Imagine Robert Carlyle's "Begbie" character from the film "Trainspotting" getting all philosophical after waking up with a hangover in a police cell and you would have a good idea what this strange Booker 1994 winning novel is like. Imagine the Glaswegian vernacular of Begbie and Rab C Nesbitt with enough F words to make a navvy catch his breath and the thrust of the novel becomes clear. Little or no plot gets in the way of the narrative - which I found delightfully easy to understand, not having any problems with the hadnay's or didney's , clatty trainers or wasney's. That said the Begbie dialogue though funny for a while did tend to grate as it tokk the plot nowhere at all. The main character Sammy wakes up from a police kicking blind and so the whole sory is him stumbling around assessing his life for the next few days - not going to the hospital like you would having found yourself blind but stumbling round to the Dhss to get blind benefits. The whole sorry mess does have some good moments - he rethinks his life in Prison and his past life and there are genuinely funny lines . But as a whole given the vernacular and the aimlessness of the story (or lack of it) and the pointless ending it all seems a little waste of time.
I have read contemporary reviews of the novel and many seemed to think this book was a victory for the voice of urban working class folk - one in the eye for the southern intelligentsia. But it isn't, it comes from the same mind set that made Rab C, Nesbitt a popular hit . Media intellectuals think they can get to the bottom of the Urban Working Class psyche with work like this. I really doubt anyone from inncer city rough areas portrayed here would read a book like this , in fact I doubt whether many have read this at all , I can't recommend it . I can't turn to friends and say read this its really good its about a bloke who gets drunk gets a kicking off the police , goes blind then spends the rest of the novel wondering why his girlfriend left him and where his tobacco has gone . Yet it is funny in places, the language is about as bad as it gets but its lack of real story is just a let down , there is just no explanation for any of the happenings to the main character so after a while one doesn't really care what happens at all.
I have read contemporary reviews of the novel and many seemed to think this book was a victory for the voice of urban working class folk - one in the eye for the southern intelligentsia. But it isn't, it comes from the same mind set that made Rab C, Nesbitt a popular hit . Media intellectuals think they can get to the bottom of the Urban Working Class psyche with work like this. I really doubt anyone from inncer city rough areas portrayed here would read a book like this , in fact I doubt whether many have read this at all , I can't recommend it . I can't turn to friends and say read this its really good its about a bloke who gets drunk gets a kicking off the police , goes blind then spends the rest of the novel wondering why his girlfriend left him and where his tobacco has gone . Yet it is funny in places, the language is about as bad as it gets but its lack of real story is just a let down , there is just no explanation for any of the happenings to the main character so after a while one doesn't really care what happens at all.
