Reviews

If James Kelman was 30 years younger and had been exposed to the same pop detritus as Douglas Coupland was, he'd be Alan Bissett. Bissett writes about small, financially shaky lives of the sort that are rarely celebrated. Plot is less interesting to him than how these men operate, on their own and in groups. Bissett is plugged into the DVD generation, roaming beyond merely dropping film quotes into his characters' speech to show what movies and music add to their lives but also what these interests are compensating for.

The young men of Boyracers drive round and round their native Falkirk looking for something to do. Worryingly, they appear to have learned how men should interact with each other from Scorsese films, not from their absent fathers. In the ‘grey Falkirkness’ of the zone they inhabit, a new U2 album is a landmark event, and attempts to escape to university or another town are stymied by the self-defeating mantra, ‘Ye dinnae. Dump. Yer mates.’

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Adam Spark lives in Falkirk with his sister Jude. A hapless 18 year-old with 'special needs', his life revolves around his job at a fast-food restaurant, his love of Queen and his secret life as a superhero. When Adam is hit on the head and his sister is tempted away from Falkirk by a new life in Glasgow, his moods start to swing. Is Adam as harmless as he seems? Does he really have superpowers? And if so, would he use them for good or evil?

This is an utterly engrossing book, consistently moving and laugh-out-loud funny. Bissett writes in Adam's first-person vernacular, scattered with pop-culture references, punchlines and sound effects ('oof bash ug!'). However, Adam's childish viewpoint makes him an unreliable witness, unable or unwilling to recall or comprehend his actions.

Adam's dilemma is partly a question of the extent to which his fantasy cartoon-world is a defence mechanism against reality and responsiblity. While we will Adam to make the right choices, we also know that it's doubtful he could cope with the real world. Our narrative uncertainty mirrors Adam's struggle with moral questions in a bewildering world of mixed messages.

Scotland already has plenty of literary heroes, but it's found another in the the incredible Alan Bissett.

FOUR OUT OF FIVE STARS

Alan Bissett's second novel is one of those tragi-comedies that lure the reader into a false sense of security before neatly whipping away the carpet of expectation. The opening scenes introduce us to Adam Spark, 18, fast food worker and deeply impressionable, cared for and kept from harm by his beloved sister Jude, their parents having 'gone to Oz'. There's more than a hint of autism in Sparky's obsessions with Queen and superheroes, and his near-violent reaction to having his routine disrupted, but Bissett wisely leaves his hero's implied learning difficulties unspecified.

Following an accident, Sparky believes he has accquired superpowers, including the ability to alter the pace of time. The comic book pastiche and Sparky's vivid, authentic voice allow Bissett to explore questions of of 'good' versus 'evil' without falling back on easy answers, while the developing relationship between Adam and Jude, as she sets out to cut the umbilical cord, is movingly depiced.

FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS

Alan Bissett served up a treat with Boyracers, and the spark hasn’t gone with his latest creation – Adam Spark, Scotland’s first superhero. This bitter-sweet tale of an 18 year-old Falkirk boy with learning disabilities and a Queen obsession deals with the issues surrounding his difficult transition into adulthood. Revolving around Adam’s loss of his older sister to her recently found girlfriend, every page treads a fine line between belly chuckle and tear-jerker. Bissett’s colloquial mastery sucker-punches you with effortless style, while head-injury induced superpowers allow Sparky to slow down and speed up time, altering the amount of words per page. Bizarre, hilarious and moving.

This is the latest in an honourable line of attempts to bring spoken urban Scots to the page. Considerable ingenuity has been expended. If you’re the sort of reader who cracks a smile at ‘drexion’ (direction), ‘jyools’ (jewels) and ‘zif’ (as if), then this is the book for you. Alternatively, you may find yourself thinking that received punctuation – for all its culturally imperialist baggage – is less oppressive than declaring a fatwa on the comma. A novel has to be very impressive indeed to overcome a first few pages as laborious as these.

Adam Spark – or rather Sparky – likes listening to Queen and sliding downstairs on a tea-tray. The politically-correct label is ‘learning difficulties’ or ‘special needs’; on the streets of Falkirk they say ‘spastic’ and ‘mongol’. Sparky lives with his big sister Jude, their parents having gone to ‘Oz’. He has the body of a man and the mind of a child, but a child with random poetic insight: an idiot savant in the tradition of Forrest Gump and Chancey Gardner.

Although this is an extravagantly written novel, its true genre is Hollywood sentimentalism. Sparky is a mirror held up to the nature of our age, and quite sinister at times, but ultimately the reader exhales a big soppy awwww. He subjects shop assistants to sexual and racial harassment, gets involved in gang fights, shoplifts, sets fires, exposes himself to security cameras and generally behaves like the archetypal ned. He also suspects he may be a superhero. Terrified of being left to fend for himself, he attacks Jude’s lesbian girlfriend, Maryann. We start to wonder what else he might be capable of. Harming his sister? Killing a child? The story seems about to take an interesting turn but soon reverts to heart-warming fable. Working at a burger joint, Sparky meets Bonnie, his ideal girlfriend: a sweetie with cystic fibrosis and big breasts. Being a reflection of contemporary masculine selfishness and emotional inadequacy, he nearly blows it, but the happy ending is never in doubt.

Thankfully, you get used to the spelling and punctuation – i meantay say i did. Then cars and grilling machines start addressing our hero in cod-Greek. Actually, it’s just the letters that look Greek: the words are decipherable if you squint while moving the page in and out of focus. Presumably these typographical games have a purpose: the reader lets go of pre-conceptions and looks at the world afresh, coming closer to the character’s perspective. If you haven’t thrown the book out of the window first. Only you can’t do that because it’s a sympathetic portrait of a man with learning difficulties, and if you find it intolerably exasperating, what does that say about you?

