Scottish author James Kelman deserves to be a household name

He last worked with Glasgow-based Thi Wurd in 2020, and before that, Canongate in 2016. His latest works have been published with California-based PM Press,  with whom he has just published a short-story collection, Keep Moving and No Questions (2023).  It is a tragedy that one of our nation’s greatest writers finds himself presently so rejected by his own country.

Ultimately publishing is about readership. While publishers sometimes “take a punt” on someone, the driving factor behind most decisions is readership and sales. In short, Kelman doesn’t pull in the sales to attract publishing deals, and yet, many will argue that the quality of his work has hardly declined, if at all. Then, what is it that restricts his sales?

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Many will be familiar with the controversy surrounding Kelman’s Booker Prize win. His style of writing, incorporating dialect, phonetic-renderings of words, unconventional sentence structure, and most notably, a hearty use of profanity, was disregarded as unliterary by many. 

Rabbi Julia Neuberger famously threatened to resign from the judging panel on grounds that the decision was a “disgrace”, while Simon Jenkins of The Times called the work “literary vandalism”.

As a working-class writer Kelman was at a disadvantage from the outset but the outcry about his critical success compounded matters and his outsider status became a primary point of identification for him and his work.

It felt like there was a smear campaign against him. He was branded by many as unreadable for his tendency to write in a form of non-standardised vernacular English.

Frankly, this unreadability is a myth. Over the first four pages of How Late the text is over 93% standard English (including swearing), with a further 6% composed of contextually obvious variations (“auld” for “old”, “ye” for “you”). Forgive the weary reference, but if someone can read Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, they can read Kelman without prior familiarity with Scotland.

It is therefore not the language that restricts readership but a perception of language (and, as I will demonstrate, the content and Kelman himself). The upset at swearing in Kelman’s work is so absurd given the state of pop culture over the last half century, it is hardly worth mentioning.

Beyond his abnormal (but certainly not supernormal) style of writing, a few other aspects put him as outside the confines of the literary establishment in Scotland.

To say Kelman has been neglected by Scotland is perhaps a stretch. After the Booker, he won the Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year Award in 1998; he was awarded the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year in 2008 and 2012; and has had his 2016 novel Dirt Road adapted into a film. 

Yet, his relationship with the so-called literary establishment is strained.

At a Saltire Society Award event Kelman’s acceptance speech was spiked with frustration about the cultural climate his work existed in.

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And, in spite of his undying insistence of its state as fiction, God’s Teeth and other Phenomena (2022) is no doubt an attack on the world of the literary establishment through the narrative voice of a frustrated “Banker Prize”-winning author who is successful by some measure but frequently finds himself objectified by those around him. One must admit that those with the power to publish and publicise Kelman might have been affronted.

This (justifiable) behaviour is symptomatic of Kelman’s dogmatism. Just as he will never change his writing in order to sell in bulk at airports, he will never moderate his opinions in order to find himself in favour. Kelman is an ideologue to his own downfall, but is this commitment to what he believes not also the most important and magical aspect of his art?

A less dogmatic writer of his ilk might have cast aside his hatred of nationalism (of any kind) in order to levy more backing from the cultural capital tied up in the independence movement.

Likewise, in The Red Cockatoo: James Kelman and the Art of Commitment, Miller and Rodgers write that ‘[t]he idea or authority of control is alien to Kelman and that is why he has never been able to align himself with the traditional patrician left in Scotland.”

Aside from his reluctance to be considered within “Scottish miserablism”, Kelman has pointed out that he is not an employee of the Scottish tourism industry.  IT is perceivably negative depictions that pushed the Saltire Society to label How Late as an “unfortunate portrayal” of Glasgow.

And yet, a considerably bleaker denigration of the city such as Douglas Stuart’s (below) 2020 Booker Prize-winner 

Shuggie Bain is shunned in no comparable way.  In brief, one might posit this related to how Stuart describes his novel as “an act of witness to Tory social destruction”, which antagonises a brand of politics  that is rightly a target of ire in Scotland contemporarily. 

No such link can be easily drawn in How Late which displays Scotland’s neglect of its own citizens on a micro-level that is further removed from party politics. Additionally, any political critique in Stuart’s work is more palatable by the nature of distance – he writes of decades gone, while Kelman writes in an unending present.

Beyond Stuart, another point of comparison to Kelman’s position is Irvine Welsh, who seems to have no problem with sales, and yet writes in a mode further removed from Standard English than Kelman.

Crucially, Welsh has a target audience grounded in  counter-culture, music and drugs. The characters in Trainspotting attend a Pogues gig, and Kelman’s closest pop-culture reference is Murdo’s fascination with zydeco music in Dirt Road.

Of course, none of the above reasons for Kelman’s recent struggle can be taken as gospel, simply as a reasonable suggestion. Ultimately, whatever the reason, Kelman’s name deserves to be household, and yet, one fears that beyond the voraciously bookish,  it might slowly be forgotten.