Jeremiah – good-hearted everyman with a weakness for gambling – is on the plane home to Scotland tomorrow after twelve years in the old US of A. He pops out of his motel for a drink. This sets him off on a chain of encounters, reminiscences, and regrets that takes him through three different bars and a long walk in the snow. All of it is related in the Scottish Glaswegian dialect.
He’s a bit of a misfit in the states: his camaraderie is treated suspiciously, his accent is misunderstood, he gets accused of sexism. But more than that, he’s a red-card immigrant, which means the State Department has officially determined he is an atheist and socialist.
The novel up to that point had been so realistic that I was half convinced this was a political development I had yet to hear about. But no, this is a USA that is just a notch further advanced along the path it seems to be taking. (Recent change of president notwithstanding.) There is more paranoia of immigrants, more inequality, more political correctness. The airlines have fallen on hard times and planes regularly crash. For reasons that remain in the background, swarms of the destitute and luckless camp out around the airports. These are controlled regularly and undesirables (whether panhandlers or political suspects) are brought to “Patriot Holding Centers”.
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Jeremiah works at such an airport as a low-level security guard. That is, he recalls his time working there as he sits in the bar. The description of the hierarchy and functioning of security takes on a life of its own and is like a novel within the novel. He’ll wander off for pages about the gambling schemes (intricate as any financial derivative) concocted with the homeless, or the ghostly trolley-pusher dubbed The Being. It’s a closed universe, terrifying to contemplate as a whole, but this rarely comes out in Jerry’s thinking. It’s the day-to-day contact with colleagues that takes front stage. Hilarious and awkward by turns. This Scotsman has trouble reconciling his unreconstructed masculinity with the new age. His inclination to assert himself physically if necessary, his attraction to females, and irrepressible sociability all get him into tight spots. His garrulousness will entertain and astound you – unless it makes you feel like the shadowy CIA-level ops who commandeer his office late one night. After ssshhh-ing several times, they shut him up with an expert slap across the nose.
It’s an implicit irony that Jerry, the born underdog, is part of the security apparatus. To others further down the scale he is part of the machinery of oppression.
This is a huge endlessly inventive, ever-questioning, bubbling-over brilliant novel that mixes the Kafkesque with political warning, the information age with hard-man blues, all done in the vernacular. It’s not just the USA: has the modern world become too alien a place for the ordinary man, Scottish or not?
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A