Swing Hammer Swing!

This tuneful novel traces the adventures of Tom Clay through the waning days of The Gorbals, a slum in Glasgow that is yielding slowly to the wrecking ball of urban renewal. But the story is slight compared with the voice, which is by turns musical, poetic, punny, and amateur-philosophical. Torrington, like his protagonist, isn't afraid to careen between the high and the low, from Pascal's "Pong-sees" (as railway driver, Wee Tulley, calls them) to decrepit domino players ("those rowdy spot-mortems") drinking stout in equally decrepit pubs. Throughout the book, it was the working-class Glaswegian cadences, whether lilting or gutteral, that kept me charmed.

It's the story of a week in the life of unemployed, aspiring writer, Tom Clay who is living in the Gorbals slums of Glasgow as they are being torn down in the 60's. His pregnant wife is in hospital. He has a one-night stand with a woman whose husband he fears is seeking revenge on him. His wife's family keep nagging him to get a job and a hair cut. It doesn't have much plot although it's full of incidents and digressions. Clay is involved in various strategies to get money. He has intellectual interests and may be writing. The main attraction is the quality of the writing. This is witty and erudite but prolix, and demands close attention. The humor, although often ingenious, becomes somewhat repetitious by the end. The plumbing of the Gorbals was very primitive and this gives rise to recurrent scatological themes.

More than a year after receiving this book as a Christmas present from a sibling whose literary taste I was beginning to question, I at last opened it. Within minutes I regretted not having done so much sooner. This first novel is, in short, a magnificent work, a fact that hits you from the first page. It is said that the author spent 30 years writing Swing, Hammer, Swing. I believe this, as the facility with language, the ability to convey the tragic hilarity of life, the penetrating insights sandwiched between slapstick picaresque, all of these features, so evident in the novel, betoken an author of far more experience than one would expect from a first-time novelist. In fact the 30-year gestation of the novel goes a good way toward accounting for its apparent paradox -- the fact that it is marked by youthful exhuberence and playfulness, yet conveyed with all the indicia of a seasoned word-monger at the top of his game. I was pleased to see reviews placing this work alongside Joyce's and Pynchon's, but I would put Torrington closer to Donleavy. The picaresque journie of Thomas Clay -- haunted throughout the week that we spend with him by omens of his mortality -- reminds me more of the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield (The Ginger Man), Cornelius Christian (Fairy Tale of New York), and Darcy Dancer (The Adventures of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman), than they do of the perambulations of Tyrone Slothrop (Gravity's Rainbow) or Leopold Bloom (Ulysses). Although Torrington may well be the Scots' Donleavy, to push the comparison too far would deny the originality of the novel. And while I laughed out loud throughout, drawing concerned looks from fellow patrons of the cafe where I read most of the book, this is not just a funny novel. 'Memento mori' images pervade the novel -- notably and hilariously in the form of a certain outhouse specter (or is it a gumshoe, or bill collector?) With these images come an ominous sense that an era is passing, that what Tom Clay (and the reader sharing his experiences) knows and loves is on the brink of destruction. Nothing less than modernity's not-always-creative destruction is following us as we accompany Tom in his efforts to slow down this inexorable march, to hold onto a corner of the world that we find familiar and homely -- heimlich as Freud would have it -- while knowing that the hammer will soon shatter it. The week we spend with Tom Clay is the last one during which that architectural marvel and social microcosm known as the Gorbals existed, before being reduced to rubble in the name of humane 'slum clearance.' It is a heavy and poignant metaphor. What lies ahead we don't know. We know that it will be unheimlich. But, after we have survived this December week in the company of Tom Clay, we d

Jeff Torrington makes a grey Scottish day into a carnival of the absurd. He turns a week-in-the-life of one man into a pilgrimage of mediocrity, and a dance of celebration. I have never eaten a book up word for delicious word like this varitable feast. You don't know me and I certainly do not know you, but I guarantee that you will love this book. Add it to your cart, and pay your electric bill in advance, because you will be up all night!!!!

Swing Hammer Swing was given to me by a friend who dropped it in my lap and said, "You'll like this." If you are the kind of person who likes Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat..... then don't read Swing Hammer Swing. Jeff Torrington has mastered Scottish innuendo in his writing. A good prep to Trainspotting and vice-versa.