Kieron Smith, Boy
James Kelman Hamish Hamilton, 432pp, £18.99
Bullied by his brother and other “big boys”, largely ignored by his distracted parents, Kieron Smith feels his only sanctuary is his grandparents’ home – until he is moved from inner Glasgow to a new housing project on the outskirts of the city, where he struggles to adjust.
Like many children, Kieron is both uncomprehending and astonishingly perceptive of what is going on around him. Through him, Kelman mixes the frustrations, mysteries and confusions of childhood with a vivid social history of working-class Glasgow, mapped out in such small details as the excitement caused by “scrambles” for pennies at weddings. Kieron tells us how when he was naughty his da “skliffed ye up the back of yer neck and it was sore”, and how, from his old home, he had to avoid the quickest route to his grandparents' because “the Papes would get ye.” (“Papes”, he tells us, often had “black hair and peelywally skin”, though sometimes they proved more difficult to distinguish.)
As in his earlier works, Kelman’s narrative voice is well tuned to the vocabulary and the rhythms of the Glaswegian dialect. It is an ambitious but superbly realised tale, full of imaginative tangents fitting to the mind of an inquisitive young boy.
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