Swing Hammer Swing!

Plot

Product Description An "energetic, irreverent and very funny" (New York Times Book Review) first novel set in Glasgow during a single week in the late sixties. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it "a rich Scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor...and pungent dialect." Winner of Britain's Whitbread Book of the Year Award. From Publishers Weekly This debut novel, set in late-1960s Scotland, depicts a week in the life of a writer faced with unending problems.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Whatever else it does, this 1992 Whitbread Award winner points up the disparity between what can make best sellers lists in the United Kingdom vs. the United States. Make no mistake--this is Literary Fiction (caps intended); the blurb-writers who compare Torrington to Joyce are entirely on the mark. Set in Glasgow in late 1969, the novel chronicles a week in the fateful life of soon-to-be father, would-be novelist, slum-dweller Tom Clay. The nearly 30 years of gestation that Torrington's book endured show through in the vivid characterizations of Glasgow and its denizens. What plot exists is subservient to vignette, but, in the tradition of Joyce, the language is rich and colorful. Not for the average U.S. fiction reader, especially with its heavy use of regionalisms, this work should still appeal to some with more eclectic tastes. Strongly recommended for fiction collections with enough funding to be venturesome.- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Jeff Torrington (31 December 1935 – 11 May 2008) was a novelist from Glasgow in Scotland. His novels draw on the changing face of modern Scotland. Swing Hammer Swing (1992) was situated in the demolition of the old Gorbals and The Devil's Carousel (1998) drew on the decline of a fictionalized version of the Rootes/Chrysler car plant at Linwood. Swing Hammer Swing was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1992. From Booklist The standard of Torrington's writing is so high that for once one is not ashamed to compare an unknown novelist to authors who are justly famous. That wag Joyce is the truest neighbor, though contemporaries Pynchon and Rushdie will do in a pinch: like all three, Torrington has a beautifully barbed wit and a fabulous ear for language, enough to send the sentences tumbling over one another in a symphony of belly laughs and brays or, where things are bleaker and more sarcastic, in a sort of muffled thudding like the dropping of shoes. Reportedly, Torrington, now 58, worked on this, his first novel, for nearly 30 years while he did a series of very odd odd-jobs and, in the last decade, struggled through Parkinson's disease. It is the tale of Clay, a would-be writer living in Glasgow's "redevelopment" area (a slum in the process of being bulldozed) during a week in the late 1960s. Glasgow always had a reputation for being Scotland's toughest city, and there's an air of resentful making-do that overhangs every interaction in this oddly rich, dying neighborhood. Clay himself, anyway, has trouble: a pregnant wife, a family that resents and hounds him, no job, no publisher, someone who's after him, and a very strange problem with time. In England, this novel won the Whitbread and became a best-seller. It probably won't mean as much here, but on its merits alone, it deserves a wide reading. Writers this good, writing in the English language, can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.Stuart Whitwell From Kirkus Reviews This close examination of a week in one man's life in Glasgow, Scotland, is both exhilarating and exasperating. Torrington, who toiled on this first novel (the 1992 Whitbread winner) for thirty years, has shaped passage after passage of beautiful prose but failed to hang them on a substantial plot. Thomas Clay is in limbo. His pregnant wife, Rhona, has been hospitalize