‘Disenfranchised miserable male narrators, teetering on the brink of social and/or personal ruin’ – If It Is Your Life by James Kelman

If It Is Your Life is James Kelman’s first collection of short stories in twelve years.  Full disclosure: I haven’t read any of Kelman’s stories before, though How Late It Was, How Late blew me away – Kelman’s ability to immerse the reader in one man’s consciousness in such obsessive detail just staggered me.  So I was very eager to get my hands on this collection and plunge back into Kelman’s dirty, messy, expletive-laden world.  So to say I was disappointed is a horrible understatement.

I’ll add that I like Kelman’s style.  He’s a master of the rambling interior monologue; his social observations ad asides are acute and very funny; he nails the rhythm of people’s speech.  His defiant and hardy loners never seem contrived or exaggerated.  But – and it’s a big but – he’s got nineteen stories here, and I found it  very difficult to distinguish between them.  They’re all first person; they’re all narrated by disenfranchised miserable male narrators, teetering on the brink of social and/or personal ruin; they’re mostly somewhat lacking in plot or narrative direction.  The characters might vary in circumstance and back-story but they all sound alike, and for my money, with nineteen tales and over two hundred and fifty pages, I’d have liked to be presented with a little more variety.

On the plus side, if you enjoy one of the stories, you’re likely to enjoy the lot.  They range from one-page flash fiction pieces like ‘Bangs & The New Moon’, a witty snapshot of a writer bemoaning other scribes who ‘present images in the presupposition of universal fellowship’, to the fifty-two page title story, ‘If This Is Your Life’, the angsty stream-of-consciousness of a university student who’s trying to reconcile his new life in middle-class England with his working-class Glasgow roots, and who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend.  This was by far my favourite story – the longer length of the piece gives the reader time to fully inhabit the character’s disjointed thought process.  The other stories use a similar format – plunging the reader straight  into the angry and bitter minds of the narrating character – but because the stories are fairly short, and the voices are all similar to each other, the effect is less like a set of individuated tales, and more like different perspectives on the same life.  In fact, the opening story could have been plucked straight from How Late It Was, if only this new character was blind rather than one-legged.

Many of the the stories are bound up with misunderstandings, conflicts and gaps in communication – plenty of them feature individuals fighting against an impersonal government or benefits system – ‘Tricky Times Ahead Pal’ and ‘I Am As Putty’ in particular show Kafkaesque struggles for individual justice.  Kelman looks again and again at the void between the genders – his women are mysterious, capable creatures, seen by their husbands, boyfriends and ex-partners as creatures immune from the crippling doubt and disasters that constantly afflict the narrators themselves.  ‘It was just dignity, it was just being a woman,’ says the narrator of ‘If It Is Your Life,’ wistfully.  ‘Talking About My Wife’ is a poignant glimpse into a marriage; the husband has just lost his job and doesn’t want to tell his wife, but she comforts him anyway.  ‘She was always so cool, so calm, but I could never have told her that, never,’ he tells us at the end.

Any Cop?: In the end, I found this an unrewarding read.  Kelman’s dealing with the same issues as he does in his longer works of fiction, but the stories aren’t as developed as the novels, and some of the shorter ones seem almost throwaway.  His style’s distinctive, but it hasn’t been put to great use, and I think he might have done better to cut the number of pieces here and lengthen and develop the remaining ones.  He’s writing about the marginalised, but when they all blend into an indistinguishable lumpen mass, as I think they do here, it seems like a pretty ineffective strategy.   My verdict?  Skip it, head to the novels and properly immerse yourself in Kelman’s world.

Valerie O’Riordan