This launched 30 years ago in March of 1994 and went on to win that year’s Booker Prize. We caught up with reading it recently and found an intriguing stream of consciousness style novel (think of James Joyce’s various works).
How Late it Was, How Late was written by Scottish author James Kelman. His other novels are also (apparently) experimental, particularly around that uninterrupted narrative mode.
Set in Glasgow, the work follows the life of Sammy. He’s been on a drinking bender and is now trying to piece his life back together. Best of luck to him!
Exploring Disability and Social Injustice in How Late it Was, How Late
“Funny how ye tell people a story to make a point and ye fail, ye fail, a total disaster. Not only do ye no make yer point it winds up the exact fucking opposite man, the exact fucking opposite. That isnay a misunderstanding it’s a total whatever.”
Kelman used a working-class Scottish dialect for much of his prose, in the same vein as Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting (1993).
However, the central theme of the works are vastly different. How Late it Was, How Late is a story of disability, as opposed to addiction literature that Welsh dove headlong into.
In rather terrifying fashion, 38-year-old Sammy wakes up with a hangover and realises he’s been very badly beaten up.
The result of that is he’s going blind. This realisation is presented in the opening paragraph as follows.
“Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can’t ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck…”
A while ago we reviewed Notes on Blindness by John M. Hull, a collection of essays on Hull’s descent into blindness.
How Late it Was, How Late is fiction, but it certainly pushes the boundaries of dire situations for its lead character. Sammy is in for a rough time of it and he deals with his depressive issues with bouts of considerable profanity (*ahem*).
“Waiting rooms. Ye go into this room where ye wait. Hoping’s the same. One of these days the cunts’ll build entire fucking buildings just for that. Official hoping rooms, where ye just go in and hope for whatever the fuck ye feel like hoping for.”
The social injustice element of the work plays out as police question Sammy regarding a crime. One that isn’t explained to him.
There’s the Kafkaesque element of The Trial (1925) there, with the familiar story of one man up against some serious red tape.
What stands the book out is that focus on a disability, which is a unique angle with which to explore someone’s situational difficulties. All of which means this isn’t a cheerful book to read.
It’s an onslaught of uncertainty and makes the work challenging to this day.
For some readers, maybe the subject matter will bother them. For others it’ll be the stream of consciousness style.
We’ve some reviews at the time hail this as inventive, but it really isn’t. You’ve got the likes of Sartre’s The Reprieve (1945) or Joyce’s works that did this long before Kelman.
On flip side, you’ve got the constant bloody swearing, matey! It’ a bit tedious after a bit, like playing bloody Grand Theft bloody Auto V. Realistic to Glasgow or not, you can’t go five words without an f bomb.
BUT! It’s a good book. Not outstanding. A bit of a chore at times. But bold and, for its time, we should imagine quite the dramatic statement. Not least as it represents its era and people in unflinching fashion.
Perhaps some of its power has diminished over the last 30 years as the times have changed, but its premise and focus on a man adjusting to his new world still resonates.
Kelman’s Booker Prize Win and the Controversy of Bloody Well Swearing in Blasted Literature
The Booker Prize runs but once a year and only one writer can bag the gong. In 1994, one judge (Rabbi Julia Neuberger who’s a member of the British House of Lords) wasn’t best pleased with Kelman’s work.
Apparently, she called it a “disgrace” and “crap”, then threatened to resign if it won. After it won she went on to say:
“I’m really unhappy. Kelman is deeply inaccessible for a lot of people. I am implacably opposed to the book. I feel outmanoeuvred.”
The Independent defended the book in an October 1994 piece: If James Kelman’s Booker novel is rude it is in good company. Robert Winder wrote this.
“James Kelman’s victory in the Booker Prize on Tuesday night has already provoked a not altogether polite discussion about the place of swearing in literature. His winning novel, How late it was, how late, is a boisterous riot of four-letter words which many readers – those who resent the intrusive appearance of a true-to-life vocabulary in novels – will find hard to admire.”
Some books have been banned for stuff like this. Think of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It was banned for being too obscene (further proof THE WOKE MOB has ruined society).
Kelman’s work goes above and beyond D. H. Lawrence’s pathetic attempts, as Winder reported 30 years ago.
“Kelman’s is certainly an uncompromising vision. There are, it has been estimated, 4,000 fucks in the Booker winner – 21 of them in the first three pages. At one point the narrator of the novel, a drunken ex- convict called Sammy, is losing his eyesight: ‘Sammy shut his eyelids tight. He felt bad now, so fucking bad. These things filling yer head man, fucking filling yer head, terrible, fucking terrible. If Helen chucks him now, he was really fuckt, right out the game, he would be as well parking the head in a gas oven.'”
At the time, Kelman defended himself most vociferously.
“The real issue is to do with suppression, the standard English literary voice won’t allow it. I mean, the term ‘fuck’ can be used in about 17 different ways, one of which is the cause of its exclusion.”
Our take on this is… well, we tend to limit our use of swear words. Or playfully play on curmudgeonly Britishisms (bloody hell!) for self-deprecating effect.
But reeling off loads of swears for the sake of it (desperately trying to be edgy, for example) is just boring. At least for us.
Of course, if you want to be realistic in your prose then some people really do speak like that. Where we’re from there’s a certain type of geezer who simply cannot go through a sentence without swearing constantly (which we just covered in our most recent short story: The Gobber).
So, it’s up to you. Are you a writer? Do you like swearing it up a notch, you bastard? Let us know your take on this, you bloody fool!
