James Kelman

You wake up with Sammy and then follow his life step by step for a week, in and out of hospital, interviews with the police, and fumblings around the corporation flat. Sammy has gone blind after starting a fight with the police and taking a hiding. He accepts this new problem as just one more in a long line of woes. Only after a couple of hundred pages he suffers a panic attack as he at last realises he is a blind man and everything has changed. But this feeling passes too.

There is a terrifying authenticity in this account. There is no appeal to anything outside of Sammy’s world. No use of irony, no collusion with the reader, no message, no hint that this is presented as entertainment or edification.

The reader – that is to say, me – can’t help wondering what the writer is up to. Does he mean to suggest that Sammy is the archetypical human? Is he saying something about the ordinary man at a loss in a bureaucratic world? Or does he take pleasure in throwing this portrait in the face of the middle-class reader: this is the real human for you, the rest is just conceit.

Kelman carries you through the swells and ebbs of the protagonist’s moods. Sammy’s experience become your own. You live through the changes in the world that only after reflection you can recognise as moods. On a sentence level, the prose in the working class vernacular is hardly a great innovation. That kind of thing has been done before. It needs a good ear, that’s all. The genius here is spread out over dozens of pages at a time. And also there’s the tenacity to carry through the project: a minute by minute narrative, not spiced with unlikely events, sticking only to the language and concepts of Sammy’s world. And to trust that this is worthwhile.

All the same, it’s a once-off kind of book. It’s like an exercise in purism. And though you may finish the book and think you have met the whole Sammy, you haven’t. You have only followed Sammy’s actions and heard what Sammy himself knows of himself. This book is not the final word.