James Kelman: Borderline insanity

The Booker Prize winner discusses marginal lives and Scottish nationalism with Max Liu

Scottish writers are 'subject to imperialist forces,' says James Kelman (MARTIN HUNTER)

James Kelman looks refreshed when we meet in the café of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Dressed in a smart, black suit, he's pleased to be home from a holiday in Devon: "Driving back across that border, there's always a sigh of relief. Not because of foolish notions of Scottishness. It's to do with landscape and space."

The Glaswegian protagonist of Mo Said She Was Quirky, Kelman's eighth novel, is less fortunate. Helen shares a cramped flat with her infant daughter and Muslim boyfriend – the Mo of the title –and works gruelling night shifts as a croupier in a London casino. Kelman likes the notion that his characters' lives continue beyond the novel's final sentence, but he denies that Helen's experiences relate to his own time in the English capital: "I was happy living in London in my twenties. I met my wife there, and it features in my early stories. I don't consider the setting of the new book a big deal."

For four decades, his formally inventive, emotionally resonant fiction has explored Scottish working-class life. He's best known for How Late it Was, How Late, which won the 1994 Booker Prize, sparking outrage in some quarters with its expletive-heavy idiom. One dissenting judge labelled it "a disgrace" but, now 66, Kelman has been acclaimed as "the greatest living British novelist". How did he begin this latest book?

"I wanted to turn on its head the easy, Las Vegas idea of gambling, by having a young single mother work in a casino out of economic necessity. As a young man, when I wasn't trying to be a reader, I was trying to be a gambler."

Helen's unease at sleazebags leering across the poker tables is convincingly rendered, so what does Kelman think about the male gaze? "Leering and ogling is what men do to exercise power. Helen knows the male look in the better sense too, by which I mean, when a young woman walks along the street and a man instinctively looks at her. But as a father of teenage girls, you're no longer comfortable with that. You want to …" Here, Kelman mimes a playful punch, which evokes Helen's protectiveness. But her hopes and anxieties for her daughter are also tenderly expressed.

Kelman's last novel, 2008's Kieron Smith, Boy, was a moving depiction of childhood, and there's a softer tone to his recent writing. How does he find grandparenthood? "It's a battle not to be overprotective. As a young parent, which myself and my wife were, you take risks. Helen lives with her boyfriend but she's a single mother, so she faces different pressures. She might not have justifiable reasons to doubt Mo but she must be careful who she brings into her daughter's life."

On her way home from work one morning, Helen's taxi stops at a crossing and she glimpses a homeless man who she thinks might be her estranged brother. She doesn't get out to investigate, but whether the man is Helen's brother or not ("ambiguity must be maintained," says Kelman), is the intention to remind us that homeless people are always somebody's family?

"It's cosy to think your work could have that effect. There are people on the street who wouldn't have been 20 years ago. They can't even go to the toilet without breaking the law." He repeats this last detail, gently rapping the table.

Helen intends to tell Mo about the man at the crossing, but within the novel's 24 hours, the opportunity never arises. She laments her lack of time but Kelman's formal experiment is also concerned, I suggest, with time and space. "That's a five-pints-of-Guinness discussion," he says, and I glance at our lukewarm coffees. "This novel is not a purely existential experience. There's the notion of the camera looking at the character and also the character looking out from the lens. There's the world in its material sense, and a shift in to the rhythms of Helen's consciousness."

Perhaps because his father restored paintings for a living ("a craft that's been hijacked by the middle-classes"), Kelman initially wanted to be a painter. As a teenager, he read biographies of artists, then novels by Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus and 19th-century Russians. When he started writing in his early twenties, he felt an affinity with literature from former colonies: "Scottish and African writers are both subject to imperialist forces. You have to invest the imposed language, in my case English, with the rhythms, phrases, syntax of your community."

Is the present debate about Scotland's independence too limited to lead to true empowerment?

"The SNP's debate is the only one the political establishment allows. It's pathetic that the SNP support the Queen. I was speaking with five Scottish writers recently: we all favour independence but none of us is a nationalist." He identifies "dangerous forms of nationalism in England" and recent naïve, trivialising discussions about racism in football which are "so dishonest it makes me want to vomit". In the novel, Mo is trapped in his job as a waiter due to what Kelman is reluctant to call his "identity".

Kelman is a warm, expansive interviewee but for all his fond memories of London, he feels ambivalent towards the country south of the border. "Scottish independence would be a healthy way for English society to look at itself," he says, being both provocative and sincere. The referendum is slated for 2014 but Mo Said She Was Quirky is an urgent, compassionate, mesmerising reflection of our present moment.

It ends as How Late it Was, How Late began – with a character lying in the street. When I draw this connection, Kelman bursts out laughing: "I'd not thought of that," he says. "I'd not thought of that at all."

Mo Said She Was Quirky, By James Kelman

Hamish Hamilton £14.99

"It might have been him and it might not have been him. It was like watching a taped movie and you get interrupted by somebody and miss something important, so you have to rewind. Helen had to rewind. No she didn't. The whole day long my God rewinding, what else had she been doing? Replaying and replaying, replaying or rewinding, doing both."