What you can say is that the writing smacks a little too much of a self-conscious tour de force for Sparky and the novel’s first-person narrative voice to be one and the same. Sometimes they match: I had no trouble believing in Sparky under pressure, ‘feelin like theres a terrier in ma brain thats no had its tea.’ And I loved Maryann making ‘a face like shes showin ye howtay work a dyson.’ But there are moments when we could only be listening to the ventriloquising of a creative writing tutor: butch Jude, given a sequinned dress, ‘xaminin it like it was an antique or special or cursed or burst’; Sparky squeezing his pet mouse to death because ‘i deserved it’. And sometimes Alan Bissett doesn’t bother throwing his voice: he just stands at the chalkboard with a pointer.

Sparky can be pressed into service as a metaphor for just about anything. The idiosyncratically local threatened by American homogenization. White western ignorance and prejudice. Small nation grandiosity. Class anxiety. The crisis of masculinity. Seven-stone weakling Britain joining bully Bush’s war on Iraq. The moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary culture.

In fairness, this is more an irritating review than a damning one. Bissett has written an ambitious novel with much to admire. Sparky is a terrific character. Jude’s mixed feelings for him – love and desperation at being trapped as his carer – are movingly portrayed. A less po-faced reader will find plenty of laughs. Bissett is unlucky in having to follow Jonathan Lethem’s take on the bullied-boy-turns-superhero theme, the spellbinding Fortress of Solitude. By comparison, Sparky’s superpowers seem little more than a gimmick: a sugar-coating for all that sociology. The Incredible Adam Spark is too weighted down by his multiple metaphoric significance ever to fly.

WE'VE MOVED BEYOND GRITTY URBAN REALISM, BUT ONLY AS FAR AS FALKIRK

Alan Bissett's second novel, The Incredible Adam Spark, has a distinct air of childlike naivety about it. Bissett's debut, Boyracers, appeared when the author was still a student, and was an adrenaline rush of a thing, detailing the extremes of life for a bunch of teenagers in sunny Falkirk. For this latest novel, Bissett hasn't strayed too far from that formula or from the town that he clearly knows so well. This time, however, the world is seen through the eyes of Adam Spark, a rather simple soul who has more than a trace of Forrest Gump about him.

Adam Spark's world is one dominated by Jude, his sister and lone carer, his love of Queen and superheroes, his job in a fast-food restaurant and the local gang who sometimes pick on him but sometimes allow him to run with them.

One thing to point out at this stage, if you're a fan of conventional punctuation and grammar, this is definitely not the book for you. Bissett throws all of that out of the window to create an energetic stream of consciousness narrative that is initially irritating but ultimately successful in dragging the reader along with it.

The character of Adam Spark is the most successful aspect of Bissett's book. There isn't much of a plot to speak of - his sister wants her independence, he saves a child and thinks he has special powers - but Spark is engaging and refreshingly ambiguous.

Unlike the narrator in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (to which this novel bears some resemblance), Spark isn't wholly innocent. Indeed, in his own simplistic way, he struggles between his good and bad sides throughout the book.

Although it's slightly disappointing that Bissett hasn't strayed too far from his debut for this follow-up, it is still an interesting and thought-provoking novel and, alongside Ewan Morrison's excellent collection of short-stories The Last Book You Read, makes for two more intriguing additions to the panoply of emerging Scottish fiction.

Adam Spark is 18 but has the mental age of an eight-year-old. 'Sparky', as he is known, lives with his big sister Jude in Falkirk, loves the rock band Queen and works in the local branch of a burger chain. With his limited understanding of what is going on around him, his life is not exactly sweet.

The gang from his estate, H-Glen Animalz, pick on him relentlessly, and he relies on feisty, kind-hearted Jude to defend him from the bullies. But one day an accident gives him some amazing super-powers and he has to work out how to use them.

As the novel's narrator, Sparky is a virtuoso literary creation. Alan Bissett made a splash with his debut Boyracers in 2001, a vibrantly energetic and poignant tale of teenage life in his Falkirk hometown. Now he is taking his animated and emotionally raw prose to another level with this tale of a learning-disabled outsider whose dogged optimism and angry confusion provide the novel's bittersweet heart.

Like its predecessor, The Incredible Adam Spark is packed full of references to popular culture - TV shows such as He-Man and Masters of the Universe films such as Finding Nemo and The Wizard of Oz, and music from The Blue Nile, Belle & Sebastian and Queen - but its basic plot is drawn from the traditional dilemma of comic-book superheroes.

Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the Hulk all had to choose between fighting for good or evil - just as Sparky must decide whether or not his powers should be used to save children or steal a new Rangers top from InterSport.

Written against the backdrop of the second Gulf War, which politically minded Jude bitterly opposes, this novel looks at the fine line between being a good guy or a bad guy. Sparky's inclinations are sound, but his anger at Jude for finding love outside their tight-knit sibling bond, and his pleasure when the H-Glen Animalz finally seem to take him under their wing, lead to some ethical quandaries. Sparky needs to work out who the baddies really are, and whether or not he is becoming one of them.

Bissett gives voice to Sparky's inarticulacy with short, grammatically chaotic sentences, capturing contemporary Scottish dialect in a much more upbeat style than Irvine Welsh's streetwise prose. Sparky's disingenuous voice, pondering the complexities of adult life, also has echoes of Mark Haddon's equally perplexed narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

But with his love of flipping burgers, his home-made superhero costumes and his passion for Queen guitarist Brian May, Sparky is a wonderfully unique character who manages to evoke both great sympathy and, at times, revulsion. Thanks to his idiosyncratic take on the world and some imaginative writing, this is a fresh and exciting read.

IS IT A BIRD? IS IT A PLANE? NO, IT'S A FALKIRK DAFTIE WITH A HERO COMPLEX

Adam Spark is a superhero. Possibly. It's hard to tell. The reader's sole source of information is Adam himself, and he has 'learning difficulties', or 'daftspazzymongol,' as they phrase it on the streets of Falkirk. An 18 year-old man-child, Adam can see mood-revealing auras, manipulate time, and chat with machines and animals. Unlike Superman, Adam shoplifts, exposes himself and beats up his sister's girlfriend; but then Clark Kent didn't grow up in Falkirk.

