How Late It Was, How Late
by James Kelman
Summary
Sammy Samuels wakes up in a Glasgow lane after a two day drinking session, gets into an argument with some plain clothes police, takes a beating, and comes round in a cell unable to see. The blindness does not go away. The rest of the novel is a man negotiating the benefits system, the police, a doctor and a solicitor while blind, broke, and unable to prove any of it happened.
It is written entirely inside Sammy's head in Glaswegian, with no quotation marks and no separation between his thoughts and the narration, and it swears constantly because he does. The much reported count of profanities is beside the point: the language is the argument. Kelman's position, argued for a career, is that working class speech is a literary language and that translating it for a middle class reader is the insult.
What emerges is funnier and more tender than the reputation suggests. Sammy is stubborn, self deceiving, decent and frequently very good company, and the bureaucratic scenes are comic set pieces.
Go in knowing that the first ten pages will decide it for you. Readers who adjust find one of the great novels of institutional powerlessness. Readers who cannot get past the swearing or the absence of punctuation should not persist, because it never changes and is not meant to.
It is not long and the plot is thin by design, since the point is the grinding rather than the outcome. Readers who admired Irvine Welsh should know that Kelman is the writer Welsh came out of, and is doing something far more serious with the same materials.
Historical Context & Significance
How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize in 1994 and remains among the most contested decisions in the prize's history. James Kelman was the first Scottish writer to win it.
One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, publicly disowned the result, calling it a disgrace, saying she was implacably opposed to the book, that Kelman was deeply inaccessible to a lot of people, and that she felt outmanoeuvred. She is widely quoted as having dismissed it outright as "crap". Newspaper coverage largely abandoned the book for a count of its swearing.
Kelman used his acceptance speech to defend the right of a culture to be written in its own language rather than assimilated, which turned the row into an argument about class and literary gatekeeping that has never really closed. His influence on the Scottish writers who followed, including Irvine Welsh, is difficult to overstate.