Curious Joe

Pack Men, a sequel of sorts to Bissett’s first novel Boyracers, takes place over the course of a single day – that of Rangers’ appearance at the 2008 UEFA Cup final in Manchester. Alvin, the teenage hero of Boyracers, returns here as a mid-twenty-something narrator reunited somewhat awkwardly with mates Frannie and Dolby plus a minibus full of fans travelling to see the match. Our knowledge that the day will climax in a riot involving fans and police in the centre of the city hangs over the story, providing it with an inevitable endpoint.

Simply by writing a book which focuses in part on sectarian bigotry as expressed through football, Bissett has done something brave and important. Despite the prominence of the Old Firm rivalry in Scottish society, very few art works have tackled it head on. Does he do the subject justice? At the moment, I’m going to go for a cautious ‘yes’. Bissett avoids painting Old Firm fans as mindless or one-dimensional, and goes a decent way towards suggesting why they might behave as they do. And the presentation of the riot, its build up and its aftermath benefits simply from the depth of realistic description.

There has always been a strong and undisguised strain of autobiography in Bissett’s work, and this novel is no exception. This means that at one level it’s not appropriate to criticise any aspect of his description of the riot, or to infer any ideological motivation behind the way Rangers fans’ behaviour is portrayed – this may well simply be what happened.

But still, it’s hard to not to feel uncomfortable with parts of the novel’s stance on sectarianism – by implying that accusations of bigotry largely stem from feelings of shame and disgust about the Scottish male working class generally, and serve to make the accuser feel better about themselves and distance themselves from their backgrounds, Pack Men comes close to leaving us with no position from which to legitimately criticise it.

At times it also comes close to suggesting that football bigotry for most is a harmless ritual that people engage in to give meaning to their lives but do not actually believe in the values of – while this may well be true in some cases it seems dangerous to take it as the norm.

There are also more familiar elements to the novel. Pack Men continues Bissett’s long running use of typographical experiments, interrupting the run of the prose with, for example, a presentation of the lads planning their trip as the minutes of a company meeting. An even stronger continuity is the closeness of the prose to the spoken voice. An affinity for spoken language has always been a part of Bissett’s work and has been reinforced over the last couple of years through his project the Moira Monologues, a series of spoken word performances which has introduced him to a much wider audience. It’s no surprise that several of his novels have already been commissioned for film and TV versions. Bissett just does have a knack of capturing the way people speak, and his work always reads well out loud. Check this Moira Monologues extract for proof:

While as mentioned above the focus on football is new, the general social setting is very recognisable – working class, male, booze and testosterone driven completion within a group – as is Alvin’s relationship to it – simultaneous feelings of pride and shame, a recognition that university education has separated him linguistically and socially from his old friends. These are effectively regular fixtures of modern Scottish fiction. There’s something intriguing about the structure of this novel, though, the way it plays with your expectations and gradually pulls you to places you didn’t expect. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that Alvin’s feelings of class alienation include a crisis of sexual identity. This is something unexpected within the macho world and voice of the novel, but it works because of the respect Bissett has for his readers and the gradual way that he works up to it.

As I gathered my thoughts on the novel, I started to notice uncanny similarities amongst the books I’ve recently been reviewing. In particular, the overlaps between Pack Men and Ever Fallen in Love felt significant. Both dig gradually into memories, both reflect on class identity, twenty-something malaise and stalled hopes and both have at their heart the emotional impact of sexual encounters at university which ‘must never be spoken of again’.

In other words, the novels are about repression, and this psychological edge is a large part of what makes them compelling.

Euan McClymont is Curious Joe’s resident book critic, follow us on Facebook to keep up to date with his reviews.