Universal with a Glaswegian flavour
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James Kelman's novel takes us into the cathartic mind of Rab Hines, bus conductor and social philosopher. Hines is complex, misunderstood and wonderful, but not extraordinary. Infact, I think many readers will identify with Hines' frustration and the erratic wanderings of his mind, which he won't let bus conducting and the rat race in general wear down. Although essentially a working class novel set in 1980's Glasgow, the novel does transcend its setting and Kelman's writing can be compared with Dostoyevsky and Hamsun and read as a flux of consciousness novel that embraces the universal themes of love, hope and despair but all through the individual mind of a Glaswegian bus conductor.
The novel evoked in me a strange mixture of emotions. Sometimes I empathised with Rab and his frustrations at the system. I found the love scenes between Rab and his wife and their mutual understanding of each other, combined with their mutual despair and frustration with life and each other, incredibly moving but never hyperbolic, always in perfect measure. However, although I consider myself something of a socialist there were points in the book where I just wanted to grab Rab and tell him to get on with it. It's this type of characterisation that makes the book so real and so touching. Hines is a true anti-hero, he is self-depreciating, stubborn, able, unable, loving and immense: "a perplexing kettle of coconuts" indeed.
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'On The Buses' in Kelman's Glasgow
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This is the novel James Kelman should have won the Booker Prize for, his powerful evocation of the 'daily grind' in 1980's Glasgow is haunting and darkly moving. Adhering to the Joycean ethic of making the 'ordinary man' on an 'ordinary day' the hero of the text, Kelman's modernist techniques take this to powerful extremes. This is socialist fiction in a dislocated and marginalised Britain where the character 'Hines' finds himself on the edge of sanity with no promise of the usual 'working class' escapes. There are no Glasgow street fights, drug excesses or football matches here, instead we are drawn into the interior monologue of an everyman, sensitive, intelligent, trapped and falling to pieces. Sounds a misreable read and when Kelman gets criticism it's usually because this is high brow lit which offers no 'plan of action' or 'dramatic entertainment'. But what Kelman does unequivicably is give the under dog a voice, and the everyday a place in art. This is an important book about the 'sectioning' of individual realities in modern Britain. Although this is about Thatcher's Britain, it's just as relevant today as it was when evryone ignored it back in the 80's
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