Focalisation, Flight and flânerie: James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late and the crime novel

This paper analyses James Kelman’s 1994 novel How Late It Was, How Late through the prism of the crime novel and the figure of the flâneur. The novel revolves around Sammy, a Glaswegian criminal with a fondness for ‘wandering’, and who loses his sight after a violent encounter with the police. We argue that Sammy’s sight loss can be seen as emblematic of the dispossession experienced by marginalised working-class people whom the surveillance state seeks to supervise at every turn. Moreover, the novel’s peculiar third-person focalisation, in which we seem to inhabit the point of view of the protagonist without having full access to his secrets, implicates the reader in the very systems of surveillance from which Sammy is seeking to take flight. Moreover, in exploring how language is policed and dictated by the state, the novel seemed to anticipate some of the controversies attending its Booker Prize victory, especially as concerns its urban demotic and gritty subject matter. Sammy is a blind flâneur trapped in a Kafkaesque carceral society which has transformed the once-familiar city streets into a labyrinth. We therefore argue that How Late It Was, How Late is less a work of urban realism than a self-reflexive reworking of the crime novel.