If it is your life [Hardcover]

`'If It Is Your Life'` is not so much a collection of short stories as a collection of pieces of creative writing. Kelman doesn't really do `stories'. In 19 pieces of writing of varying length from just a single page to more lengthy pieces, such as the story that gives its title to this collection, Kelman writes (mostly) about people on the edge of society. He addresses issues such as class, politics, gender, age and ill health.

Kelman, who won the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel `'How Late It Was, How Late'`, has long been a writer that divides opinion. His Booker winning book was infamous for the frequency of use of `the f-word' and Simon Jenkins once described him in `'The Times'` as an `illiterate savage'. For others, Kelman is a working class intellectual who writes about people struggling against various types of oppression, with a calculating subversion of the English language and a disregard for convention. I tend to veer more towards the latter view, but that doesn't mean you have to like the result.

Reading `'If It Is Your Life'` is rather like reading the collected dramatic works of Samuel Beckett. There are moments of dark humour, moments that work in a way that other writers don't achieve, but equally, there are frequent moments where the reader is left thinking `huh?'. Some of it reveals richer depth when you think about it afterwards rather than the immediate effect of reading it on the page, but perhaps life's too short to have to work that hard with a piece of writing. Kelman's work is rather like modern art - sometimes you get it and at other times it feels just like `scribble'. In a full length novel, and indeed in some of the longer pieces of writing here, you do get into the rhythm and it does work, but in a collection of short pieces there are many instances that feel like snippets of experimental creative writing with little discernable point to them. Certainly, he appears to have thrown out the convention of a story with a set up, a middle and an end a long time ago.

I don't want to outline each piece of writing here, but to illustrate my point about this collection, let's look at the first few pieces. First up is a darkly amusing piece that could have come straight from the pen of Beckett about a homeless amputee who is given a pair of trousers from Oxfam but with the wrong leg cut off. Then we move to a very short piece called ``Our Times'` about a `normal' family situation that goes nowhere.

The third piece `'Talking about my wife'` is longer and is the internal and external dialogue of a man returning home from the night shift having been given the sack for shouting at his boss. Interior monologues are one of Kelman's specialities - the vast majority of this book falls into that category. If I was supposed to feel any sympathy for the protagonist, I didn't. I just wanted him to shut up - and even more, I wanted him to stop spelling `politics' with first two `p's and then four (as in `ppppolitics'). The fourth piece is one of those bits of creative writing that starts in the middle of a sentence and goes on for a couple of pages with no break and ends mid-sentence. This is either creative or pretentious, in my view. It was lost on me.

And so it goes on.

Saying that, there were some that I did enjoy. ``A Sour Mystery'` relates a tale of a drink between a man and his ex-girlfriend that is beautifully observed and very authentic. Similarly `'The Gate'' which tells of a grandfather collecting a bicycle for his grandson is touching and poignant. And the title piece is interesting on a variety of issues including nationality, youth and class and is very accessible. But even here, there is the habit of writing something and then questioning it and the strange occasional ending of paragraphs mid-sentence. In general, the longer pieces are much better though and the writing can be completely enthralling in places.

None of this should deter the reader from exploring any of Kelman's full length novels which are intense and not always easy to read, but, for me at least, offer a far more rewarding outcome.