A Disaffection
Patrick Doyle, a 29-year-old Glasgow schoolteacher, feels hopelessly trapped in a life of compromise and hypocrisy. A closet revolutionary who believes that all teachers are Establishment lackeys, Doyle despises his colleagues but has no other social contacts. His life is an endless round of lunch-hour pints in working-class pubs, cheap take-out dinners, and lonely weekends in his dreary flat, where his only amusement is playing imaginary music on cardboard "pipes" that he salvaged from the trash. Like a Samuel Beckett character, Doyle swings from suicidal despair to grin-and-bear-it resignation with pendulum-like regularity. Only Kelman's linguistic virtuosity--especially his use of Scots dialect, which can make the most depressing statements sound hilariously funny--keeps the book from collapsing under its own weight. Expect a limited but enthusiastic audience for this one.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.