Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature (review)

Narratives of Class is a welcome contribution to the field of multicultural British literature as well as Irish and Scottish studies. Although the author works with a relatively small number of authors and texts—the novels of James Kelman, Roddy Doyle, Janice Galloway, and Eoin McNamee published between 1983 and 1997—the insights of her study extend well beyond her immediate subject matter. Drawing upon both cultural geography and spatial theory, McGlynn uses as her starting point for analysis what she terms the “urban periphery,” which she claims is at least partially removed from the hierarchies created by nationalism, imperialism, and class: “a local identity is not a romanticized, national one; rather it acknowledges that there is nothing special to elevate it above any other city” (15). Indeed she sees the urban poor of Belfast and Glasgow—even Dublin—as doubly disenfranchised since both Scottish and Irish nationalisms tend to privilege the countryside (the Highlands or the west of Ireland, respectively), thereby excluding the cities’ working classes. But the urban periphery also becomes a site of resistance, where authors can create new fictions that thwart traditional literary expectations and their underlying political implications.

One of the most significant insights that Narratives of Class provides is into how these contemporary authors work against the traditional realist, working-class novel. Written primarily for middle-class audiences, the purpose of this type of novel was “to present an authentic image of the exotic otherworld” (39). Yet even as this branch of realism attempted to capture the authenticity of the working-class persona, a third-person narrator often undercut this representation. Moreover, in novels like Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (which is used as a representative example), the plot reaffirms a very specific trajectory of progress and development in which the working-class protagonist becomes incorporated into the bourgeoisie. The writers discussed here, Kelman and Galloway in particular, resist these expectations by writing “plotless” novels that offer neither climax nor closure.

McGlynn’s careful and considered textual analysis provides readers with a better understanding (and in some cases, an increasing respect) for each author’s experimentalism. In the chapter on Kelman, perhaps the most successful in the book, she argues that the very elements that made the novel How Late It Was, How Late a controversial choice for the 1994 Booker Prize also mark its narrative innovation. The protagonist’s frequent use of profanity, for instance, becomes an expressive mode of discourse, so that words like “fuck” take on several different parts of speech and a variety of meanings. This reading connects to the broader point that Kelman’s working class narrators do in fact possess the ability to speak standardized English but deliberately decide not to. McGlynn carefully excavates the narrative in order to demonstrate these working-class characters’ comprehension, but also rejection, of “proper” English and thus emphasizes their linguistic choices rather than their limitations.

In her close readings, McGlynn is careful to situate her subject matter in the terrain of contemporary Irish and Scottish literature. This is particularly useful in the chapters on Kelman and Galloway, where other prominent Scottish writers like Alisdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, and the pop culture phenomenon Irvine Welsh are also briefly discussed in relation to the study’s major issues. However, this context is almost entirely missing in the chapter on Eoin McNamee, the least well-known author who is examined. Although there is passing reference to the more attention-getting Northern Irish poets, like Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, there is a noticeable silence about McNamee’s relation to other Northern Irish fiction writers like Bernard MacLaverty or Ronan Bennett. Given McGlynn’s discussion of McNamee’s Resurrection Man as a statement on the detective genre, a comparison to Bennett’s work within the thriller seems especially promising. This absence most likely stems from the fact that Chapter Five in Narratives of Class is approximately half the length of the other author-centered chapters and...