Liberties by Peter Bennett

Peter Bennett’s motivation for writing Liberties, he tells the Big Bearded Bookseller in a recent interview, was to be able to tell a story set in the east end of Glasgow with characters with working class voices. These are a rarity in literature, he says, and he’s not wrong, sadly, although there may be tentative signs of an upswing, with a new generation of writers like Emma Grae, Colin Burnett and Kirkland Ciccione taking up the mantle of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman and unapologetically exploring working class heritage (and humour). 

Liberties, then, is set in Shettleston in the late nineties, at the start of the New Labour government, when it was already becoming obvious that, whatever it said on the political tin, it was the same old shite inside. Poverty is a constant, as are the options for escaping it, as are the consequences of those options. 

What appears, at first, to be a series of picaresque adventures featuring a disparate set of characters, gradually coalesces into a single narrative structure pulled together by those powerful working class themes of poverty, family ties and an unerring ability to make desperately poor life decisions. 

Arthur Coyle is a pensioner, friend of Tam and grandfather of Danny. All three, in different ways, are heavily involved with a local loan shark and villain, Harry Mullin. Also in thrall to Mullin is Stevie, a clever and capable young musician in danger of being sucked into a spiral of drugs and petty crime and trouble. This being Scotland in the 1990s, the future looks bleak for all of them but Peter Bennett’s exciting, funny and ultimately moving novel charts a steady path, avoiding clichés and stereotypes, maintaining a sense of realism but leavening it with humour, and creating a cast of characters who are realistic and well drawn, about whom the reader comes to care, and whose stories are genuinely stirring. 

Liberties is highly recommended.