Here a new landscape stamps itself indelibly onto the literary map: the infamous Glasgow slum called the Gorbals, in whose ripe, decaying airs Torrington's intoxicated and intoxicating debut is steeped, and through whose derelict streets his narrator and alter ego, Tam Clay, traces his past and parlous future in the last few frigid days before the wrecking crews move in. Tam's ruminative, often alcoholic and virtually plotless ramble intersects the paths of friends, enemies and eccentric strangers, some current, many remembered, most real, some imagined, and all fantasticated by the carnival whirl of Tam's fecund, boozy imagination, in equal measure ruminative and manic. But Tam's real foe isn't to be found among the in-laws, the pregnant wife, the jealous husbands or the debt collectors he dodges from tenement to taproom: his real enemy is time's ruthless march crushing his grimy, garrulous turf into the rubble of memory. His refuge is a rich scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor, with which he crams his vanishing world into chunks of wild imagery and pungent dialect, every phrase so grafted to time and place as virtually to defy quotation. Torrington's writing is as voracious as it is vivid, encyclopedic in its reach, eagerly setting down nuggets from Sartre and Nietzsche alongside reflections on the humiliations of the Scottish soccer team. Thirty years in the writing, this 1992 winner of the Whitbread Award is overstuffed, parochial, self-indulgent, sentimental, overambitious--and well worth every minute of reading time. (Apr.)
Here a new landscape stamps itself indelibly onto the literary map: the infamous Glasgow slum called the Gorbals, in whose ripe, decaying airs Torrington's intoxicated and intoxicating debut is steeped, and through whose derelict streets his narrator and alter ego, Tam Clay, traces his past and parlous future in the last few frigid days before the wrecking crews move in. Tam's ruminative, often alcoholic and virtually plotless ramble intersects the paths of friends, enemies and eccentric strangers, some current, many remembered, most real, some imagined, and all fantasticated by the carnival whirl of Tam's fecund, boozy imagination, in equal measure ruminative and manic. But Tam's real foe isn't to be found among the in-laws, the pregnant wife, the jealous husbands or the debt collectors he dodges from tenement to taproom: his real enemy is time's ruthless march crushing his grimy, garrulous turf into the rubble of memory. His refuge is a rich scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor, with which he crams his vanishing world into chunks of wild imagery and pungent dialect, every phrase so grafted to time and place as virtually to defy quotation. Torrington's writing is as voracious as it is vivid, encyclopedic in its reach, eagerly setting down nuggets from Sartre and Nietzsche alongside reflections on the humiliations of the Scottish soccer team. Thirty years in the writing, this 1992 winner of the Whitbread Award is overstuffed, parochial, self-indulgent, sentimental, overambitious--and well worth every minute of reading time. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Whatever else it does, this 1992 Whitbread Award winner points up the disparity between what can make best sellers lists in the United Kingdom vs. the United States. Make no mistake--this is Literary Fiction (caps intended); the blurb-writers who compare Torrington to Joyce are entirely on the mark. Set in Glasgow in late 1969, the novel chronicles a week in the fateful life of soon-to-be father, would-be novelist, slum-dweller Tom Clay. The nearly 30 years of gestation that Torrington's book endured show through in the vivid characterizations of Glasgow and its denizens. What plot exists is subservient to vignette, but, in the tradition of Joyce, the language is rich and colorful. Not for the average U.S. fiction reader, especially with its heavy use of regionalisms, this work should still appeal to some with more eclectic tastes. Strongly recommended for fiction collections with enough funding to be venturesome.-- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
The standard of Torrington's writing is so high that for once one is not ashamed to compare an unknown novelist to authors who are justly famous. That wag Joyce is the truest neighbor, though contemporaries Pynchon and Rushdie will do in a pinch: like all three, Torrington has a beautifully barbed wit and a fabulous ear for language, enough to send the sentences tumbling over one another in a symphony of belly laughs and brays or, where things are bleaker and more sarcastic, in a sort of muffled thudding like the dropping of shoes. Reportedly, Torrington, now 58, worked on this, his first novel, for nearly 30 years while he did a series of very odd odd-jobs and, in the last decade, struggled through Parkinson's disease. It is the tale of Clay, a would-be writer living in Glasgow's "redevelopment" area (a slum in the process of being bulldozed) during a week in the late 1960s. Glasgow always had a reputation for being Scotland's toughest city, and there's an air of resentful making-do that overhangs every interaction in this oddly rich, dying neighborhood. Clay himself, anyway, has trouble: a pregnant wife, a family that resents and hounds him, no job, no publisher, someone who's after him, and a very strange problem with time. In England, this novel won the Whitbread and became a best-seller. It probably won't mean as much here, but on its merits alone, it deserves a wide reading. Writers this good, writing in the English language, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.
"The standard of Torrington's writing is so high that for once one is not ashamed to compare an unknown novelist to authors who are justly famous. That wag Joyce is the truest neighbor, though contemporaries Pynchon and Rushdie will do in a pinch: like all three, Torrington has a beautifully barbed wit and a fabulous ear for language, enough to send the sentences tumbling over one another in a symphony of belly laughs and brays or, where things are bleaker and more sarcastic, in a sort of muffled thudding like the dropping of shoes. . . . Writers this good, writing in the English language, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand." —Booklist Publishers Weekly " Swing Hammer Swing! is funny, clever, and bleak as hell. I wrote Torrington a fan letter, the only one I've ever written." —Bob Odenkirk, actor and comedian
