James Kelman (2008) Kieron Smith, Boy.
Posted by celticman on Sat, 02 Jun 2018
Kieron Smith, Boy almost in a stream of consciousness, single-minded, dizzying prose, which for over 400 pages guides you through the before and after of late 1950s Glasgow with its decaying tenements and rats and squalor and then the promise of new greenfield sites and housing schemes, mile after mile of houses with inside toilets but nothing much to do. I’m guessing the first part is near Govan, where Kieron lives with his mum and dad, who has given up his job with the merchant navy and come home for good and his brother, Matt. Matt’s the brainy one. Or so it seems. The one that passes his eleven plus and goes to grammar school. His mum dotes on Matt. His da respects him.
Kieron, later, gets to go to the same Grammar school, but dogs it to work with his mate Mitch. Mitch is his best mate in the new scheme. He’s a great fighter and has been to Approved School, but he’s a bit slow. Kieron’s in first year. He’s just gone twelve. Matt in fifth year, at a time when kids left at fifteen to work.
They moved, of course, by then, leaving somewhere like Govan to somewhere like Drumchapel, perhaps Easterhouse. New slums for old. Kieron loved the old life. He’d a nook where he liked to read and ponder, beside his granny and granda. Just around the corner. Moving away it wasn’t the same. And his granda, who was teaching him about boxing and life, dies.
Kieron’s mum wants the better things in life. She’s a snob and doesn’t like crudity or Catholics much. His dad hates Catholics and black men. He’s not sure who he wants to win when he watches the boxing on telly. This is something Matt winds his da up about, as Kieron looks on. He hates all that. The tension. The peacocking.
He prefers the dullness of necessity, what Kieron refers to as Fate with a capital.
sticky stuff on the road or so ye might trip up or cum setting across a wild beast, ye turn a corner and out jumps a crocodile, so that’s yer Fate, unless you can do something about it, you have a knife in yer belt then you can kill it, plunge it doon…Because that’s yer Fate.
The paperboy said stuff. All people did. They said stuff and it was just boasting…It was yer Fate to go to hell.’
Kieron’s got a lot of growing up to do. We leave him mid-stream, still trying to get by, paddling on, and looking to distant shores. Small boys are often a good guide to the future and to the past and not just for Treasure Island. Read on.
- celticman's blog
- Log in to post comments
- 917 reads
Comments
I have read a few of Kelman's
I have read a few of Kelman's books. Greyhound for Breakfast shocked the living daylights out of me half a lifetime back. Nihilistic and very 'real-seeming.' Lots of seedy wee men whose priorities were food, dole, and the betting shop. Women were seen as roof providers first, sex could be a secondary bonus. It needed to be said in the same way that Eminem needed to be heard. 'Know your enemy' and learn some of the 'why.'
Not sure if I shall read Keiron Smith, Boy. I am enjoying the gorgeous travel memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermor which look back to the late 30's. I have finished A Time of Gifts and am about to start Between the Woods and the Water, - part 2 of his teenage solo tramp trip from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.
Kelman's telling it like it
Kelman's telling it like it is, can be hard work. Not much of story. Take or leave it. Inevitably people do, myself included.