For his second novel, Alan Bissett tackles material recently explored by Jonathan Lethem. In The Fortress of Solitude, Men and Cartoons and The Disappointment Artist, Lethem has developed the argument that the fantasy genre is a sort of comfort food - consoling, yet dangerous when imbibed immoderately. Bissett doesn't deviate significantly from the thrust of Lethem's lesson.

Adam, a sci-fi fan, is autistic. Badly bullied, he finds respite and an element of self-definition in the comic-strip morality tales he adores. Within the past five years, his parents have died, or 'gone to Oz' as thinks, leaving his sister Jude in charge. Fat, gay and militantly right-on, Jude fearlessly protects Adam. Yet even she can't shelter her brother when he wanders from home, curiously seeking the approval of the thugs who persecute him. As the perennial patsy, Adam should draw sympathy. And the trajectory of the book heads towards the sort of feelgood fudge Hollywood would have no trouble endorsing.

'You always had the ability to alter your fate and those of others. That was your power, the power of everyone alive: to heal and not destroy, nurture instead of hate,' Adam learns at the novel's close in what looks dangerously like The Moral Of The Story. One might ask at this point, as Adam does of another character a page earlier: 'Why ye talkin like a Christmas card?'

Adam is no sweet Forrest Gump, however, nor is he Mark Haddon's human calculator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Adam's actually rather sinister. If his violence, racial harassment and fire-raising can be argued away as the result of manipulation, his attitude to children is harder to contain. At first it seems merely the standard concern of any superhero, or someone deluded enough to think he's one. But what are we to make of his admission that when he was 15 he had sex with a 13 year-old neighbour after a game of strip snap?

'I look at weans and ken that each of them man I could grab them take them away from their mam and dad,' he confides darkly. 'I could take that wean far far away where nobody could see it again oh aye.'

It's enough to make you wonder whether the repeated references to the latest Iraq war filling the background aren't meant to cure the reader to think of Adam as in some way a metaphor for America. Does Bissett believe the world's sole superpower is a rampaging idiot child on a mission to save regardless of the consequences?

Imperialism of a cultural variety can be detected in Bissett's use of language. An idiomatic mess of song lyrics, film quotes, advertising jingles and other forms of psychic dross, Adam's speech is an accurate depiction of the Scots spoken by a younger generation as culturally bound to the States as to the mitherland. It's a blunt instrument but also capable of occasionally capturing the deeper sense of something with its Beat-style mash-ups: see the way in which Adam describes the gang with 'bigdogfaces tongues out drool.'

While one is never quite sure whether Bissett intended his narrator to be so ambigious, and thematically, Letham has gazumped him, the author's use of the vernacular does, I think, represent something new.

It’s not enough just to use the English language these days, it seems; everyone wants to reinvent it. Daren King’s Boxy an Star and Tony White’s Foxy-T were written in ‘2 kool 4 skool’ idiolects which threw the grammar book out of the window, then went outside and stamped on it. The latest in this burgeoning genre (fukwitlit?) is written in Scots dialect with jazz spelling (‘ambyoolance’, ‘con-sen-trayt’), freeform spacing, and, like the books above, nothing so square as an apostrophe. Which frankly makes it fairly tough to get into. Get the lingo, though, and you’ll find a decent story of a comic-obsessed boy with Downs Syndrome failing to click that his sister and carer is a lesbian, that he’s not a superhero, and that he’ll never be employee of the month at his McJob. Ah, bless. What next though? Novels in crayon?

FALKIRK'S ONLY SUPERHERO

When the Glasgow-Edinburgh train pulls out of Falkirk you see the Hallglen estate on your left, a collection of grey-white buildings on a gently rising hill, a 1970s town planner's dream set in concrete. It's here that Alan Bissett, an affable 29-year-old lecturer in creative writing on Glasgow University's MLitt course, set his semi-autobiographical debut novel, Boyracers; here where he grew up, where his parents still live in a spotless terraced house next door to their daughter and her family; and here, too, where the hero lives in his latest novel, The I ncredible Adam Spark. It seems an obvious place to meet.

There's nothing quite like Alan Bissett's fizzy, upbeat fiction in the republic of Scottish letters. There are no great moral complexities here, no tangled, writhing plots. His critics would say his work lacks range, is over-simplistic, hasn't moved far enough away from Hallglen, much less Falkirk. Fans would argue that he doesn't need to: that he totally inhabits the mind of his main characters, and does so with wit and panache and a huge sugar-rush of energy.

In his new book, that means inhabiting the mind of Adam Spark, who works in a Falkirk burger bar, an 18-year-old with a mental age of eight and a half. In the absence of both his parents, Adam is emotionally dependent on his sister, Jude, a 21-year-old lesbian who, the reader can see but Spark cannot, is increasingly reluctant to carry on looking after him. Now a student in Glasgow, Jude has all her life to live and all her love to give: she will, quite clearly, survive. But will Adam? And should she stay or should she go?

Such a dilemma - when it was a question of whether to leave his friends in Hallglen and go to university - was one that formed the basis of Boyracers' plot and yet it's here again in the new novel. It seems a curiously old-fashioned theme, found more commonly in the 1960s, when the social consequences of being educated out of your class were first becoming apparent. At a time when family life has lost much of its lustre, when its ties have weakened, it often no longer seems a credible counterbalance to the opportunities education has to offer. Yet to Bissett it must have been.

The day I visited his parents' house, half a dozen relatives were also staying there and at his sister's next door. That, the large photos of the grandchildren on the walls, the inclusion in the new novel of a local song written by his grandfather, Bisset's own fond memories of those early, more community-minded days in Hallglen before council house sales made everyone start building high fences around their gardens and stop talking to each other - everything speaks of a place that might indeed have been hard to leave, or which, once left, would continue to haunt a writer's imagination.

