Books of the Month

'Translated Accounts' by James Kelman

How many writers could pull off a novel with no plot, an unknown setting, and barely any characters? James Kelman manages to do it in this challenging follow-up to his Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late.

The book is something of a departure for Kelman. The writer who built up a reputation describing in graphic detail the lives of working-class Glaswegians has swapped his familiar territory for a foreign, almost abstract, country. Translated Accounts claims to be a collection of 'first hand' statements rendered into an official kind of English by unspecified officials. The 54 pieces, allegedly by three, four or more individuals, slowly build not into a narrative as such, but nevertheless into a picture of sorts. In an unknown country, apparently under military rule, we learn about torturings, disappearances, possible rapes and murders - all at the hands of the mysterious 'authoritys' and 'securitys'. Characters are defined not by their traits and mannerisms, which hardly survive the 'translation', but instead through details about their lives - one recurring character, for instance, is a man who's wife is disappeared-feared-dead, and whose daughter has been sent to live with her grandparents for safety.

This isn't a novel for the faint-hearted. It's a challenging read. But it poses many questions about language and politics, power and its proper use, and the ability of human feelings to withstand linguistic and political torture. Does the mangled English of the novel represent a triumph of human expression in the face of unbearable physical privation, or is it to be seen as the garbled waste product of an official 'system' which has no place for the nuances of feeling and emotion? There are times when the reader catches just enough of a story to grasp the motivations and inner feelings of individuals, only for those characters to be lost in a fog of confusing transcription. Does it work? Each reader will probably have a different answer, so try it, and make up your own mind.

Susan Tranter

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