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That Was A Shiver And Other Stories By James Kelman

Book Review for Wasafiri magazine

Date : 11/06/2018

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Wayne

Uploaded by : Wayne
Uploaded on : 11/06/2018
Subject : Creative Writing

That Was a Shiver and Other Stories

By James Kelman

Published by CannonGate £14.99 h/b

At the age of 71, Glaswegian writer James Kelman appears to be enjoying a late-period purple patch. Only last year there was Dirt Road, his most substantial novel in almost a decade – and his first to be adapted into a film – and now, scarcely twelve months later, we have a hefty new collection of short stories. If Dirt Road, with its American setting, plucky teenage protagonist and, let’s be honest, fairly trite conclusion, was Kelman showing his new publishers, CannonGate, that he was more than capable of producing a good, solid, commercial novel (and, arguably, a good solid commercial YA novel at that) then That Was a Shiver sees Kelman reasserting himself as one of the masters of the modern short story. Not counting 2015’s A Lean Third (Tangerine Press’s slim-but-welcome re-issuing of some of Kelman’s very earliest stories), That Was a Shiver is Kelman’s first new collection of short stories since 2010’s If It Is Your Life. By Kelman’s standards that collection was disappointing and curiously unengaging. That Was a Shiver is a brilliant return to form.

The stories in That Was a Shiver range across the familiar Kelman territory of cafés, pubs, flats, work places, and the like, and return again and again to one of his familiar concerns: the seemingly unsurpassable gulfs that exist between one person and next, but which, given the right circumstances, the right individuals and the willingness to connect, can shrink down to just a “shiver”. (And “shiver” is a recurring motif throughout this collection, suggesting the transience, fragility and temporality of such connections.)

The distances between total strangers is explored in ‘This Has No Title’. Kelman turns a non-encounter during a bus ride home into a meditation on loneliness and the need for companionship, no matter how fleeting:

“Then the man coming along the aisle, a big heavy fellow, he sat down next to me. I knew he would. I had made the space. He noticed I had and nearly smiled, just how he looked around the eyes like it was almost a smile and hoped I would notice it. A recognition of the other’s humanity. There would be this between us.”

There are the distances between generations:

“Kids come stoating in the door like ye werenay there. Oh fuck maybe I’ve disappeared! That was how ye felt. Ye dont know whether to laugh or get annoyed like how in my day there was a bit of respect for folk about to hit the eternity trail. Us auld-timers I’m talking about.”

Class:

“As soon as I got home, closed the door, saw the kids and had a cuddle with Wilma the world reverted to one in which a person could cope without contemplating the murder of one’s fucking superiors. The officer-class I am talking about.”

And, naturally for Kelman, the distances between the sexes: those universally awkward misunderstandings and clumsy fumbles for connection:

“He turned to her, reached to brush her cheek with his index finger, tracing the cheekbone. The light glinted on her eyes. He leaned to kiss her cheek, his hand on her arm, but she was resistant. He withdrew and settled on his back. You’re not good at relaxing, she said.”

Throughout these stories Kelman is writing at the top of his game. He is a master prose stylist, the demotic dialogue and simplicity of the language belieing the rigorous craftmanship: the precisely placed word, the carefully structured sentence, the finely balanced paragraph:

“He held the door open for me and I went in. The woman locked the door behind me. The man led me into the kitchen and she followed on. He saw me looking at the cigarette stub and took it out of the corner of his mouth, leaned to tap ash into the sink, then looked to make sure it was not burning and dumped it in the rubbish bin. The smell of old tobacco was strong.”

At other times there is a beautiful and tender lyricism to Kelman’s prose:

“When our first child was a baby she had rolls of blubber on the upper thighs. I cleaned the diahorrea, sluicing between the rolls, how red the skin, how sore it must have been yet she bore it in wonder.”

This said, not all the stories are successful. Some are a little too opaque for their own good. Others come across as mere literary exercises (such as ‘The State of Elixirism’ which seems to be an updating of the Sirens episode of Uylsess or the meditation on grammar that is ‘Clinging On’). Happily, though, the very few weaker stories are far outnumbered by the successful ones, and one wonders if the pruning of three or four of these slighter stories wouldn’t have made this a stronger collection. (After all, at just over 300 pages, this is a third longer than Kelman’s past short story collections). But this is just churlish nitpicking. That Was a Shiver more than holds its own against Kelman’s earlier work. And while that earlier work was (largely) inhabited by young men who were restless and at odds with the world – eking out lives of quiet desperation, etc. – the characters here are older and more anchored in their daily lives. Such anchorage has been hard won, achieved through compromise, empathy, and an acknowledgement of one’s past mistakes:

“In contemporary jargon I would admit to having ‘fucked up’ my life. One should admit such matters and not conceal them if such issues are thought to be the ones, the main perhaps questions, while Anne herself, she was never a blinding flash, what do they call it, love at first sight, oh this is the girl for me, it was not like that. I was in sore need of female companionship. Males tire me eventually. On guard and have at thou.”

This is where the volume is strongest: when Kelman is writing closest to home: from the perspective of an “auld timer…on the eternity trail”. And these depictions of old age makes one pine for a full-length novel in which Kelman gives the subject his undivided attention. After all, he has already given the world brilliant depictions of childhood (Keiren Smith, Boy), young adulthood (A Chancer) and the difficult terrain between late-youth and early-middle-age (A Disaffection). Now, as Kelman enters his eighth decade, That Was a Shiver suggests that the best may still yet to come.


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