When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling it ‘crap’ and the award a disgrace. A columnist counted the number of ‘fucks’ — apparently 4,000. This was 1994 and savage Glaswegian vernacular replete with rhythmic obscenities was terra incognita to English readers. Kelman was paving the way for followers like Irvine Welsh with Trainspotting and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar. Scottish writers are part of the mainstream now, but Kelman, recognised as the godfather of modern Scottish writing, critically admired on both sides of the Atlantic, remains oddly uncelebrated south of the border.
His ninth novel, Dirt Road, is a strange and beautiful thing for those prepared to follow its meandering path. Drawing on Kelman’s recollections of his teenage years in the States, it tenderly explores grief and loss and a lonely boy’s passion for accordion music. No drunken losers in Glasgow gutters here, as Kelman captures the suffocating isolation of two people, frozen into silence, incapable of expressing their feelings or even everyday thoughts to one another.
The deaths of his mother and, earlier, his sister, have devastated 16-year-old Murdo and Tom, his oppressively controlling father.
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