KANE'S LADDER
by Carlos Alba
Polygon, 266pp, £12.99 IF THERE'S ONE THEME dominating Scottish fiction right now it's Glasgow childhoods. Last month, with Kieron Smith, Boy, James Kelman took us uncompromisingly inside the
skull of his Govan-born protagonist from the age of about six to the onset of puberty; this month Anne Donovan's Being Emily (see Page 20) has an artistic Glasgow teenage girl trying to hold her family together in the face of tragedy. Now along comes journalist Carlos Alba with an assured, enjoyable, warm-hearted debut about a ten-year-old boy growing up in Pollokshields that seems on occasion to be a synthesis of the two.
Of course, there are yawning differences too. Where Kelman gives us a ten-year-old's mind without the slightest hint of sentimentality, Alba piles it on thick, with dollops of pathos as a side order. But Kelman's Kieron Smith would probably get on well with Alba's Steve Duff: both have very proper mothers who "correct" the way they speak, both look enviously at their Govan contemporaries' lives; both have older, swottier, brothers, a keen awareness of class divisions and – this is obviously buried deep in the young Protestant Glasgow psyche – a secret fascination with Catholicism.
Of the three writers, Alba writes the least convincingly from a child's point of view. Although Steve's story of his apple-thieving escapades and the crumbling of his parents' marriage is told in the first person, an adult sensibility is evident throughout. Steve might well be thrilled, for example, to get Dixie Dean's autograph, but he would probably not compare it to a Canaletto. He might notice how different his brother's nose is to his own, but he would be unlikely to reach, so early, for the adjective "aquiline", and even if he did, he probably wouldn't use such phrases as "reference points" or "objective assessments".
But let's not get too snooty here. It's only when you read Kelman that you realise how many other childhood narrators are mere acts of adult ventriloquism. That's why such tales have a default mode of sentimentality: all the time, the hidden adult narrators are looking back with a mix of pity and affection at their younger selves, erasing the raw incomprehension that seemed such a part of childhood at the time, making sense of everything with hindsight.
At its worst, Alba's portrait of a 1970s Glasgow childhood is dotted with the kind of references that belong more in stand-up comedy monologues about childhood than in childhood itself (when you don't, after all, know what the keys to future nostalgia will be). You know the sort of thing. Remember when you got your sex education from mud-covered "nuddie mags"? Remember how embarrassed you'd feel when another kid saw you in your Joe 90 pyjamas? How much you wanted that chopper bike? How you had to pretend you knew all about the plot for Godfather II even though you were ten at the time and the film had an 18 certificate?
Early on in the book, there were moments when I thought this was all that Kane's Ladder would add up to – a fictionalised version of Where Did It All Go Right?, Andrew Collins's memoir of "growing up normal in the 1970s". There's the same frustrated wish for adventure, the same resentment at being so ordinary that "the most thrilling thing that ever happened in our house was when a soufflé collapsed" – and as you can tell from that phrase, the same barely suspended adult sensibility.
Yet even though these faults never completely go away, Kane's Ladder has gradually compensating strengths. Alba is good on dialogue (those Godfather II playground discussions are genuinely funny), and keeping the plot within a tight timeframe gives Alba's novel a sharper focus than either Kelman or Donovan's own Glasgow childhood novels.
So yes, it's a sentimental, feel-good story of growing up that never rings completely true. But so sure is Alba's grasp of his characters (all of whom credibly evolve over the course of the book), so confident is his dialogue, so unerring his sense of comedy, pathos and bathos, that here is a Glasgow childhood to treasure.
The full article contains 704 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
