After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that even after a career that’s stretched for nearly forty years, Kelman is as hungry to push the form as ever.
The stories here range from Scotland to America, from hospital wards to the bedroom, from the high surreal to the witheringly real. They also explore both extremes of what might be considered short stories: the title story, in which a student returns home to Glasgow from university in London, is close to a novella in length, while several stories barely stretch to a page. These shorter stories provide an interesting counterpoint to the longer ones they alternate with: the longer stories cover the familiar Kelman territory of the dispossessed and their struggles in relationships, either with loved ones or with officials, while the shorter stories unveil an unexpected lyricism that often makes them resemble prose poems.
Like many writers, Kelman is interested in the meaning of language and its influence in relations of power. However, where others would insert a university professor, another writer or a government expert as their cipher in the text, Kelman is content to show that the remnants of the working class are just as capable of understanding this relation between language and power. In the opening story, ‘Tricky times ahead pal’, in which the narrator has a leg amputated and then stumbles around the hospital ward in a pair of trousers that have had the wrong leg removed, there is still a constant awareness of language: ‘I call it the good leg, of course it was the only one’ and ‘How would he have described me? The one-legged bloke with the back-to-front trouser(s).’ In ‘A Sour Mystery’, the narrator’s only means to cope with the breakdown of his relationship is ‘to describe myself in the third person’, and in ‘Pieces of shit do not have the power to speak.’ the narrator discovers how being robbed of a voice equals the absence of any rights whatsoever.
When his characters’ helplessness is allied to the creeping awareness of mortality in many of the stories, you could be forgiven for dismissing the collection as unrelentingly bleak. Yet if Kelman resembles any other writer, it is surely Beckett. He has the same cold-eyed realisation of hopelessness, but also the same awareness that hope still lingers, whether in the form of tenderness between man and wife that’s alleviated all of his works since The Busconductor Hines, to the ridiculous dreams of the amputee: ‘To the embarrassment of the staff responsible for administering the anaesthetics I clung onto my dreams. One concerned the possibility of one-legged midfielders playing in a World Cup. Would I ever play football again! … But can a man not dream?’
There are in this collection stories that in their density and the jagged immediacy of their rendition of experience occasionally threaten to lose the reader, but a Kelman experiment that doesn’t quite work is still worth a hundred of the banal identikit stories so beloved by magazines. This is a writer sharply aware of language, still interested in asking what it can do.