God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena by James Kelman

by Duncan McLean

God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena
James Kelman
PM Press, Oakland, (2022) £12.99.

The cliched view of James Kelman has him as a relentlessly urban writer. ‘It was assumed by most,’ he reports in one essay, ‘that I crept around Glasgow with recording devices at the ready, recording fearsome drunken illiterates of the Glaswegian male populace.’ But this has always been a careless reading, as, right from his earliest collections, many stories have had small town or rural settings, often Highland ones; ‘The Bevel’ in Not Not While the Giro (1983) for instance, or ‘The Red Cockatoos’ in Greyhound for Breakfast (1987), right up to the feverish fairy-tale of ‘The State of Elixerism’ in That Was a Shiver (2017).

These are not idyllic landscapes evoked in descriptive swoons. The narrator of ‘Where I was’, for example, writes of the environment he finds himself in, ‘A wind like the soudtrack of a North Pole documentary rages.’ (Lean Tales, 1985.) James Hogg or Nan Shepherd’s characters would have experienced that wind differently, but Kelman’s appear to be wandering or drifting though an unkan country; they’re not from there themselves, not rooted in its climate or culture. Economic and political forces have moved to conceal or even erase the connection many Scottish city-dwellers have with their rural ancestors, going back just a generation or two.

Apart from its opening few pages, Kelman’s new novel, Gods Teeth and Other Phenomena, is set in an un-named rural area. There are towns out there, and occasionally the story moves through them, but most of the time the action takes place in deep country, up hillsides, in remote converted farmhouses, in gloomy woods by the banks of brackish canals. There are suggestions in the book’s final pages as to where the story has unfolded but that isn’t important, any more than the ‘real’ locations of Deads’ Town, Wraith-Island and the bush between them matter in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.

Why bring in a 70-year-old Nigerian novel? Well, in 2020 Kelman published What I Do (Memoirs). Its assessments of writers and artists whose work Kelman admires provide the best available insight into how he views his own art. Significant Scottish writers he’s been associated with are there, but one of the most rewarding pieces is ‘The Voice of Amos Tutuola.’ Kelman’s reading of Tutuola’s work, and in particular the still startlingly fresh The Palm-Wine Drinkard, is fascinating. It suggests many parallels to Kelman’s own work, and the challenges faced by anyone writing in a language not centred in their own culture:

Tutuola breathed life into the deadening voice of the colonizer; the life derives from the rhythms and speech patterns of the language(s) 31Northwords Now Issue 44, Spring–Summer 2023 REVIEWS indigenous to his people and culture. The contemporary culture of which he is at the heart, in direct opposition to assimilation, also reaches beyond Nigeria and Africa.

It reaches, for instance, to the Gàidhealtachd, the Nornlands, and most other parts of Scotland. This reach is made explicit by Kelman in the opening pages of the essay, where he discusses similarities between The Palm-Wine Drinkard and John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, a collection he came across as a young writer, and which remains important to him. He also talks about the signifiance of his paternal grandmother’s language: ‘She sang to us in Gàidhlig, laughed at us in Gàidhlig, and spoke to us in English.’

God’s Teeth puts its ‘hero’ through various trials and tribulations as he traverses a landscape that is itself threatening. In folktale terms it’s a quest narrative, like ‘Sgeulachd Mic Iain Dirich’ from Campbell’s collection – or indeed like The Palm Wine Drinkard.

So, who are we following through this countryside that is detailed, concrete and believable, yet fantstic, even phantasmagorical? Jack Proctor is a 66-year-old writer from Glasgow, who’s been sporadically successful in a conventional sense – he won the Banker Prize, for instance – but who is thoroughly opposed to the commodification of writing by arts bodies and academia. For Proctor, writing is a philosophical and political assertion of the individual’s right to exist, and for the community they come from to exist. It’s about voices being heard, and stories being told.

In one episode in Tutuola’s novel, the palm-wine drinkard and his wife face a hostile audience: ‘we felt pain and talked out, but at the same time that the whole of them heard our voice, they laughed at us if bombs explode.’ Proctor too goes through a series of painful encounters, but he speaks out, and the result is laughter. God’s Teeth is the funniest of Kelman’s ten novels to date. ‘Make it interesting!’ Proctor repeatedly urges his writing students, and Kelman does. When I wasn’t laughing, I was somewhere between grinning and gasping in recognition and horror.

The story follows Proctor through several weeks of a writing residency organised by the House of Arts and Aesthetics, whatever that is (he never finds out.) What he does find is that it’s almost impossible to write whilst on a writing residency. Instead, he’s expected to travel through unknown terrain in hostile weather to give talks, do readings, teach classes, and above all perform the role of The-Banker-Prize-Winning- Author. Proctor can’t perform anyone else’s role. What he wants to do – what he must do – is write. Along the way he’s ambushed by threatening figures such as ‘a uniformed member of the college constabulary’, ‘a part-time Lieutenant Colonel in a community-guard militia’, ‘some idiot tutor bastard yapping on about “readability”’, ‘a Permanent Secretary to the Upper Hereditary Chamber’ complete with ‘ermined fist’, Wilko Codling, ‘the creator of the DI “Deadly” Dudley Merson books’, not to mention ‘Tallulah Debray, Dramatic Vibrettist, Renowned Exponent of Dance-as Art- in Performance’. Some confront him in person, some haunt the expectations of his interlocutors – or of Proctor himself.

The comedy of the book, and its political (non-ermined) punch, come from Proctor’s continual battles with these nemeses, who may or may not be well-meaning, and who continually frustrate his attempts to write, not to mention failing to grasp the value of his writing advice. And it really is good advice. Anyone setting out to tell stories, whether short or novel-length, could learn an enormous amount from Proctor. Unfortunately, many of his students are not happy with his approach. They don’t hear his words as advice, but as obtuse philosophising: a refusal to give them what they want, which is ‘tips’ on getting published, on TV adaptations, on snappy titles. Frequently it seems they just want to attend a writing class in the hope of affirmation, or at least an audience.

Yet Proctor is patient with almost all of them, generous with his time and experience, constantly alert to any sign of genuine interest in writing in his students:

Let all of us go now and if we haven’t already done so we should begin writing at once, and those of you who find it impossible to write a single word must find a pencil and write down on an A4 piece of paper the following words: it is impossible to write a single word
and follow that with the word:Why?
and following on from that just hold yer breath and dive in

No better advice for any writer. Splash!