Contemporary British Novelistsoffers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory,Contemporary British Novelistsexplores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts.

The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious...

This quotation says it all. Speaking in 2006 as Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen University, Janet Todd admits to feeling pressure to appreciate the work of James Kelman. Wittily and cattily Austen-like, she hesitates to dismiss him, yet she manages to do it anyway, and all the more sharply for the teasing hesitation. Her use of the generic personal pronoun ‘one’ does a number of things. It suggests that she is of the class which uses ‘one’ to distance the speaking subject from what is being said. Even theOEDsuggests that such usage is associated especially ‘with British...

The Busconductor Hineswas at least ten years in the making. Drafted as early as 1973,¹ and published in 1984, its title prompts two simple questions which this chapter will consider at length: why choose a busconductor as the subject of the first novel? And why put Hines on Glasgow buses? The blunt biographical answer would be that Kelman himself had been a busconductor in Glasgow, indeed it was when he was ‘a bus conductor, [that] he attended writing evening classes’² for the first time. But Kelman had many other occupations from his own experience from which to choose, as...

Tammas, the twenty-year-old man who is the focus of Kelman’s second published novel,A Chancer(1985), is defined by two actions: he habitually gambles and he habitually leaves. He gambles in card games at work, on dominoes in pubs, at bookmakers, at greyhound races, at horse races, on games of snooker and in casinos. He leaves social situations of all sorts: a date with a girlfriend, a football game, employment, nights out with friends, a wedding, the living room if his sister and her husband are about to enter and, perhaps most bleakly, he splits off from a party of...

Though the men in all three of Kelman’s first novels could loosely be described as having a working-class background, only Patrick Doyle ofA Disaffectionattends university. Of the three, Doyle is the only car-owner and the only one who lives on his own. With his degree and his postgraduate teaching certificate from what he refers to as ‘teacher trainers’, Doyle is professionally qualified which means his work as a secondary-school teacher is solidly-paid and we might even say his occupation, if not his troubled identity, is middle class.¹ Doyle condemns his job as being supportive of the state, productive...

In chronological terms, Kelman was a published short-story writer and a produced dramatist long before his first novel was in print. In 1978, for example, BBC Radio Scotland produced a play by Kelman calledHardie and Baird: The Last Days.¹ It concerns two leaders of a popular uprising of the radical reform movement in Glasgow in 1820. The uprising was put down brutally and quickly by British soldiers, having been manipulated and brought out into the open by government agents. Kelman’s play is set in John Baird and Andrew Hardie’s prison cells in Stirling and is largely based on surviving...

Throughout this study, I have used standard interchangeable terms to describe generally the type of language Kelman uses in his fiction: ‘vernacular’ or ‘dialect’. The problem with such terms is that they signify both a degree of subordination to a standard form of language and, perhaps as a consequence, a quality of pejorative provincialism in contradistinction to the metropolitan assumptions of universalism which the standard is granted, in the very act of defining one against the other. While there may be many dialects, a dialect in isolation is always the binary though unequal opposite of the standard form. In application...