Swing Hammer Swing‪!‬

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 4. APR. 1994

Here a new landscape stamps itself indelibly onto the literary map: the infamous Glasgow slum called the Gorbals, in whose ripe, decaying airs Torrington's intoxicated and intoxicating debut is steeped, and through whose derelict streets his narrator and alter ego, Tam Clay, traces his past and parlous future in the last few frigid days before the wrecking crews move in. Tam's ruminative, often alcoholic and virtually plotless ramble intersects the paths of friends, enemies and eccentric strangers, some current, many remembered, most real, some imagined, and all fantasticated by the carnival whirl of Tam's fecund, boozy imagination, in equal measure ruminative and manic. But Tam's real foe isn't to be found among the in-laws, the pregnant wife, the jealous husbands or the debt collectors he dodges from tenement to taproom: his real enemy is time's ruthless march crushing his grimy, garrulous turf into the rubble of memory. His refuge is a rich scotch broth of language, steaming with metaphor, with which he crams his vanishing world into chunks of wild imagery and pungent dialect, every phrase so grafted to time and place as virtually to defy quotation. Torrington's writing is as voracious as it is vivid, encyclopedic in its reach, eagerly setting down nuggets from Sartre and Nietzsche alongside reflections on the humiliations of the Scottish soccer team. Thirty years in the writing, this 1992 winner of the Whitbread Award is overstuffed, parochial, self-indulgent, sentimental, overambitious--and well worth every minute of reading time.