Book review: Who’s Aldo? by Colin Burnett
Who’s Aldo? is a sort of sequel to Colin Burnett’s first work of fiction, A Working-Class State of Mind. That book, written like its successor, in what is described as “East Coast Scots”, of which more later, met with high praise, not all from the usual suspects. Echoes of Irvine Welsh and even James Kelman have been recognized, though Burnett is a more genial writer than the former, less ambitious than the latter. Now that publishers can no longer look for many reviews of most books in newspapers and magazines, it is customary for them to collect as many pre-publication endorsements as possible, and these present almost every new book as a masterpiece. They rarely are of course, and that may be said of Who’s Aldo?
Masterpieces, after all, are rare and precious. It’s usually enough for a book to be good and enjoyable without saddling it with excessive praise. Who’s Aldo? is a collection of stories more or less linked. Aldo Ali is an engaging character, now timid, now bold, now at a loss, now competent. He has friends whom he is always ready to help and enemies whom he is quick to thump. There is violence in the book but it is mock-violence; the blood is cosmetic. Aldo has boxed – successfully, he says – and is now ready to train young fighters, for whom he acts as a stern father or at least elder brother.
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Hide AdHe has his own fearful moments. A visit to the local Health Centre reduces him to a gibbering wreck – a nice piece of comic exaggeration. Happily, he can’t be too concerned with his own state of health – he has other responsibilities. Chief of them is the new love in his life, his two year-old dog Bruce. He spoils him splendidly – his birthday party is a glorious extravaganza – and he is suitably indignant when Bruce is accused of impregnating a Labrador in the park.
All this is engaging. Who’s Aldo? is an agreeable and lively example of a genre best described as 21st century urban Kailyard. That’s to say, it is true to life viewed through sentimental glasses; true to life, but life that is softened and made agreeable by an essential kindness. Just as authors like Barrie and the other Kailyarders pleased their readers by the use of couthy rural Scots, so Burnett now gives his work a certain verisimilitude by the use of the Street Scots of Leith, vigorous though coarsely limited in range.
It ought to make for easy reading, just as A Window in Thrums was in its time – and indeed still is, to some extent anyway. Yet Who’s Aldo? is not always easy reading – though easier if you read it aloud. This is because what passes for East Coast Scots is much of the time merely Scotified English, that’s to say, the English of a newspaper like this one, given a phonetic turn. Words and sentences which may look strange on the page are clearly comprehensible if you sound them in your head. So, for instance, when you read that Bruce’s birthday party was “the maist socht efter event ae the year”, I suspect that many readers, as first puzzled, will enjoy these stories only if they sound the words – which is not how one usually reads fiction.
It's a bold venture writing in any form of Scots – and how far anyway does this “East Coast Scots” go? Certainly not as far north as Aberdeen or even Dundee. Burnett, I should say, brings it off pretty well, perhaps as well as it can be brought off, and the stories are light and amusing. But it’s a limited view of life, as limited as the stories in my great-aunt’s People’s Friend and People’s Journal used to be 70 or 80 years ago. Once you accustom yourself to the orthography, the stories are enjoyable, but Burnett is a talented writer capable of deeper and more significant work.
Who’s Aldo? by Colin Burnett, Tippermuir Books, £11.99.