"I was the first of the family to go to university, and at first I felt a bit of an oddity there [he was at Stirling, where he got a first in English]. It was only later that I felt a bit of pride about my working-class background and wanted to spend more time here. Now I feel it's a positive advantage." Boyracers, published five years ago when he was 24, tapped into that awareness of what had made his teenage years so different to middle-class norms. "It's really a rites of passage story, and I wrote it on a wave of confidence. It just took off."

The latest novel, which he wrote in the three years he was teaching English at Leeds University, had an altogether more difficult gestation. "I was thinking maybe I was one of those writers who had just one book in them," he says. "I was writing whole passages and junking them - I worked out that to end up with a 60,000-word novel I'd actually had to write 150,000 words. At first I tried writing it in standard English, but it was stillborn on the page. When I switched it into a Falkirk dialect, it started to fly."

Catching the character's voice is always, he says, the key to his fiction. His new novel only took off when he realised that the pattern of Adam's internal dialogue meant that he was a teenager with learning difficulties. "Adam can't analyse the world: it comes to him in a wall of sensation, and that's why you get the sounds things make too: it's the way that infants can't differentiate between the thing and the sounds it makes."

There's no subtlety about Adam Spark: he thinks, as it were, in the primary colours of a cartoon strip with sound effects to match ("His face fell doompf"). There are some loyalties - to the rock group Queen, to the burger chain that employs him, and to the Hallglen gang who he doesn't realise use him as a shoplifter and a figure of fun, while luring him into ever greater peril. After he is accidentally kicked in the head while trying to save a child, he starts seeing colours around people's heads as if they had auras: red for rage, orange for love, blue for fear and so on. Maybe, he convinces himself, such powers mean that he is a secret superhero.

Although both his novels are set in Falkirk and have teenage narrators, Bissett insists that the similarities end there. "Here I wanted to feel what it was like to be trapped inside the head of someone like Adam. I wanted it to be like Riddley Walker or A Clockwork Orange in that there'd be this difficult, confrontational language which would click in by about page four or five and lock the reader inside the story." Having a narrator with learning difficulties was a further challenge: large parts of the story have to take place in the reader's mind because they couldn't take place in Adam's.

Bissett is passionate and engaging in talking about writing: he is, one suspects, a great motivator for his creative writing students. He always wanted to be a writer, even as a child, which completely mystified his parents: theirs never was a bookish house.

He remembers the social pressure to conform as a teenager and how he always wanted to resist it. "To be popular you had to have the right haircut, the right jacket, trainers, jeans. I remember when I was 13 going to this club in Falkirk where all the under-agers used to hang out. I'd begged my mother to buy me this Pepe jacket which cost £50, which was way more than we could ever afford. But she'd bought me it and when I strode into the club everyone was admiring it, and I was really popular.

"It got nicked that night. When people asked me, I said it was in the wash. But I'm sure that moment when my jacket was nicked and I realised I was never going to be popular at school - that was the moment that I started being a writer."

Packed with more cultural references per page than the Guardian media section and the Independent combined, Alan Bissett’s witty debut novel is set in Scotland’s decaying dustbin, Falkirk. And, amazingly, despite the fact that you would be hard-pushed to find the place on any map, let alone think of it as a town brimming with action, it’s a terrific yarn. Told through the eyes of 15 year-old Alvin – tiny cock, virgin, teetotal, massive Pink Floyd fan – we’re taken on a breakneck tour of adolescence, as Alvin and his mates smoke pot at school, punch the living daylights out of each other at the bowling alley and muse about the perils of teenage life. Without ever becoming patronising, Bissett brilliantly uses instantly recognisable cultural icons (Irn-Bru, Radiohead, Only Fools and Horses) to get the reader deep inside the characters’ heads. Meanwhile, text messages and lines from songs and movies punctuate Alvin’s chatter, as he grapples with girls, exams and depression, before finally coming of age. Superb from start to finish.

THREE OUT OF FIVE STARS

For some time now, Kelman, Warner and Welsh have represented the establishment in Scottish fiction. They are clearly Alan Bissett’s masters in Boyracers. But this is a ‘nice’ book about ‘nice’ people. The only violence is an accidental broken leg and a wasp nearly swallowed, and the second sex act is consigned tactfully to a blank page. The exploits of four lads in their late teens from Falkirk are told from the point of view of the youngest, Alvin, who abandons his chums to go to Stirling University in a paler reflection of Renton’s departure for Amsterdam at the end of Trainspotting. The narrative is racy enough to mask the underlying sentimentality, engagingly intercut with excerpts from Alvin’s favourite albums.

Bissett has a fondness for interrupting an episode in mid-sentence (or even mid-word) to introduce parallel material. These are hardly ‘hard men’ (is that species at last dying out from Scottish fiction?) but Alvin’s dad and brother are suffused with a familiar male pathos, and each time the blank space denoted ‘mother’ is referred to, a lump unmistakably rises in the narrators’s (the author’s?) throat. Women, gays and Catholics are alien species, the focus of fascinated but repelled curiosity. The most rounded female character in the book is without doubt the car, Belinda.

The problem is that what looks, and is presented as, new, all too often proves depressingly familiar. But then, young novelists tend to come of age after imitating their forebears.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE IS NOT ALL ABOUT TEENAGE KICKS

Every night the boy racers drive round a circuit, the loop that is Falkirk town centre. They have other courses, away from the police, like an industrial car park outside Camelon, but the town centre is favourite.

Alvin and his pals are on the fringe, desperate to belong to something other than each other, looking for a purpose, determined to stay together no matter what happens.

There’s Alvin and Frannie and Dolby and Brian. Alvin’s still at school and is known as the Runt. Brian’s a barman, Frannie stacks shelves, and Dolby installs Jacuzzis, though he’s something of a closet philosopher.

Good at physics, he could have gone to Stirling University, but dogged school when Frannie and Brian dogged it and forgot his homework when they did, because, ‘ye dinnae dump her mates’.

Alvin’s dad is unemployed. He used to work at Grangemouth oil refinery, which is where Alvin reckons he’ll end up, and now stays at home, watching television and laughing at other people’s tragedy.

