screaming down the walls
This article was published in January 2001 in Product magazine under the title, Who's Next.
(1,103 words)

So what’s new in Glasgow? The Blues Poets, blistering electric in Scotland’s oldest literary pub; a Bengali dance performance of Burns’s songs; a saxophone poet, spinning magic in a Victorian garden; a Lighthouse multicultural exhibition …

But what about deep fiction, where are the new voices in literature? Where are the new Kelmans, Kennedys, Galloways, Grays?

Donald Dewar made the astute observation that it would now be impossible to contain Scottish literature in a large bookcase. Over the past thirty years, ‘Glasgow’ authors have played a central, powerhouse role in the tearing apart of class, language and fictional attitude blinkers which has allowed subsequent writers to explore their imaginations without the need to justify their writing. With nearly forty writers’ groups across the city, more people, from a broader socio-economic and cultural base than ever before, are picking up the pen. The internal creative tensions occasioned by this democratisation of the word means that it may take some time for new voices to form and develop, as writers search for a mode of expression which is not simply imitative. The opiate shadow of Irvine Welsh currently looms large, but it, too, emerged from, and will slip back into the stream. Like composers, writers internalise the lessons of their predecessors. Within every novel, there is a poem.

Chris Dolan’s chilling stage adaptation of the Holocaust novel, The Reader, poses fundamental questions which resonate far beyond the Third Reich, including the role of the Word in the creation of evil and in any subsequent redemption. Dolan’s own first novel, Ascension Day, is quintessentially Glasgow, with its sense of incipient emigation and suffocated dreams, and yet it also emotes a continental European literary tradition. The characters soar above the city, and reference points flash up over a shifting Scottish landscape. From Stone Over Water to The Casanova Papers, the consistently inventive, intelligent prose of Carl MacDougall is a paean to eclecticism. The textual machine-gun surrealism of Des Dillon screams at us that here is a writer who embraces experimentation. ItchycooBLUE!! Jackie Kay’s jazz Trumpet plays with national, gender and racial identities. Leila Aboulela’s novel, The Translator, is partly set in Aberdeen, but many of her observations would also be true of Glasgow. Scotland is shrinking and expanding, simultaneously. Glasgow vs. Edinburgh rivalry is becoming a redundant, artificial construct as authors seek to define themselves and their writing, not by some narrow geographical, class of ethnic label, but by the power of their prose and the heterogeneity of the themes on which they draw. Literature ceases to be trammeled by its location, and instead, adheres to the wavering line of its locus. That, surely, is a sign of a mature, confident and dynamic literature.

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The Powerlines, by Gerrie Fellowes, is a prose web in which every comma, every breath, is critical. Originally from New Zealand (via England), she is of Scottish ancestry, and her work epitomises the broadening base of Glasgow fiction. Concepts of Scottish-ness, of Glasgow-ness, are changing. Elizabeth Reeder’s prose rejoices in the poetic density of the relationships it anatomises. One of Glasgow-based Neil Wilson Publishing’s first six-pack of authors, Raymond Soltysek writes broadly in a ‘Glasgow-style’ - powerful, sinuous, disturbing and, at times, violent - but scratch beneath the ink and you’ll find Occasional Demons is suffused with a subconscious central European sensibility. All the best movements are invisible. Like Soltysek, Anne Donovan’s work packs a substantial punch. Both are expressionist, muscular writers who draw on the darkest recesses of the human soul. Toni Davidson’s work is both tender and energetic; while Sheila Puri’s stories of Glasgow’s South Asian community are understated and utterly un-exotic. She speaks the unspeakable. And that, surely, is what writing is about.

These authors have mature, highly sophisticated styles; they are hardly novelty turns. But what is this industrialised capitalist neurosis, this incessant craving for the new? We consume new books - novels - and their authors, just as publishers create new markets. But it’s not as simple as that. Margaret Ann Doody, in her True Story of the Novel, asserts convincingly that the form arose, not in C18th London, but 3,000 years ago, in Ancient Persia. As writers and readers, we are children, seeking out new objects, textures, thoughts, and finally, words. Perhaps it’s a paleolithic survival technique. Our tongues are our hope. Audio-visual culture is dumbing-down at a rapid rate. A Fascistic celebration of celebrity is the new coinage. Perhaps the Word will be our only means of escape from these digital dystopias. Write, or else crack up. And as the song goes: There is no time for crackin up, my friend …

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To engage in a dialectic of the imagination, is to begin to explore a broader dialectic relating to the power relationships of our everyday lives. Writing is a lone experience, and yet, in counterpoint, writers need to meet with one another, to share the physicality which is writing. Make no mistake, writing is dangerous, both for the soul and for established orders. We see much creative talent, wasted in glitzy irrelevance. Without fresh voices, we are dead. The arts flow through people’s lives. The Word validates us. It makes us real. The confidence of a community, and of the individuals within a community, grows with each word we bleed, and the process is infectious. Other people think: I could do that. This does not necessarily mean that more literary Titans will be produced, since that largely depends on London publishers and agents, the gods and archangels of literary eschatology. The industry tends to be reactive. This is not good for new writing. In a bourgeois capitalist society, the owners of the wealth are the censors. Polygon, Canongate and NWP are to be treasured. Without such adventurous outfits, the likes of Kelman, Gray, Kennedy and Galloway might never have got anywhere, and today we would asking: Whatever happened after Archie Hind? Everything is interconnected. Janice Galloway was inspired by James Kelman reading her work; I got my start as a gentleman of the west in a group run by Agnes Owens. And so it goes …

In this Civilisation of the Word, we take letters, words and we make them into stories. And thus, do we replicate God, or at least, we reveal the god in ourselves. The replication of old forms is a wonderful, affirmatory act; the creation of new forms is miraculous. The two processes are not mutually exclusive. Nothing lasts. Not even The Blues Poets. We are all just indentations in the ether. A vision of Hell, perhaps. But Hell’s fun, if you’re belting out a good book. And so is Glasgow.

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