[Mars-Jones is an English critic, editor, and short story writer. In the mixed review below, he offers a thematic and stylistic discussion of How Late It Was, How Late, noting Kelman's political and linguistic focus.]

When Julius Caesar taught himself to read without reading aloud—to safeguard military secrets—it was regarded as a troubling innovation. The general had taken language inside his head and made it private. Since then the scars of separation have long healed, but there persists at the back of some minds a fantasy of reunion: writing returning to the womb of speech.

In James Kelman's fiction, this fantasy of a defiant wholeness has a political agenda superimposed on it, which seems compatible but actually clashes: that of giving a voice to the voiceless, those whom society and literature ignore. Even this ambition is more alienated than it seems, since giving someone a voice implies the same power relation as taking a voice away, and restoring a voice to its throat is not a possibility but a dream of healing. Still, it's the way Kelman's two projects, the linguistic and the political, work against each other on the page that makes his writing so hard to enjoy—being brutally frank, so hard to read—and so much easier to praise instead.

It is no news that Kelman is an outstandingly negative writer, whose instinct is to fight deprivation with deprivation (a characteristic that colours even titles like Not not while the giro and A Disaffection), but with How late it was, how late, the hefty new instalment of Strathclyde arte povera, he has set a new standard for himself.

His hero, Sammy, has no job and no home. He stays with his girlfriend Helen, but for the length of the book she is missing. This absence may be a judgment on Sammy or something more sinister (we never learn which). Sammy is missing something even more crucial to his welfare—his eyesight, lost perhaps for ever in the course of police interrogation. He was arrested after picking a fight on the street, while on the rebound from a drunken binge which cost him the memory of an entire day.

Missing Saturday, missing Helen, missing sight. This narrative of subtractions comes perilously close to being a subtraction of narrative. With sensory deprivation added to social, Sammy's unilluminated head, which is where we spend the whole book, is only fitfully a stimulating place to be. The most striking absentee, the most mourned by the reader, is ambient Glasgow, present only in shadowy memories, or muffled episodes of abrasive kindness.

Interior monologue is a highly artificial way of representing the mind's activity as speech, most effectively used as one element of a compound style. Served up raw and in quantity, unsustained by the world, it is highly indigestible. Kelman's dialogue positively skips along under the reader's eyes but there's not a great deal of it; Sammy's monologue is a long and weary trudge.

There is plenty of third-person in the book, but it brings with it no supplementary perspective and amounts to an alienated first. Cheating slightly, Kelman introduces the lyrics of country and western songs, laid out as poetry, for borrowed emotional resonance.

The few incidents of the novel could easily be accommodated in a short story; it can hardly be said that Kelman exploits the possibilities of the ampler genre. He establishes the seriousness of his project by brute duration, as if any invocation of the formal resources of the novel would sell Sammy into the slavery of writing.

For Kelman, authorial distance seems to be a form of literary imperialism. It is certainly an illusion, but so to be sure is the supersession of the author by his creature. In the first sentence of How late it was, how late, for instance, Kelman uses six semi-colons and a single colon, a near-exquisite piece of stopping that belongs to a different world from Sammy's. This other world is one which, among other things, would make political analysis possible. All Sammy can do is exemplify the sufferings of his region, his history and his class. The fact that his stoicism, a virtue on the personal level, is from a different point of view a guarantee that he will remain in his place, is an irony the book refuses to house.

Sammy drinks only a few pints in the course of the book, but whenever the characters refer to drinking establishments, their names (and nothing else in the book) are put into italics, like saints' names in a family Bible, or churches in Baedeker. It seems a curious form of bad faith for the author to vanish stridently from his text, while lingering slyly in nuances of punctuation, and in the respectful alcoholism of his italics.

For the first 200 pages of the book, before Sammy starts to re-enter the world around him, the reader has little to engage with beyond the authenticity of his language. Sometimes the effect is deliberately flat: "So all in all he had entered a new epoch on life's weary trail." Sometimes there is a dark flicker of wit: "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. One on every corner. Course they had them already: boozers."

Most often, though, the language is half-dead, half-alive, undeterred by the speaker's sudden sobriety (Sammy's blindness imposes a virtual house arrest) from bar-room philosophizing. Too much of the book is only kept by the prestige of dialect from sounding like banality or Beckett: "Ye just battered on, that was what ye did man ye battered on. What else can ye do? There's nothing else"; "Life, man, full of misunderstandings; nay cunt knows what ye're meaning"; "Ye blunder on and ye blunder on. That's what ye do"; "Life. Life could have been worse"; "Ye made wrong moves in life. It couldn't be denied"; "It was an effort. Life. That was how ye had to keep going."

On one singular occasion Kelman seeks to demonstrate that the acrid tang of Glasgow speech is not synonymous with benighted social attitudes. The subject is women:

Ye wonder what they see in as well I mean being honest; men—christ almighty, a bunch of dirty bastards, literally, know what I'm talking about, sweaty socks and all that, smelly underpants. Course they've got nay choice, no unless maybe they're lesbian, then ye get tits bouncing against each other and it's all awkward and bumpy; same if it's guys, cocks and legs banging—that was what happened inside once, this guy that fancied Sammy trying to give him a kind of cuddle christ it was weird, fucking rough chins and these parts of yer body knocking the gether, yer knees as well man ye were aware of it, how ye didnay seem to merge right, maybe for the other thing but no cuddling, the guy actually said that to him he says, Sammy ye're holding me like a woman, I'm no a woman. Fine; fair enough, but how were ye supposed to do it, cause he hadnay wanted to hurt the guy, he liked him, know what I'm saying, he was a nice guy and aw that. Fucking hell man, life, difficult.

This passage of surrealistic liberalism from a narrator of considerable reflex belligerence can be put down to authorial wishful thinking, the strained neutrality of the word "merge" in this register its give-away.

In general, though, Glasgow speech and the attitudes it embodies are holy to this writer. To describe the local tongue as the language of resistance would be to understate his view of it; it is a language of truth in revelation. To most readers, admittedly, the words "bampot", "clatty" and "bammycain" will seem superior to the words "tosser", "dirty" and "nuthouse", either for reasons of regional loyalty or novelty. But are they really reliably superior, a million times better, enough to justify their constant incantatory repetition?

It is a paradoxical position, to feel that everything about people's lives can be corrupted or fouled except their speech, particularly when their speech is so freighted with fucks, adjectival fucks, adverbial fucks ("as x as fuck", "like fuck"), interpolated fucks ("enerfuckinggetic, enerfuckinggetised"), fuck cadenzas; "lonely, just fucking lonely, lonely lonely fucking lonely, lonely; that was his wife, lonely"; "That was the fucking story. Just as well she had went afore this, afore this fucking shit man this fucking blind shit, fucking blind blind blind fucking blind man blind a fucking blind bastard."

At moments like these, Kelman's aim as a writer—which might be imagined expressed as no authority but in authenticity—leads him into producing something curiously unaffecting, a piling up of inarticulacies. His prose becomes something to be consumed dutifully, not emetic or stimulant but good for you: cod liver oil. In his theology, the opposite of England/book/death is Scotland, voice and life. Yet a voice on the page is no longer a voice. Strange that he leaves it there stranded, and the reader stranded too.