How Late It Was, How Late (1994)
Who wrote it?
James Kelman (1946-; active 1973-), born Glasgow, Scotland. A prolific author of short stories, novels, plays and essays, this was Kelman’s second Booker nomination following A Disaffection in 1989. Brought up in social housing to a working class family, he left school at 15 and began writing in his early twenties. He’s fiercely political (though not party political) and describes himself as a libertarian socialist anarchist. His writing is typically written in a raw and accurate rendering of Glaswegian dialect, and has influenced authors from Irvine Welsh through to the 2020 Shuggie Bain winner Douglas Stuart.
What's it about?
How Late it Was, How Late covers the aftermath of a “lost weekend” for 38-year-old ex-convict Sammy. It’s a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue in which we find Sammy learning to cope with sudden blindness, seemingly induced by a police beating. He remembers nothing of the previous two days’ drinking binge, and has seemingly been left by his partner Helen, following a fight which kicked off the weekend’s events.
Through the novel we see Sammy learning to cope with his newfound disability, in remarkably emotionless and matter-of-fact fashion. His attempts to seek help are frustrated by Kafkaesque bureaucratic encounters, and an attempt by an opportunistic lawyer to take on his case is met with indifference. Late in the novel his son Peter arrives on the scene and provides him with money that helps him leave, seemingly heading to begin a new life in England.
What I liked
It goes without saying that the dialect is fantastically well-rendered. It feels real, not just in the sense of mimicking Glaswegian turns of phrase, but more impressively in communicating the inner life and stream of consciousness of a character not often found in mainstream literary fiction.
Sammy is a gem of a character, beautifully created and expressed. His reaction to his affliction is evidently the reaction of someone used to having little agency and accustomed to a life of being buffeted from bad luck to worse by the forces of bureaucracy and fate. He reveals little deep introspection, and his consideration of the impact of his blindness on his future always feels secondary to an in-the-moment survival instinct and desire to get on with things.
It’s a novel that feels unlike any other Booker winner to date in its rawness and energy.
As someone who read a lot of Irvine Welsh growing up, the influence of Kelman was obvious - and also probably made the style a lot less surprising or “difficult” to me than others (including some of the judges and critics at the time) seem to have found it
There are some genuinely (if bleakly) hilarious moments in here.
It’s nicely open-ended. A window into an unusual character in an even more unusual scenario, it doesn’t try to offer neat conclusions or judgements on Sammy or his world.
What I didn’t like
As a fellow music-lover, I didn’t particularly feel the music references and occasionally snippets of lyrics worked especially well or added anything. Perhaps because they were largely drawn from a genre (country) that I’m not super familiar with? Though I guess they were there to represent Sammy’s only real emotional outlet, so made sense in that context.
Much as it feels stylistically and emotionally satisfying, it couldn’t be called one of the best winners in terms of storytelling. The plot is thin and rather obscure, but to be honest that’s probably the point…
I didn’t mind this, but it won’t be ones for fans of clear plot resolution or moral clarity.
Food & drink pairings
A pint and a fag, obviously.
Fun facts
Some of the responses to Kelman’s win seem hysterical and somewhat unbelievable with the benefit of a quarter century’s hindsight. Judge Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatened to quit the panel if the book won, decrying its use of “foul language”, while at the same time describing it as “crap” (as well as “deeply inaccessible for a lot of people” - patronising much?); Simon Jenkins described it as “literary vandalism” and Kelman as an “illiterate savage” (seriously, WTF?); and other critics occupied themselves with counting the number of fucks in the novel (4000 or so, apparently.)
Kelman describes his writing style as a reaction to the depiction of regional (and especially Scottish) voices in literary fiction, which he describes as typically “a cross between semaphore and Morse code; apostrophes here and apostrophes there; a strange hotchpoth of bad phonetics and horrendous spelling” in contrast to “the nice stalwart upperclass English Hero […] whose words on the page were always absolutely splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate, whether in dialogue or without. And what grammar! Colons and semi-colons! Straight out of their mouths! An incredible mastery of language.”
Vanquished Foes
Romesh Gunesekera (Reef)
Abdulrazak Gumah (Paradise)
Alan Hollinghurst (The Folding Star)
George Mackay Brown (Beside the Ocean of Time)
Jill Paton Walsh (Knowledge of Angels)
Nope, once again not read any of these, though I do have the Hollinghurst on my shelf. Any recommendations?
Context
In 1994:
First fully multiracial elections in South Africa see election of Nelson Mandela as president
Official end of Allied occupation of Berlin
Finnish and Swedish voters decide to join the EU in a referendum; Norway votes against
Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition wins Italian general election
Rwandan genocide
Channel Tunnel opens between England and France
Sarin gas attack in Japan by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult
US figure skater Nancy Kerrigan attacked in incident linked to rival Tonya Harding
Arrest of mass murderers Fred & Rosemary West in the UK
O. J. Simpson arrested in the US
Suicide of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain
Death of F1's Ayrton Senna at the San Marino Grand Prix
Jeff Bezos founds Amazon
IBM Simon is the first commercially available "smartphone"
Sony releases first PlayStation console in Japan
Release of Netscape Navigator, the most popular web browser of the mid-late 90s
AOL provides first easy-access World Wide Web gateway
Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up!
Forrest Gump
Four Weddings & a Funeral
The Lion King
Pulp Fiction
Blur, Parklife
Oasis, Definitely Maybe
Jeff Buckley, Grace
Life Lessons
Whatever you do, you’re probably fuckt
Score
8.5
Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I didn’t find it especially inaccessible and all the moaning about swearing and dialect and such just feels impossibly silly to me. It stood out for its language and energy, even if it lacked that little in terms of plot.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth (1992) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman (1994) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992) - 7.5
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7 .
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (1993) - 6
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
Next up
1995, in which I read Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, part three of a trilogy of which I won’t have read the first two books, so let’s see how that pans out…
