Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington

Originally published on A Walk Through Books on 09/12/08

As a long-time fan of Scottish fiction, I looked forward to delving into Torrington’s Whitbread winner with relish.

Written in the Scots demotic that his compatriots James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have received so much criticism and acclaim for, respectively, Torrington tells the story of the, literal, decline of the Gorbals of the 1960s over one week in the life of Tam Clay.

Father-to-be, wordsmith manqué, adulterer, heavy drinker and accidental arsonist, Tam Clay is the itinerant voice of the working class.

According to The Scotsman’s obituary of Torrington, the author was "fêted by the London literary establishment as the epitome of the working-class Glaswegian done good," yet the aforementioned Kelman, when his ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ won the 1994 Booker Prize, had his novel labelled as a ‘disgrace’ by one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger.

I’ve very little authority to judge what is authentic working-class Glaswegian voice, having grown up in a middle-class West Midlands family, but there seems to be very little difference between the two voices apart from:

1. Torrington’s narrator, Tam Clay, is a more educated man, making overt references to Sartre, Kierkegaard and other renowned authors.

2. Torrington’s Clay swears a lot less than Kelman’s Sammy Samuels.

Essentially, it seems there is a working class voice the establishment can accept, one that is essentially inferior and happy to be inferior to them, with no pretensions of uprising; and one that they cannot accept, one that is boisterous and is ready to put up a fight in the name of his condition.

Tam Clay is essentially a passive observer, content just to whittle away his life in the Gorbals as it falls apart around him, happy to make comments such as ‘February’s such a waste of a month’ (p.301) and move one without further comment.

Sammy Samuels is mentally incapable of such a comment, as for him it would have to be followed by a string of invective about why February is such a waste of a month and whose fault it is.

Yet this does not make him a disgrace. His is just as legitimate a working-class voice as Clay’s, and possibly more so if it says a few things that you don’t want to hear. Because isn’t that what the working class often is to the establishment, something that they don’t want to hear?

Torrington sums up the difference between Clay and Samuels perfectly on page 140:

‘’It was too bad that the blind in literature were doubly disadvantaged; readers tend to assume they’re symbolic: ‘I presume your blind chappy represents the spiritual myopia of contemporary society?’ ‘Well, naw, as a matter of fact he jist couldnae see!’”

Clay, with his functioning eyes, only observes the surfaces of things, whereas Samuels, with his blindness, sees beneath the skin of bureaucratic injustices to the symbols of power that they represent and cannot help but yell out against them.

Both are legitimate working class voices, but only one is acceptable to the establishment.