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The contemporary Scottish novel
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generation of Scottish writers. Janice Galloway and Alison (A.L.) Kennedy
have brought women’s voices fully into the forefront of the recent
flourishing of Scottish writing. Galloway, in The Trick Is to Keep Breathing
(1989), uses her own training to describe vividly the mind of a woman
living alone in a state of psychological collapse. In Female Friends (1994)
her two heroines travel abroad (to France) in a search for adventure,
reality and friendship. Galloway’s short stories, in Blood (1991) and Where
You Find It (1996), range through a spectrum of experience, often with
undertones of psychological violence. A.L. Kennedy’s stories, in Night
Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) and Now That You’re Back
(1994), share this undercurrent of violence and social concern. Her first
novel Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) is a narrative of a train journey
from Glasgow to London (literal and metaphorical references to trains
recur in modern Scottish writing – perhaps because there seem to be
fewer and fewer of them but also perhaps as a reversal of the positive
images of trains as emblems of progress in the mid-Victorian novel). The
journey is also one of memory, of the heroine’s relationships and hopes
for the future. The climax is among the most strikingly violent in modern
women’s writing. So I Am Glad (1995) continues to keep Alison Kennedy
at the forefront of recent Scottish writing.
James Kelman’s novels are unrelentingly naturalistic pictures of innercity
desolation, portrayed with a vivid humour and empathy. The Bus
Conductor Hines (1984) was his first success, and A Disaffection (1989),
about the frustration of a man on the edge of middle age, enjoyed wide
acclaim. Not Not While the Giro (1983) is a collection of stories, which
was followed by a second collection, The Burn (1991). Both Gray and
Kelman are highly specific – many readers find the emphasis on local
accents and setting daunting – but they represent a strong and imaginative
voice handling themes of considerable importance. Jeff Torrington’s
Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), set in the poorest area of Glasgow, the
Gorbals, attracted a lot of attention, and has been talked of as the
ultimate Glasgow novel ‘doing for Glasgow what Joyce did for Dublin’.
While this sounds like an over-reaction, it does mean that the author,
Jeff Torrington, will be closely watched as he follows this, his first
novel, one that was some thirty years in the writing. James Kelman’s
How Late It Was, How Late (1994) won the Booker Prize, and perhaps
marks the arrival of the Glasgow novel. It is a long monologue, famously
full of violent language which depicts the isolation and blindness of