Alvin’s brother Dek is in London and their mother left ages ago, after putting her family through the hellish shame that is life with an active alcoholic.

It has left them without a centre, a family in name only. Alvin’s dad will only talk under pressure, preferring to remember the first time he saw his future wife at a local disco wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt.

They were punks. Their favourite song was by the Sex Pistols and dad spat into their wedding video camera. Alvin looks set to follow Dolby’s lead, until Dek comes back from London, unable to settle, convinced his mother is still alive.

This is one of the storylines Alan Bissett sets running but doesn’t develop. He concentrates on Alvin’s resolutions. He’s saving himself for Tyra Mackenzie and refuses to drink.

We watch this rites of passage, the slow realisation that there’s more to life than Falkirk, which takes him down the path Dolby, who temporarily changes his name to Uriel, rejected.

Were this simply a rites of passage novel, it would be good enough. Bissett writes with an autobiographical precision, which lays bare the awfulnesss of teenage expectation, love and the anxiety of adoration, not only for someone with whom any communication is a disaster, simply fuelling your feelings of inadequacy, but someone of a different class. Tyra Mackenzie drives to school.

He concentrates on teenage friendship, and the need to belong, the awareness that there is more to life than what they are experiencing, but this is all they’ll get.

‘If being a teenager was job you wouldn’t apply for it,’ says Alvin.

Everything is happening now. These guys need each other, have a shared series of interests and personal language.

They can recite Tom Cruise movies, U2 albums and know all there is to know about Glasgow Rangers and tangential bigotry.

This novel is unusual in the way it delineates a place and the effect environment has on individual expectations and ambitions. Their future is to be the same as their parents’.

And as we watch Alvin’s rejection of bigotry, his discovery that Tyra Mackenzie is not for him, that sex and booze can make an interesting if slightly volatile combination, and that life is to be found elsewhere, his escape makes existence for those who remain less bearable.

This is an exceptional first novel, whose natural language and, at times, silly experiments with layout, mean it won’t be where it should be on the Higher Still book list – required reading for those who understand and live its message.

JOY-RIDING AROUND FALKIRK

Leon McDermott joins the teenage boyracers driving around in circles.

Boyracers is, says Alan Bissett, ‘the first Great Falkirk Novel.’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ he admits, saying that it was just a joke. ‘I’ve just been saying, “oh aye, it’s the first Great Falkirk Novel” because all you hear about is who’s going to write the Great American Novel.’

And Falkirk, you think, seems about as far away from America as you can get. It’s also Bissett’s first novel. After having short stories published here and there, after editing a collection of new Scottish fiction, after high praise from the press, Boyracers is his leap into the world of the novel.

A breakneck dash through the backstreets of Falkirk and its satellite towns, a comedy, almost a tragedy, a caustic look at what has passed for culture in the last decade, Boyracers is the story of four teenagers, Alvin, Frannie, Dolby and Brian. Amusing themselves by tearing along the roads of their hometown in a car called Belinda. They’re bored with their lives, they’re bored with where they live, but they are, seemingly, stuck there.

‘Growing up somewhere – especially in small Scottish towns – you tend to think that they’re your whole universe, because you never leave them,’ he says, ‘It’s only when you grow up, you go away to university, you realise that nobody else gives a monkeys about what’s happening in Falkirk or Motherwell or wherever. But when you’re there, you feel like this is your whole universe, and you sort of stride through it like you’re Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone film.’

And that’s what Bissett’s four characters think; or at least that’s the image they try to project to everyone else. The truth, as eve, is a little more complicated. Alvin – younger than the other three, looking for role models who’ll put up with him – in particular is floundering. Like any other 15 year-old kid he wants to be like his friends; he wants to be a boyracer. But ‘they’re just driving around in circles,’ says Bissett. ‘Going in and out of housing schemes and then going home again.’

‘I remember doing that,’ he continues, ‘and at the start it was great, it was “Woo hoo!” and everything felt like a Bruce Springsteen album. And then, after about six months, it was like, well, is this it? Where are we going here, what are we actually doing?’

It’s this point that Alvin reaches; torn between going to university – ‘which everyone around him thinks is ridiculous, and he sort of doesn’t want to admit it to himself, it’d be like admitting he was gay or something’ – and being a boyracer –‘driving round council estates, listening to Bohemian Rhapsody’ – he can’t decide what he wants from life. He knows that he doesn’t want to end up still being a boyracer at 18 or 19. But going to university is anathema; as we find out in the book, Dolby didn’t go to university because ‘Dolby dogged school whenever Frannie and Brian dogged it, forgot his homework when Frannie and Brian forgot theirs, and said: “Ye dinnae dump yer mates.”’

Alvin’s navigation of the terrors of growing up, and the efforts of his mates to variously help and hinder his progress, are mined by Bissett for humour. There’s a misanthropic, sarcastic streak in here, well in tune with typically black Scottish humour, and Bissett’s acute depiction of the Scottish teenage boy, stuck in that curious limbo between kid and adult, is wonderfully vivid.

However, Alvin’s caught: he can’t decide what to do; he doesn’t even know if he can go to university, thinks Bissett, adding that’s all about politics, about consumption. The difference, he thinks, between Boyracers and books that have dealt with working class Scottish life before – like those of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh – is that ‘where Kelman and Welsh were speaking for the disempowered, against the society they were excluded from, this book’s very much about working class people that are locked within that society. They’ve got their Playstations and their cars and their mobile phones and all the accoutrements of participating in culture, but they’re still disempowered, and they don’t understand why. They’re still driving round in circles.

‘Culture at the moment,’ says Bissett, mock-sagely, ‘is just like being locked in a a shopping centre.’ He pauses, before hitting on an idea. ‘Right, if Trainspotting is the guys outside the shopping centre trying to get in, then Boyracers is the guys inside the shopping centre trying to get out.’

