The consequences of drained optics (How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman)

Member Name: scallmorpheedy

Product:	How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman
Date:	28/05/03 (459 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: style, authentic, frustrating

Disadvantages: frustrating

Sammy’s had a hoofing. And it was the polis that did it too. He’d been a wee bit naughty because of the juice and they’d given him a seeing to, a right braying! They’d kicked the living sight out of him.

And so here he is, blind. He aches all over, he’s lost his shoes and his recollection of the event is at best non-existent. And then he’s turned out onto the street and “try to be a good lad.” We follow him out to watch his progress.

Mr Kelman, bless him helps us along. He knows Sammy’s type. He’s lived around them for years and he knows how they think, how they feel and the lives they live. He can steer us around Sammy’s environment and he can open us up to his thoughts. Sammy on the other hand is not so lucky, there’s no steering force for him. So he has to make his own way from now on, renegotiating his way home without the use of his peepers. The dark world of the newly-blind all noise and contact and panic and nausea.

The world we can see him in is that of Kelman’s hand. It is a world of boozers, bingo halls and blocks of flats. A world of working men and women be they employed or not. The inhabitants of Kelman’s worlds are frustrated -we feel them mulling things over and over and getting nowhere fast. We sense their frustrations, their spiralling ambitions ricocheting against the walls that hold them prisoner. We see these walls and feel them, they are both self-imposed and of the situation. They are walls erected over decades of governmental neglect and the restraints of the culture. They are a stunted generation, too young to have enjoyed posterity and too old to grasp at it now. Opportunities withheld and opportunities missed. Yet for all of this they are alive, seething with emotion and ready to fight with it. They smack of that thing that stories –with their inherent fraud- usually strip away, they smack of the real.

Sammy is typi
cal of Kelman’s characters. He is a no-nonsense blokey who likes the drink and the banter it brings. He is self-critical. He likes a laugh. He loves and he lets down. He strives to do the right thing, to live life the right way and he would do too if it wasn’t for the fact that he is plagued by lapses, temptation arrives and he can’t resist it. Honest his tombstone would read, “he tried to be good but god made him man.”

We see this unfold as he tries to piece together his life. He struggles to adjust to his new senses; he battles with disbelieving doctors and the even more doubting social. He tries to figure out where his girlfriend has gone; mulling over their relationship and the argument that he may or may not remember having. These are all revealed in a spiral of thoughts and scenes belched out in Glaswegian. He plays the same things over and over again each time coming to a different conclusion or gameplan. It draws you in giving you a frustrating insight into the man, frustrating because it is relentless and ultimately blind.

Sammy is blind and that’s for certain but not just organically. What becomes clear is that he is blind to his situation. We can see it and its bad. His girlfriend has invariably done a runner, the authorities do not believe him, he is alone, virtually penniless and blind, it cannot get any worse. Yet for all this he brims with optimism, if only he could do THIS then THIS will happen, she will come back, it will get back to normal. Alas we can see it won’t, he’s gone one little caper and one pint too far. It is at once inspiring and tragic this resilience in adversity. It reveals a powerful human soul battling and battling with no hope of victory.

Unfortunately this central theme can become tiring. Because the story is about one character and is played out intently within his head, it does become a touch repetitive; further reinforced by the subject matter –
;repetition and memory being an essential part of Sammy’s coping with blindness. Also his metronomic switching from resilience to despair and his seeming inability to see this makes you want to slap Sammy into reality and also to slap his society too. Because of this the book becomes a wee bit testing to persevere with.

However it is worth the effort. Kelman writes really well, his short story compilations “not not while the giro” and “The burn” are good introductions to the style. Its predominantly good old fashioned twang that he can trot-off fast paced and aggressive or slower and more reflective if need be. As for this book, inevitably it makes you think about the consequences of going blind yourself and the way that society responds to that. It rattles with solitude whilst also drumming of independance. And also,and most strikingly, it gives you an insight into that personal thing to which we are all sometimes partially blind. Seeing Sammy and hearing him thinking things through, made me think about the aspects of my mind that I don’t normally see, namely those never-ending self-obsessed entities that are buried by what we see and hear around us, those relentless egotistical voices that are our thoughts.

And on thinking that, I re-judge Sammy. Perhaps he isn’t blind at all. Perhaps free from the distraction that vision can bring he is able to see his thoughts and consequently see himself. Or perhaps I’m just seeing things that aren’t there.

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