence, but so overwhelmed by what he has been through that there is a danger he will not truly understand his boy until it is too late. That he has not given him pocket money since his wife died, this having been her responsibility, is just one symptom of how distracted and heedless he has become.

You have to be careful in the land of the free, as the title of an earlier Kelman novel says, and it applies equally to this book. America as Murdo and Tom find is fascinating and disturbing. Could they move there permanently, their relatives keep asking? The Scots-American culture in which they have arrived is both familiar and strange, kitsch and heart-warming. It is nothing like Scotland, and that is perhaps part of its charm. Neither Murdo nor his father has come here to seek out the old country; quite the reverse. They want to put what has happened there behind them.

The Dirt Road of the title could apply as much to the one they have trodden at home these past few years as to this holiday. There is anger here, about world politics, religion, gun culture, and the oppression of the poor, but Kelman, for the past three decades our most exciting novelist, trains his deepest insights and fury on a young man trying to understand death. “Everywhere ye looked it was Mum not being there and ye could not get away from that.” Murdo rages against the platitudes of those spouting scripture, or just trying to help. “Oh now son she’s in a better place.. It wasn’t just daft it was worse than that”. Although it is kindly meant it infuriates him. “Mum and his sister Eilidh, what world were they in? A spirit world, always surrounding you and you surrounding it. You are within it but they are within you.”

For a story that takes place across a fortnight in which for the most part very little happens, Dirt Road is alive with anticipation and event. There is something almost uncanny about Kelman’s ability to present another person’s presence and thoughts, to make them transcend the page, and take on a rounder life than that of most people we know. Because whose minds are we allowed into as closely as this? Even our own are sometimes impenetrable, as Kelman suggests: “Murdo thought things that were totally private. Nobody ever got to know. Not even him in a weird way. It all mixed in without working it out.”

As ever, he nails the practical and the mundane in such a way that it elevates the banal by showing its significance, its function in getting on with every day and making it one’s own. Money is an issue at every turn, the cost of groceries, the price of a bus ticket, the need to make a living. Kelman’s realism in every aspect of what he depicts in part explains why his fiction reads as if it is real, because in so many ways it is. If he is honest and unvarnished in this, we trust him when he goes into the unknown.

The artistry and compositional complexity of Dirt Road are almost invisible, because it is such an effortless read. Every line matters, whether it is capturing the beating wings of Murdo’s imagination, or the exhaustion and fears of his father. Made from so many layers, it will take several readings to unpick fully, but that will be a pleasure. It is hard to think of a writer better at conveying character and reflection, who can make ordinary dialogue sing like his, without anything seemingly profound or witty being said. When he writes about music he is in perilous territory, words notoriously inadequate in conveying sound, yet he choreographs the setting, and the mood, of various performances with such panache you not only think you hear music but can feel what it is like to perform. There has always been, of course, a music to the rhythm of Kelman’s prose.

This is a risky novel in other ways too. Writing about bereavement without wallowing in emotion takes experience and wisdom. The restraint Kelman shows pays off, his glimpses of grief like a dagger’s stab, a single sentence pinning heart-break the way an overblown paragraph could never do.

But for this reader, the strongest pulse of the novel is the living relationship between father and son. The tenderness with which this is portrayed is haunting, because while it is written from the boy’s perspective, one is made all too aware of how his father must be feeling. Feeling is what this book is all about, at times almost unbearably so. How James Kelman manages that remains a mystery, like all remarkable works of art.