That Was a Shiver and Other Stories

James Kelman

Canongate, £14.99

Review by Alan Taylor

IN the beginning was the word, and the word was four-lettered. No one in the history of literature has used "f***" to such purpose and with such potency as James Kelman. In his short stories and novels its versatility is astonishing. It can be a verb, a noun, an adjective, an expletive, an endearment, a conjunction or simply a verbal tic. It is as commonplace as "and" or "but" – and more meaningful. Speech, it seems, is not possible without it. It is to a sentence what coal is to a steam engine.

To people, however, who are offended by its mere appearance in print, as was my fellow Booker judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, it is reason enough to dismiss Kelman out of hand. Hence his denunciation as an “illiterate savage” by a columnist in The Times after his novel, How Late It Was, How Late, became Scotland’s first and only Booker winner in 1992. For that intemperate savant, Kelman’s frequent and insistent use of "f***" was a sure sign of his ignorance and his unsuitability as the winner of the prize.

In fact, it was the columnist – for f***'s sake! – who was the ignoramus. Had he taken the trouble to read the novel properly, which is told from the point of view of a Glaswegian man who has become blind, he might have recognised that "f***" was part of its fabric and essential to the rhythm of the narrative, and that Kelman is as brilliant and innovative a stylist as Samuel Beckett or Virginia Woolf. Remove the "f***s" and the novel would collapse like a wall without mortar.

This is underlined in That Was a Shiver, this latest collection of 24 short stories. Take, for instance, This Has No Title, in which a man is sitting on a bus observing his fellow passengers and musing about life. The bus is going somewhere. Is the man?

“What is escape,” he begins, “is not so much escape as the unplanned. My life had reached a point, deteriorated to a point, been arrested prior to this, this point, utter disintegration. The desire for death is desire and desire is activity. I had avoided it in other words, where escape is not avoidance, and was looking for a why, why, why, why.”

What follows is a torrent of consciousness. Who is the narrator? He has a wife and a daughter. Most likely he is formally educated. He doesn’t say "f***" much – a couple of times in nine pages – and he uses fancy words like "equilibrium" and "ethereality” and phrases like “immaterial reality” and knows enough about philosophy to muse, “We talk about truth being conditional, but more precisely, it derives from a condition.” Passing reference is made to “burn-out” and a murder. There is little in the way of description; there are no names of places or people. What we do know is that it is night: “a block of black paint without a single shard of light, not one.”

What Kelman creates here and elsewhere in this collection is an atmosphere of Kafka-esque anxiety and menace, of things falling apart, of centres unable to hold. The dearth of detail serves to heighten the mood of paranoia. Mostly, the stories’ settings are mundane and nothing much happens in them other than lives atrophying. The title of one story, Clinging On, speaks for the collection as a whole. Here are men, mainly men, who’ve reached a stage in their lives when they’re beginning to wonder what is the purpose of life. Are they going anywhere? Are any of us?

Such big questions have always been at the heart of Kelman’s work. That they are asked by people who appear "ordinary" and with whom, if you passed them in the street, you might prefer not to exchange glances, is immaterial. As Robert in That Was a Shiver says: “People gie ye looks. Just their eyes. Do they even know they’re doing it? Maybe they don’t.”

It is a Sunday and Robert and his wife, Tracy, are “down the Barrows”, browsing among the stalls. They go their separate ways, having agreed to meet for lunch. “Tracy didnay want him trailing eftir her. She was good at shopping, smelled a bargain at a hundred paces: take aim, fire.” Robert wanders aimlessly then comes across a stall selling vinyl records. He has not intended to buy anything but when he spies an album by Ernest Tubb, a country and western singer, he is tempted.

On slipping the record out of its sleeve, however, he discovers that it is not by Tubb but Mario Lanza, the opera singer. When Robert points this out to the youthful “Miss Girny” who’s minding the stall she is not impressed. “Look,” she says, “do you want it?” He does want it but he wants first for her to acknowledge that all is not as it should be. What irks particularly him is that Miss Girny doesn’t appear to care. In that regard, she is typical of the world in general. No one cares. “It didnay matter,” thinks Robert. “It didnay matter. What did it matter, it didnay.”

Of course, it does matter and Robert is left to fulminate inwardly. As the morning progresses his rage rises to a tumult and the use of "f***" to articulate his thinking multiplies until there is at least one per line. That Was a Shiver is a wonderful story, as good as anything in Greyhound for Breakfast, which is Kelman’s finest collection. It has humour, pathos, and humanity. You can tell that the author’s sympathy for and empathy with his characters is genuine. Men like Robert are not hard men in the traditional, West of Scotland sense. They may live with the prospect of violence but they are not themselves inherently violent.

They are also, by and large, feminists and respect women. In Oh the Days Ahead, which opens the collection, we are introduced to Andy and Fiona who, having met in the Scotia bar, are now in bed. Sex, though, is not on the agenda because Fiona has vetoed it. She is wearing bra and pants while Andy has on his boxers. Neither of them can sleep. He has an erection but he might as well be impotent for all the good it will do him.

“How could he go to bed with a woman in the expectation of not having sex?” he wonders. “In the name of god. This was not like going to bed with a long-term girlfriend for christ sake they had only met.” In lieu of coupling, the pair chat. Fiona talks about the hassle women get in bars and bridles when Andy tries absolve the Scotia of any blame: “there’s no such thing as a hassle-free bar. There isnt. Yer wrong if ye think there is.”

Reading Kelman, as I have been doing since the publication in 1983 of his debut collection of stories, Not Not While The Giro, is always a pleasurable challenge. He does not write stories that can be described as traditional nor does he follow prescribed paths or make concessions in search of popularity. Like the best short story writers – James Joyce, Kafka, John Cheever, Alice Munro – he has reinvented the form through his audacity not to conform to the expectations of those who underestimate the intelligence and perceptiveness of the reading public. His stories may concern dossers and delusionists, no hopers and chancers, petty criminals and serial gamblers, but each one is an individual who has been dealt a hand that he must learn to play or lose his lot.

What he is offering are slices of lives that most western literature ignores. What he also does is make me laugh, often uproariously. If you have not read a word of Kelman before try One Has One’s Weans. Its narrator talks about “upper-class c**ts” and Heinrich Boll in the same paragraph. He has a girlfriend called Wilma, a boy aged three and girl aged two. They appear to live in a building that is on the brink of demolition. He works 12-hour shifts and takes whatever overtime “the whitecoat managerials” offer him.

When he comes home Wilma tells him she thinks it may be rats that are causing the noise that is stopping the children from sleeping. He decides to raise this with his neighbours, the Donnellys. Told he may have rats, Mr Donnelly points to a crack in the outside walls that he has been attempting in vain to fill. It is this that is causing the noise. In comparison, “F***ing rats...are easy. Just batter them ower the skull. It’s the front door with them anyway son, know what I mean, they ring the f***ing doorbell, rats, open the door and in they stroll. Usually they’re wearing polis uniforms.”

James Kelman is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Fri Aug 18 and Sat Aug 26