By Adam Page
Every few years, almost like clockwork, the publishing industry tells itself a very specific type of lie, and it always wears the same coat. It calls itself “discovery,” or “giving voice to the voiceless.” It will throw a launch party, usually in a converted warehouse with a cash bar and canapés shaped like little lumps of coal. And somewhere in that room will be a man who has never paid his own gas bill in cash, and he will raise a glass to “authenticity.” I’ve stumbled into these rituals a few times now, in Belfast, in Edinburgh, once in a hotel bar in Dublin which smelled like spilled prosecco and moral compromise, enough times to know exactly what it is. It is grave-robbing with a marketing budget. And the grave, this time around, is the tenement.
It’s that which I want to talk about; the single-end, the close, the stair, the room-and-kitchen. Call it what you like depending on which side of the Irish Sea or the Clyde you’re standing on, but it has become one of the most reliable pieces of real estate in British and Irish fiction, and like most reliable real estate, somebody is getting rich off it who has never had to live there. The tenement novel isn’t dead, but I think it’s worse than that. It has been renovated. Somebody has come along and sanded the damp off the walls, put in a skylight, and it now renting it out to people who want to feel something authentic for £22.99, next-day delivery, gift-wrap available.
Let me start with the men who actually knew what they were writing about, because the rot only really set in after those who built the form were shoved out of the room.
Patrick MacGill wrote Children of the Dead End in 1914 with the calluses still fresh on his hands. He had been a navvy, a tattie-hoker, a Donegal boy sold (and I mean sold, indentured and auctioned like livestock at the hiring fairs) into the potato fields and railway cuttings of Scotland before he was old enough to shave. He didn’t observe the tenement from a research grant, he lived and slept in it. The book almost literally reeks of it; the stink of the overcrowded rooms, the smell of wet wool and coal smoke that never leaves your clothes no matter how many times you wash them, and you can’t afford to wash them enough. MacGill wrote rage, not atmosphere. Ho wrote about the priests who were colluding with the landlords, about a boy who was driven half-mad by exploitation, and about a system designed with the same cold precision as a machine designed exactly to grind up the poor and call that grinding “opportunity.” It wasn’t a genre story he was writing, but the penning of a testimony, and testimonies have a habit of becoming inconvenient once the people who suffered them are safely dead and can’t object to how they’re repackaged.
Now look at what happened to the form after that first generation of witnesses started dying off, and you should notice the timing here also, as timing is never innocent. Alan Sillitoe came along in 1958 with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and gave us Arthur Seaton; Nottingham and the lathe, the fighting, the fucking, the drinking, the entire glorious middle finger raised straight at every institution that ever tried to tell a working man what he was for. Sillitoe knew the bicycle factories because he’d worked in one, and he also knew the rage wasn’t decorative; it was structural, and the only sane response available to a man who correctly understood that the system had already decided what he was worth before he was born. It was a declaration of war written by a conscript, not an example of the misery-lit that has become so fashionable.
Then James Kelman shows up a few decades later and does something seemingly even more dangerous than rage: he refused to translate. How Late It Was, How Late doesn’t come with a handy phrasebook, or pause to explain the Glasgow patter to some imagined reader in Hampstead who needs a glossary at the back like they’re touring some foreign country. Kelman’s prose isn’t performing working-class Scottishness for an audience; it just is working-class Scottishness, unapologetic and uninterested in your comfort, and the refusal to translate is the single most political act available to a writer working in this tradition. It says clearly: this is not for you to consume, and this is not a safari. If you can’t follow the rhythm of how these people really talk, that’s a problem with you ear, not the prose.
Kelman was awarded the Booker Prize for it in 1994, and you’d think that would be the vindication, the moment the gatekeepers finally opened the gate for good. You’d be wrong. Rabbi Julia Neuberger threatened to resign from the panel if the book won, calling the decision a “disgrace” and that “Kelman is deeply inaccessible for a lot of people.” Simon Jenkins, a columnist for The Times called the award “literary vandalism,” disgusted by the very idea that a novel that profane, that stubbornly Glaswegian, that unwilling to perform for the room, could be crowned literature at all. And to me, there it is; the whole rotten architecture laid bare in one tantrum at an awards dinner. The prize can be given, grudgingly, through clenched teeth, as a kind of hostage exchange, but God forbid the form actually succeeded on its own terms without someone in a dinner jacket clutching their pearls about “readability.”
So that’s the lineage; witness, declaration, and refusal. Three different weapons, but the same war. Now let’s talk about what’s been done with the corpse since.
