SOURCE: "The Paranoid Sublime," in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 10, May 26, 1994, pp. 8-9.

[In the following, O'Hagan offers a mixed assessment of How Late It Was, How Late, discussing the book's relationship to Kelman's other works and noting Kelman's preoccupation with politics, oppression, and the Scottish working class.]

It was getting dark one sulphurous evening in Glasgow in the winter of 1990, when a pop-eyed cultural apparatchik—almost breathlessly ripe from a Chinese paper-lantern parade she'd just led through the naked streets of Carntyne—sat down beside me in a bar to the side of the City Chambers, to gab about the glories and horrors of Glasgow's reign as European City of Culture for that year. The city's better writers, it seemed, would have nothing to do with it. The £50 million jamboree, led by the municipal council, set its sights on ridding the city once and for ever...