Mr Happy and Mr Bitter

Katie Grant

THE GOOD TIMES by James Kelman Secker, £14.99, pp. 246 It was the management consultants McKinseys, William Hague's erstwhile employers, who in 1985 concluded that if Glasgow was to move from industrial decline to post-industrial prosperity, it needed an image make-over. We got stone- cleaning, floodlighting, façade-ectomies (keeping the front of the building whilst developing the back). We got the Garden Festival, the City of Culture, 'Glasgow's Miles Better'. As our crowning glory, we got Mr Happy, his horrid yellow body riding in triumph over that celebration of Glasgow's embarrassing imperial past, the City Chambers.

James Kelman has no time for all this `cultcha', much of which now lies derelict. He is a Glasgow realist accused of being both uncivilised and depressing. The most famous fact about him is that the word `fuck' appeared 4,000 times in his Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late. Yet Kelman is also the author of a perfect, fuckless short story, 'Acid', in his 1993 collection Not Not While the Giro. There is more to Kelman than fucking statistics.

The Good Times comprises 20 stories of varying lengths. They continue Kelman's crusade against the image-maker's preoccupation with the surface by exposing the dark, troubled heart of this city, a heart which no amount of stone-cleaning or glossy brochures can reinvigorate. Drinking cappuccino and tapping on a laptop in a trendy café will always come second best to banging rivets into ships.

Kelman's language is, pointedly, the antithesis of a McKinsey Report and whilst Blairite luvvies extol his work in pathetic attempts to prove their street cred, his contempt for their intellectualising cant is undisguised. He writes as Glasgow people speak, not as the image-makers would like them to speak. He ignores grammar, inverted commas and any pre- tence at gentility:

I didnay bother saying nothing back at him, otherwise on and on and on and on, digging and digging, all the fucking time fucking dig- ging. I don't know how come he was wanting to dig at me like that but he was and it was getting at me the way he done it, he knew how to do it.

His dialogue is similarly uncompromis- ing:

You told me yeh you fucking told me.

I told you.

What time's it?

I told you okay.

What time is it?

Ten minutes.

Fuck off (pulped sandwiches)

Kelman has said:

Getting rid of that standard third party narra- tive voice (ie the one that puts things into standard English) is getting rid of a whole value system . . . Let's just go for the factual reality here.

Here is the crunch for The Good Times. Is such factual reality really worth writing down and is it literature? To a sociologist, The Good Times may be invaluable, but those looking for stories may look in vain. There are no plots in this collection, just episodes, mainly unresolved, hanging in the air.

Yet who better than Kelman captures late 20th-century Glasgow, hanging on by a thread, hankering for its past, confused over its present, impotently furious at the loss of its place in the world? In 'Joe Laughed' we see youth as being as equally useless and bitter as the jobless, poisonous industrial wastelands which now serve as playing fields in this, once the second city of the Empire. 'The Norwest Reaches' shows us the family man's disdainful dis- missal of his current job because it does not involve hard physical graft. He chooses to stay at home, seeing this not as a derelic- tion of duty but, smugly, as the right priori- ty. 'Okay wee wummin, see ye later . . . Daddy is not going to work today.' This is late 20th-century Glasgow man. He is not Mr Happy. For Kelman and his characters Mr Bitter would be more apt.

It says much for Kelman that writing whose undercurrent is anger only occasion- ally lapses into clumsiness. 'Its my neighbour's kids man they're part of the community' the disintegrating man in 'The Comfort' gives as his reason for worrying about some children sitting on a window ledge. When Kelman's characters become just vehicles for his own message — in this case that Mrs Thatcher's assertion that 'there is no such thing as society' still rankles — his writing loses its edge. But when he observes the myster- ies of women's behaviour and the helpless- ness of men before it, he shows that wry humour as much as anger informs his writ- ing.

In this collection, the shorter the story, the better Kelman tells it. 'My Eldest' in barely three pages captures the tableau of a working-class Glasgow family at the beach and all the themes associated with the sea on the west coast.

Ye arent gon to swim? she said.

Yep.

Ye'll glow in the dark.

It's daylight.

She looked at me, then said: Dont, it's mad. I want to sit on a trident submarine. Sit on top of it? said my daughter.

Ower the top of it. I just feel like swimming ower the top of it, yeh, that's what I feel like doing.

I saw my eldest boy standing there and I winked, but he was tense, so tense. Come here son, I said, but he stayed put. I reached my hand out to him. It's alright, I said, come here. But he turned and ran off across the pebbles and boulders.

The longest story, 'Comic Cuts', an exercise in pub philosophy, is dull. But it provides another example of a topic which should form a good subject for a PhD — the role of soup in the literature of urban realism. Soup, which features largely in many Kelman stories, • seems to symbolise hope and gritty integrity. A man who makes soup must, underneath it all, be a decent man.

McKinseys, Mr Happy and now Mr Blair believe that they, not Kelman or soup, have brought good times to Glasgow. Kelman shows that they have not. For if these are the good times, what will the bad be like?