FOUR OUT OF FIVE STARS

There are times when Boyracers, with its talk about last year’s football results and this year’s U2 album, feels almost too contemporary, like the story cannot quite be finished yet. Alan Bissett’s first novel is crammed with references to sci-fi, film and musings on the Rangers and the Floyd (Pink not Keith).

Its protagonist Alvin is forced to juggle his Highers, road-running mates, troubled family life and love for the unattainable Tyra Mackenzie, plus the trials of getting into a pub when you’re only sixteen. He must make the time-honoured choice between moving on (to Stirling Uni) or staying put in Falkirk with the boys who are experiencing ever-increasing trouble with the local neds.

Bissett is an engaging writer, and his novel is a readable tale of growing up in difficult circumstances. But it is also an inspired look at life, in all its relentless tedium and occasional, glorious promise.

COMING STRAIGHT OUTTA... FALKIRK?

In the same way that UFOs seem to choose the most unexpected places to land, so Falkirk is emerging as the new hotbed of Scottish literary talent. Most recently featured in Janet Paisley’s Not For Glory, it is also the hometown of Brian McCabe and Gordon Legge. No doubt a scholarly thesis is already underway analysing its influence on these authors, imagination and fictional voice. Perhaps at last others will come out of the woodwork and, holding up their hands, say, I too was born there.

And now, in an unashamedly bittersweet paean to this undistinguished post-industrial town, Alan Bissett fires off a technicolour display of Falkirk special effects, racing us through the main drag and suburbs, the pubs and clubs, even the high school precincts in a giddy demonstration of the effects on an adolescent of the combined powers of fantasy and self-belief.

Boyracers is Bissett’s first novel and it shows. Unrestrained by nervousness, he unleashes a volley of continuous prose, unbroken by chapters, which never lets pace. Launched with the adrenaline rush of a bull entering the ring, Boyracers largely takes place in the company of four friends who spend an inordinate amount of time in a clapped-out car called Belinda. For 15 year-old Alvin, ‘Belinda’s the closest I’ve ever been to something which bears a woman’s name.’ She belongs to Dolby, who works for a whirlpool installation firm and who doggedly tries to teach the basics of Physics to an incomprehending Alvin. Still, Alvin is impresssed. ‘He’s a clever guy. He’s the only person I know who reads page two of the Daily Record, the bit with all the politics on it.’ With him are Brian, who runs a pub, and Frannie, a Tesco shelfpacker whose sexual conquests take place mainly in the presence of towering tins of beans.

Alvin’s virginity is a running joke. The youngest by a few years, he suffers for it in this and many other ways. Fondly named the Runt, he’s the one turned away at the club doors while the others saunter in. He’s also the one with the brightest future, although when we first meet him he has no intention of following any direction more challenging than that of his pals.

Bissett’s style is infectious and playful, a rollercoaster stream-of-consciousness-type giddiness and poignant flashback. Every conversation, every description is filtered through references to films and songs and television, as if life in Falkirk cannot be endured unless played out against a brighter backdrop.

And for Alvin, such influences are a lifeline. Home is not a happy place. His emotionally fragile father remains at heart the punk rocker he was when he married. Even when not at home, Alvin is disturbed by constant memories of the time when he and his older brother shared the responsibility of hiding booze from his mother, who, one day, disappeared from the family home. It was no work for a child, and some of Alvin’s childishness can be traced back to this.

Unreeling a buddy saga that veers between the crude, the visionary and the tender – often in the same breath – Bissett captures the sense of a teenager desperate to make something of himself, yet scared to step beyond the world with which he is comfortable.

In places Boyracers reads like a riff that’s gone on too long, but when it catches light it catches your heart with it. Alvin and his gang are good company. So too is Bissett’s prose, at times movingly perceptive as it reflects an adolescent’s awareness of how people behave. There is real emotion here, and gutsiness. There’s also a feeling for language so passionate it shames the dullness of so many sentences that make it into print.

GEORGE, LYNNE, PAGE 3 AND AN OLD BEAT-UP CAR

Skint student Alan Bissett is being hailed as the new Irvine Welsh after writing a novel about three wild Scottish Sun readers.

And like the Trainspotting creator, Alan has had film-makers beating a path to his door.

His book, called Boyracers, is built around three teenagers who charge around in their home town of Falkirk in search of fun, excitement and girls.

And it’s tipped as a British version of American ‘slacker’ flicks such as The Fast and the Furious and Gone in 60 Seconds.

Devoted Sun readers Frannie, Dolby and Brian talk about small-town life and their hopes for the future – with hilarious discussions about Page Three and cartoon-strip lovers George and Lynn.

But despite being hailed as a new star by serious literary boffins, Alan, 25, is still living off beans while he completes his studies at Stirling University.

Alan said: ‘I was becoming so bored with uni that I decided to write a book based on my experiences when I was a bit younger.

‘At the time I just treated it like a trip down memory lane, but when people read it they said that it was so good I should approach a publisher.

‘Since then I have been on a bit of a rollercoaster ride – I can’t believe the reaction this has caused.’

For years, Alan raced round the streets with his pals in a clapped-out Citreon that they nicknamed ‘Belinda’.

He said: ‘I was just like any other teenager. Going out and looking for some fun was what it was all about.

‘We all read The Sun and we had lots of discussions about it.

‘In one of the scenes in the book Ally McCoist fan Frannie wonders if Lynne has ever been drawn fully-clothed and goes on to talk about how good-looking the girls on Page Three are.’

In real life, Alan gave up his hot-rod lifestyle and his tearaway mates after gaining a place on an English course at Stirling.

He said: ‘I’ve kind of become a lot more sensible these days. Going to uni was a totally different experience for me.

‘From hanging about on the streets to studying in the library – it came as a bit of a shock.’

Now he hopes his amazing success will signal the end of years spent scrimping and saving every penny.

He said: ‘It’s a good feeling waving goodbye to all those loans and bills, but I’ll still have to be sensible.

‘The book could be set in any Scottish town as it’s more about what happens to you when you’re growing up than anything else.