Because there is something that nobody in publishing wants said out loud at those self-congratulatory parties with the canapés: the tenement, the estate, the close, the have become setting in the worst sense of that word. Setting in the same way that a stage set is setting. Painted flats you can wheel offstage when the show’s done and the reviews are in. There is now a whole cottage industry, and I’m using the word “cottage” with all the venom it deserves as these people wouldn’t last a week in an actual cottage with damp coming through the plaster, built around producing misery for consumption by people who will never have to live inside the misery they’re consuming. Poverty as mood-lighting and deprivation as prestige-TV backdrop. You can smell it in certain prize-shortlisted fiction now, like you can smell a candle that’s trying too hard to smell like “rain on the cobblestones.” Some committee-approved simulation of hardship which has been manufactured in a lab, with none of the chemical composition of the real thing.
The tell is always the same, if you watch for it. When a novel about grinding urban poverty spends more sentences on the texture of that poverty; the peeling wallpaper rendered in near pornographic detail, the exact grain of damp on a close ceiling, the picturesque squalor of it all, than on the mechanisms that produced it, you are not reading working-class fiction any more. You’re reading a brochure, poverty tourism with better prose style, and the fact that the prose style is good makes it more insidious, not less. A clumsy con is easy to spot, but a beautifully written one gets adapted for the screen and wins prizes.
And this is where the rage really needs to focus, because it isn’t enough to just say “some of this is fake.” The actual crime, and I mean crime in the fullest sense, theft with a byline, is who gets paid. MacGill wrote from inside the wound and died pretty much broke and half-forgotten, buried without the fanfare his testimony deserved. Meanwhile, a certain kind of contemporary novelist, usually two generations removed from any real scarcity, can now go slumming in the archive and extracting the aesthetic of hardship; the closes, the patter, the razor gangs and sectarian graffiti, all strip-mined for texture, and walk away with a six-figure advance and a seat on a festival panel about “giving voice to communities that have been overlooked.” Well…overlooked by whom, exactly? Certainly not the people who lived there: they were never asking to be discovered. They were just asking to be paid a living wage and be left the hell alone by slumlords and Poor Law guardians and every polite institution that found their suffering administratively convenient.
This is the con at the absolute centre of it all: in the marketplace, the tenement novel gets treated as though its value is the misery itself, a raw material like coal, to be extracted, refined and sold, rather than the political analysis the original writers were really doing. MacGill wasn’t cataloguing squalor for its texture, he was building a case against the men who profited form it. Sillitoe wasn’t trying to romanticise the lathe, he was diagnosing the entire apparatus which turned a man into an attachment for a machine. And Kelman wasn’t performing dialect for a Radio 4 audience, he was refusing the whole premise that dialect needs performing at all. If you strip all the political rage out of that fiction, you’re left with nothing but the furniture, the wallpaper, stairwells, and accents, and furniture is exactly what the middle-class reader wants. Furniture doesn’t argue back, and it doesn’t ask why you’re standing in the room in the first place.
I’m not saying any of this to suggest the middle-class reader should be banned at the door, that’s not the argument and any critic who tells you the argument is “only the working class can read working-class fiction” is selling you a different, and dumber con. The argument is about extraction, and who controls the means of representation, which is really just the old means of production wearing a different collar. A middle-class reader who picks up Kelman and lets the prose refuse them, lets it sit there uncomfortable and untranslated and unresolved, that reader is doing something almost like justice. A middle-class writer, on the other hand, mining the same material and filing off the political serration and selling it back as a heritage-bound misery with a moody cover and a font that looks like it was stencilled onto a factory wall by a marketing intern who has never set foot inside a factory, well that’s a completely different animal. That is not literature engaging with class. That’s class being repackaged as content, and content, as we all know by now, is the only thing this rancid economy still knows how to sell.
The publishers, of course, know exactly what they’re doing, as they always know exactly what they’re doing; their innocence act is one of the oldest in the business. They’ll tell us they’re “platforming under-represented voices” in the same sentence they explain why the marketing budget for the actual working-class debut novelist is just a fraction of what gets spent dressing up the middle-class author’s version of the same territory in a jacket photo of soot-streaked tenement stairs, professionally lit and professionally soot-streaked because God forbid the real soot get anywhere near the catering.
So who owns the tenement novel? Legally, nobody. Copyright lapses, MacGill’s been dead since 1963 and there’s no estate collecting royalties on the concept of a close. But ownership was never really a legal question, was it? It’s a question of who the form still serves. And right now, watching those shelves fill up with beautifully bound, critically adored, and thoroughly detoxified simulations of the very conditions the original writers were trying to burn down, I’d say the answer is grim. The tenement novel has been repossessed, not by the state, or even the landlord. By the market, which is worse than either, because at least the landlord has to occasionally look you in the eye when he throws you out. The market doesn’t even do that much. It just changes the locks, redecorates, and lists the place as “full of character.”
The dead don’t get royalties. But somebody’s sure as hell cashing the cheque.
