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A review by iainkelly_writing
How Late it Was, How Late by James Kelman
2.0
Conflicted. I should like this book - a Booker prize-winning novel set in my home city of Glasgow and written in the Glaswegian dialect. I really wanted to like this book.
But the curse of Booker struck again (see also Milkman by Anna Burns). It's a tough slog to read, with deliberately disconcerting sentences and paragraphs left unfinished. It starts with an interesting premise but then the plot goes absolutely nowhere. The pace crawls along, pages and pages endlessly repeating, conversations that go in circles and end up nowhere.
The dialect is good to read, the swearing is true to life, but there are little niggles - having lived in Glasgow my whole life, I have never heard anyone refer to police officers as 'soldiers'.
And then there's Sammy, the main character. The trouble with people like Sammy, working class, down on his luck, ex-con, is that artists and authors romanticize them into something they're not. In truth, this sort of character can be found in Glasgow, and generally they are not very nice people. So it's hard to have any empathy.
And by the end, it all seems a bit pointless and not worth the effort - and then I read the quotes on the covers lauding it and remember it won the Booker and I think I really must be missing something.
But the curse of Booker struck again (see also Milkman by Anna Burns). It's a tough slog to read, with deliberately disconcerting sentences and paragraphs left unfinished. It starts with an interesting premise but then the plot goes absolutely nowhere. The pace crawls along, pages and pages endlessly repeating, conversations that go in circles and end up nowhere.
The dialect is good to read, the swearing is true to life, but there are little niggles - having lived in Glasgow my whole life, I have never heard anyone refer to police officers as 'soldiers'.
And then there's Sammy, the main character. The trouble with people like Sammy, working class, down on his luck, ex-con, is that artists and authors romanticize them into something they're not. In truth, this sort of character can be found in Glasgow, and generally they are not very nice people. So it's hard to have any empathy.
And by the end, it all seems a bit pointless and not worth the effort - and then I read the quotes on the covers lauding it and remember it won the Booker and I think I really must be missing something.