Everybody has the same worries when they’re teenagers. How you look, who you fancy and how people treat you feel like the most important things in the world.

‘For years people have written about the Scottish mountains, Scottish history and tartan but Scottish literature has so much more to offer.’

For the last three years, Alan has worked part-time in a bookshop to make ends meet.

Ironically he is now selling his OWN book.

He said: ‘For a while they made me wear a t-shirt saying “Ask Me About Boyracers”, which was kind of embarrassing.

‘But then I don’t suppose it’s every day one of their staff writes a book that gets published.

‘I had a book launch there last week which was surreal, but it was back to the usual shift on Saturday.

‘I’m due to finish uni in October and I’ll probably have to find a job.

‘I have a few ideas about another book, but I don’t want to become one of those people who forget where they came from, so I’ll be keeping my feet firmly on the ground.’

By the way, Karen's a smashing girl, but I didn't say all that stuff about the characters in Boyracers reading The Sun or anything.

The publicity would have you believe that Falkirk-born Alan Bissett is the next Irvine Welsh. He isn't, though the milieu - growing up bored and bad in some hole no one cares about - will be familiar to Welsh fans. Boyracers is the most frustrating novel I've read in ages. Not only do you have to cope with a dialect-fest every time someone opens their mouth, the entire book is written in the kind of whirling stream-of-conscious cant that often has you reading aloud and wondering what the hell it all means. Bissett's narrative disintegrates and he uses pop culture references the way a Tourette's patient uses obscenities. All up, Boyracers lacks the finesse and integrity of vision that writers like Welsh and Nick McDonell bring to their edgy, streetwise fiction for the whatever generation.

POWER OF BLOOD HAUNTS THE SHIFTING FOCUS OF THE GOTHIC

This anthology of Gothic fiction brings together many of Scotland’s literary heavyweights, along with a couple of newcomers. The list of established contributors is impressive: John Burnside, Michel Faber, Janice Galloway, Jackie Kay and Ali Smith are some of the big names represented here. But the book gives rise to some wider questions which are not fully resolved: is there such a thing as a Scottish Gothic mode of writing – and if so, what are its distinguishing features?

One of the sharpest contributions is ‘Like a Pendulum in Glue’ by Toni Davidson, the author of Scar Culture (Canongate). Set entirely in a sado-masochistic sex club, Davidson’s story plays with the Hollywood clichés of Frankenstein’s castle – dungeons, chains, darkness, dislocation, paranoia, deformity, fear of confinement – and it builds to a genuinely nasty conclusion.

‘The sound of his footsteps, the throb of music faded until all he could hear was the snarl of a whip. A strangely angular man stood in front of one of the walls, raising the whip and then bringing it down, sending the dust from the loose bricks flying in clouds around him.’

Davidson isn’t afraid to explore the trashy aspects of Gothic film and writing, which have been fully absorbed into the underground culture of S&M. What is all this, his story asks, about the secret pleasure of being whipped in a dungeon? Or even, perhaps, the pleasure of reading about being whipped? Davidson shows us clearly that the meaning of ‘the Gothic’ is not a historical given, but keeps shifting around as time moves on.

John Burnside’s story, ‘The Final Weight of all that Disappears’, follows a woman to the edge of insanity after she accidentally discovers the disfigured body of a girl who has been tortured and killed.

Sally, the main character, is surprised by her own reaction to the fact of murder: she doesn’t cry out or run away. She simply takes it all in, observing details. Later she is haunted by a strange recurring dream, involving a magician’s box at a circus where are no real deaths.

Along with the unavoidable dream comes a heightened awareness of the omnipresence of death: ‘It had something to do with the way things disappeared: how, even while you were alive, pieces of your body were flaking away – strands of hair, broken fingernails, scrubbed skin. Memories that had once been vivid and clear melted down to nothing.’

Burnside – whose first novel, The Dumb House, was a good example of the Gothic shocker – shows himself once again to be adept at this form of writing. If all of his short stories could be as memorable as this one, he should be encouraged to produce more of them.

The poet, Magi Gibson, also turns in a fine performance here. Her story, ‘Dream Lover’, is a study in monomania. It begins quietly enough, but surprises the reader by the way in which it artfully winds up the tension in the final pages.

A husband persuades himself that his wife is carrying on with another man. He begins sharpening his knives, plotting terrible revenge for a ‘crime’ which probably has no existence outside of his head. Gibson’s emphasis is on those psychological areas of darkness which are too little explored elsewhere in this collection.

Alan Bissett’s introduction is more interesting than persuasive. He states but declines to demonstrate a bold central proposition, namely that Scottish fiction is ‘haunted by itself – in a perpetual state of Gothicism.’

James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson are the writers who best suit Bissett’s thesis, but he struggles to find fully convincing up-to-date examples.

The idea of the Gothic which the collection puts forward ultimately means no more than ‘a return to the power of blood’ as the editor puts it.

Yet, if it is indeed true that Gothic writing amounts to a mere preoccupation with blood, we might argue that it has always been with us, at least since the 19th Century, whether in bloodthirsty thrillers of pursuit and espionage, or in contemporary American horror and slasher writing.

I would say that the only distinctively Scottish story in this book is ‘Mouse’ by James Robertson, a nightmarish account of rat infestation, which is narrated throughout in Scots.

There is considerable satisfaction to be had from this anthology, but only if you are prepared to disregard the critical posturing of the introduction and to immerse yourself in the stories. Gothic fiction, it seems, is bigger than most of our attempts to theorise it.

FROM CRACKS IN OUR PSYCHE THE DEMONS COME CRAWLING

The world is a fragile place. It may seem solid enough, with its unshakeable rules and scientific certainties: a=πr2, day follows night, death follows life and the dead cannot walk among the living. And yet how easily those foundations are rocked. A sleepless night, a touch of fever or a drop of whisky too many are all it takes to bring impossible demons howling from the void. A whispering wind, an absent partner, news of a break-in two doors down – all are enough to send disembodied footsteps echoing through the house. The worst is that once terrestrial boundaries have been blurred and another realm glimpsed, it is impossible to re-enter the same world with the same confidence.

