Agnes Owens, at 67 about to have her

third novel published, has known great

personal tragedy, but manages to keep

smiling through the wreckage. She tells

Lesley Duncan her philosophy

LARCHES are greening by the lochside. Houseboats on the Leven could be

posing for a Scottish colourist. Spring, even on a damp Friday morning,

touches Balloch. But the Haldane estate is a dispiriting place. Its grey

streets of fifties/sixties council housing have a surly, unkempt look,

hardly softened by the occasional clump of daffodils or flashy car. A

sense of communal defeat hangs in the air.

The wooden-framed house in Roy Young Avenue does not stand out from

its environment. The woman who opens the door, however, is a phenomenon.

At 67 she is about to have her third novel published -- and by one of

the classiest of London houses, Bloomsbury. Inside the miniature hall, I

bark my leg on a gate on the stairs. It's for the grandchildren, Agnes

Owens apologises, as she leads me upstairs to the converted bedroom

which is the powerhouse for a subtle and mysterious talent.

Agnes Owens burst on the Scottish literary scene 10 years ago with her

novel Gentlemen of the West, first published by Polygon, then two years

later by Penguin. It was a bleakly comic tale about a 22-year-old

brickie whose customary haunt was the pub so beloved by the Scottish

working-class male of fiction (and frequently fact). But it did much

more than dredge the shallows of west of Scotland proletarian culture.

Even in this first book Agnes Owens displayed a confident laconic style

and throwaway humour. It was a notable debut.

Owens -- gaunt-featured and soft-voiced -- recalls its genesis in a

local writers' group where she was encouraged by James Kelman, Alasdair

Gray, Liz Lochhead, and the late Joan Ure.

There is a tremendous amount of drinking in her books. Is this

something she has seen at close quarters? ''Yes, it's odd but I can't

get away from drink, I seem to have to introduce it. I could never write

about drugs -- not that I don't know about drugs -- but I find that a

humourless situation. Sometimes drink can be funny, but it's a dangerous

situation as well.''

The central figure of Owens's new novel A Working Mother -- set in the

1950s -- is Betty, who works as a typist to support her war-haunted

husband Adam and two children. A manipulative woman (and presumably an

attractive one, though she is never described), Betty should be squashed

by circumstance but for most of the book handles the boozy Adam, his

amorous friend Brendan, and her odd employer Mr Robson, with ruthless

panache. Drink destroys her in the end.

Was the book to some extent autobiographical? ''Not really,'' Owens

says. ''I suppose I've drunk in my time and fought with my husband --

I've had two husbands; one of them died -- and we've had situations when

you wake up despairingly the next morning and say, oh, I'll never act

like that again, but the actual plot was purely fictitious. I'd

certainly never write an autobiography. My God, the family would never

speak to me again!''

Owens has not been prolific -- a volume of short stories, Lean Tales,

shared with James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, another novel, Birds in the

Wilderness (originally Gentlemen of the North), and a play co-written

with Liz Lochhead, form the tally. Work and family responsibilities as

well as her self-critical approach may be the explanation.

Economy is central to her style. Her writing lacks any analytical

superstructure. Yet with minimalist means she can produce psychological

subtlety, ironic ambiguity.

Owens says she found it quite easy to get into the narrative style of

her new heroine but at the back of her mind thought: ''This novel will

do feminism no good!'' She adds that she wasn't setting out to do

feminism any good. Instead of having her central character a poor,

downtrodden person, she has made her a ''really trollopy woman'', though

able in her own way, and still a mother.

Owens herself was the mother of seven children; only six now. Her

youngest, Patrick, was stabbed to death six-and-a-half years ago at the

age of 19.

The tragic facts emerge as she considers her own lack of

sentimentality. ''I don't know what's wrong with me that I don't suffer

from it. I think maybe a hardness has come into my soul. Maybe it's age,

maybe it's what's happened to Patrick.''

Her son was killed locally. ''He was in his house and he had a fight

and, you know, it wasn't much more than that, but they called him out

unbeknown to us and we got there too late. They called him out with

stones at the window. And the sentences -- there were three of them --

were very trivial.

''The one that actually stabbed him, I've seen him two or three times

this year. His relatives stay here. The other two I don't see. They were

just done for assault.''

The heartbreaking matter-of-factness continues. ''I think to myself,

I've survived, I haven't sat in the house and stared out the window. I

went out. I've written. I laugh a lot. I don't think I'm too

unhappy-looking. But at the same time I feel terrible every day. It

never goes away.''

It's inappropriate to ask whether she had ever seen her writing as a

lever into a different milieu. But had she not thought of moving away

after the tragedy -- or would that have seemed some kind of defeat?

''I also thought I would be leaving Patrick. But I never had any

inclination to leave. I wanted to cling on to something. Anyway you

can't really escape anything. It would be a lot worse in a strange

place. At least I know people here and to start all over again would

have been just another terrible imposition. I suppose I have a love-hate

relationship with this place.''

Another reason for staying is the proximity of grandchildren who

distract her agreeably from her writing. Five live locally; she mentions

a daughter in France, and then adds with precise vagueness, ''I think

I've got about 12 grandchildren altogether.''

She herself was brought up as a Protestant but says she was always

attracted to Catholics. Patrick, her present husband, is Catholic, as

are her younger children. ''But for me, I don't have any religion.''

Perhaps, though, that very background has contributed to her

individual voice? She is sceptical, pointing out that she couldn't even

make herself heard in the family. ''It's hard to have a family and be a

feminist.''

Her family have no literary aspirations, but then neither did she when

she was young. She did poorly at Bearsden Academy. ''My father wanted me

to be clever and I didn't. I used to say I wanted to go to work in the

papermill.'' She avoided that fate, but ''managed to learn some

shorthand and typing'' at college. Part-time jobs included a stint in a

cosmetics factory in London at the age of 18 (''to me the bosses were

the type that would have done well in a concentration camp''), with a

lighting firm in Glasgow, and as a cleaner to Billy Connolly when he

lived near Drymen.

Though she thinks ''it's very nice to be kind of associated'' with the

trio of Kelman, Gray, and Lochhead, she wants to be regarded as an

individual writer. She doesn't envy the ''much wider audience'' the

others have achieved.

''I don't want to be famous in this particular part of the world, in

this little place where I live.'' When she goes on her publisher's

circuit of London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee this month, she may

find she cannot avoid wider celebrity.

* A Working Mother by Agnes Owens is published by Bloomsbury at #9.99.