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22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deceptively simple, 4 Mar 2003
This book may appear simply to be the blind ramblings of a working-class Scottish male ex-con, but in fact it's a lot more than that. Or maybe, that's exactly what it is and that is its strength. Kelman has written a novel of working-class Scottish pride. Sammy, who, as a poor Scottish male, is typically construed as "the other" by the world - particularly the English, middle-class, novel-reading intelligentsia whom Kelman knew would read this book - refuses to capitulate to this pressure. He speaks in Scottish dialect. This all relates to one of the novel's key themes - Scotland as a colonized country - colonized by England. Michael Foucault thought that if the colonized subject speaks in his own language, that he retains a certain power. If, however, he begins to speak in the language of the colonizer, he is stripped of all power. This book is Kelman reclaiming Scotland, Scottish language and "Scottishness" from the English. Sammy simply will not speak in standard English - except, interestingly, when he is faced with authority, in the doctor's or in the DSS.Another key theme is that of the 20th century European philosophy of existentialism. This book has evolved out of a response to writers such as Beckett and Kafka, and the idea of the alienation and the "thrownness" of life found in Sartre is prevalent here. Sammy awakes at the start of the novel, having no idea what has happened to him or really what is going on, and instantly his nightmare begins. The strangely positive and almost life-affirming quality of the book is Kelman's response to existentialism, it doesn't have to be a miserable philosophy, it can be very positive. Despite Sammy's social position and his constant swearing, we learn that he is actually a pretty clever and sassy guy. He refers constantly to novels that he has read, even novels from Russia and Eastern Europe. Kelman's point is that it is possible to deal with such high issues and intelligent themes ALL in a rough Scottish working-class vernacular, and that Sammy - and Kelman himself - doesn't have to give in to English middle-class language in order to be intelligent. There was some controversy when Kelman won the Booker prize for this novel, but he said: "This is where I come from, this is working-class Glaswegian and it has a right to be heard." Or something like that. This is a dark, paranoid, rambling stream-of-consciousness style novel that is somehow very positive and deals with a lot of interesting themes.
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