The Gothic, says Damage Land editor Alan Bissett, is ‘that which is going on beneath the world – that which we’d rather ignore.’ Except that story-tellers won’t let us. For thousands of years they have thrilled us with tales of things not quite understood. The so-called ‘Gothic novelists’ of the 18th Century, who has such an influence on the Romantic poets as well as authors such as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, were continuing a tradition that began when the first insomniac opened her eyes and found only darkness.

The Gothic is not a genre but a ‘way of seeing,’ says Bissett, and Damage Land presents 20 perspectives on the underworld. From Michel Faber comes the tale of an urban couple who disintegrate into the same level of savagery as the wildcat they have accidentally injured. From Jackie Kay comes a housewife with ‘fork and knife disorder’ who confronts the heart of darkness at the bottom of her cutlery drawer. There is nothing hackneyed about these stories, each offering a contemporary twist on the turrets-and-ravens concept of Gothic.

If I have one quibble with Damage Land it is over the editor’s attempts to present these stories as examples of a particularly Scottish genre. True, the country has flung up some cracking creepy yarns and Bissett lists an appendix including Robert Burns’s ‘Tam O’Shanter’ and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters and Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing? The parameters of Gothic are stretched so wide they become almost meaningless.

Bissett’s list of Scottish Goths does little to support his thesis that the nation’s fascination for the genre springs from ‘the Scottish psyche’, which stems from ‘being cast as underdog in the dialectic of power, from our being subsumed in our own culture and in that of a stronger nation’s’. He believes that ‘there is a place where the two halves do not meet. Damage. And what rough beasts emerge’ Fantasy – at which Scotland has always excelled – is perhaps a method of re-imagining that lost part of our identity...’

This notion of a veritable Calder Park zoo’s worth of phantasms emerging from the gulf where our national identity ought to be is fascinating. But what is Bissett invoking when he talks of Scotland’s ‘collective imagination’? Michel Faber was raised in Holland and Australia. Linda Cracknell moved from Devon 10 years ago and Jackie Kay lives in Manchester. What is the Scottish quality that distinguishes Stevenson’s tales from those of Poe? Something to do with the underdog’s talent for imagining itself out of oppression, apparently. ‘We display a curious habit of “dreaming” ourselves great rather than actually being great (Flower of Scotland, maybe, as case-in-point’. Oh, come on.

Yet Damage Land is undiminished by this fanciful piece of jingoism. Bissett’s contemporary take on the Gothic is intelligent and the quality of contributions is high. It might not send you to bed shivering, but it might change the way you think abou the border between the intelligible world and the world that haunts your nightmares.

IT’S GOTH THE LOT

Alan Bissett could not have planned this better. We’re sitting in a coffee shop in Stirling, watching wet Thursday morning shoppers walk past the window. Bissett is talking about Damage Land, a collection of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’ which he’s edited, featuring stories from (among others) Janice Galloway, Laura Hird, Michel Faber, Ali Smith, John Burnside and Toni Davidson.

He’s not talking about Gothic as a genre – ‘that’s different; it’s all vampires and crypts, and can get very hackneyed’ – rather, he’s talking about gothic as a way of seeing things.

‘It’s all about looking under the surface. Peeling back the nice, safe tourist attraction top layer of Scots culture and taking in the seething mass of weirdness underneath.

‘There are all these Scottish love-story anthologies, and whatever, so I thought, given Scottish culture’s associations with the gothic, it would make sense to have a gothic anthology,’ says Bissett.

‘And a lot of the people I’ve spoken to since then – all the contributors, and a few others – have said, “I’ve always seen the gothic elements in my work, which have always been there, but which nobody’s actually gone on to discuss before.”’

The gothic aspect, then, is the ‘distorted mirror’. It is, he says, ‘the thing underneath everyday life and civilisation that we don’t want to confront. It’s something that’s very relevant to Scotland, and if you look at all of the great Scottish writers, almost all of them have written in the Gothic mode.’

Bissett cites James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner in particular, which is, he argues, ‘not only the great Scottish novel, but is more and more being considered one of the great gothic novels.’

And then, he says, it hit home: this was a concept that would work very well. ‘Scotland and the Gothic have quite a long-standing association,’ Bissett explains, ‘The whole folk tradition in Scotland – Tam O’Shanter, and all the folk legends – it’s all talking crows and people being hung, or it’s the devil.

‘There’s a very macabre element to all of it, and Scotland as nation, as a stereotype, has always been associated with the wild and the barbaric.’

A quick glance around the cafe reveals nothing very barbaric, or anything that might seem even just a little out of the ordinary. And then it happens.

‘Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but hear what you and your friend were talking about,’ says someone at another table, addressing Bissett. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

It’s a man, aged 50, maybe 60 years old, matted grey hair curling at the ends, an ashtray brimming with spent cigarettes in front of him.

‘Go ahead,’ replies Bissett.

‘Lennon,’ says the man. ‘John Lennon. If you look at his work, he had to have been some kind of genius, to work within the confines of the Oracle. He was true to the work, but how come he never produced anything?’

Bissett looks momentarily lost and is thrown by all of it. An attempt to answer his question only encourages the old man, and for the next 10 minutes, he talks away, hinting at some vast conspiracy involving the Beatles, ‘children of a lesser god’, the ‘three or four’ crossroads which people reach in their lives, the difference between the sins of the guilty and the sins of the innocent, enamel, breathing problems, and the power of gravity.

It’s a bravura nut-job performance, and leaves both of us staring into our coffees, wondering if even the caffeine is part of the conspiracy.

I wonder if this is what Bissett is talking about: the weird, the bizarre, the sinister, that’s underneath the veneer of ordinary Scotland. After all, what is more normal than a high-street cafe.

‘I’ll tell you what’s Gothic,’ says Bissett with a grin, ‘Mad guys ranting away in coffee shops.’