Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glaswegian grit and gallows humour in scalding dialect., 14 April 2003
Fortunately I have a copy of a Scots Dictionary. You will need it for this book if you are a sassenach like me.Oh but it is worth the effort. The author notices the tiny details of a grim and grotty life and renders them poetic and spellbinding. I remember reading that Jeff Torrington used to work for British Leyland at Linwood (no more) and this was his life's work. He is a perfectionist. Glasgow is a marvellous and a terrible city and this is a novel to match it.Rabbie Burns with Brylcreem. Dark humour, sten gun dialogue and dollops of emotion like hot metal dropped all over you. I adore it.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What's a real working-class voice?, 9 Dec 2008
As a long-time fan of Scottish fiction, I looked forward to delving into Torrington's Whitbread winner with relish.
Written in the Scots demotic that his compatriots James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have received so much criticism and acclaim for, respectively, Torrington tells the story of the, literal, decline of the Gorbals of the 1960s over one week in the life of Tam Clay.
Father-to-be, wordsmith manqué, adulterer, heavy drinker and accidental arsonist, Tam Clay is the itinerant voice of the working class.
According to The Scotsman's obituary of Torrington, the author was `fêted by the London literary establishment as the epitome of the working-class Glaswegian done good', yet the aforementioned Kelman, when his `How Late It Was, How Late' won the 1994 Booker Prize, had his novel labelled as a `disgrace' by one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger.
I've very little authority to judge what is authentic working-class Glaswegian voice, having grown up in a middle-class West Midlands family, but there seems to be very little difference between the two voices apart from:
1. Torrington's narrator, Tam Clay, is a more educated man, making overt references to Sartre, Kierkegaard and other renowned authors.
2. Torrington's Clay swears a lot less than Kelman's, Sammy Samuels.
Essentially, it seems there is a working class voice the establishment one can accept, one that is essentially inferior and happy to be inferior to them, with no pretensions of uprising; and one that they cannot accept, one that is boisterous and is ready to put up a fight in the name of his condition.
Tam Clay is essentially a passive observer, content just to whittle away his life in the Gorbals as it falls apart around him, happy to make comments such as `February's such a waste of a month' (p.301) and move one without further comment..
Sammy Samuels is mentally incapable of such a comment, as for him it would have to be followed by a string of invective about why February is such a waste of a month and whose fault it is.
Yet this does not make him a disgrace. His is just as legitimate a working-class voice as Clay's, and possibly more so if it says a few things that you don't want to hear. Because isn't that what the working class often is to the establishment, something that they don't want to hear?
Torrington sums up the difference between Clay and Samuels perfectly on page 140:
`'It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they're symbolic: `I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?' `Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!'"
Clay, with his functioning eyes, only observes the surfaces of things, whereas Samuels, with his blindness, sees beneath the skin of bureaucratic injustices to the symbols of power that they represent and cannot help but yell out against them.
Both are legitimate working class voices, but only one is acceptable to the establishment.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Funny, 21 Mar 2008
A week in the life of Tommy Clay (and MacDougall) of sixties Gorbals, Glasgow, is a very funny yet almost plot less romp around. Without spoiling the plot less plot, it ends finally where the shrinkage of the image perspective becomes hard to bear. For `Tam', feels like he is a helpless cartoon figure, who is trapped in a scenery whirl around of repeater trees and born again boulders. A word of warning here though, for those of you (like me) are not into the `speak', it is not easy getting a handle on this. It took about one hundred pages to get there for me. Do not give up the effort is well worth it.
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by Jeff Torrington
by Archie Hind
~ Scott Walker
by Alexander McArthur
by Bruce Chatwin
