Sadie, Call The Polis by Kirkland Ciccone

Occasionally, you come across a character who, from the first page, feels like an old friend. Louise Welsh’s Rilke is one such, as is Janet in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (albeit she’s almost completely insufferable). There’s an effortlessness about the characterisation and a vividness to the voice, a sense that these people are real, that their weaknesses (and they really, really need to have weaknesses) are just as important as their strengths, that their stories are the only thing you want to be concerned with at this very moment.

I’ve been writing long enough to know that the apparent effortlessness in such portrayals is actually the product of an enormous amount of effort, so I commend Kirkland Ciccone for the creation of the absolutely splendid Sadie Relish.

We first meet Sadie in primary school in the long, hot summer of 1976 when she responds to a teacher’s question in class by saying: “When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute just like my mither.” Sadie, then, is a naïve and guileless young girl, a loner in search of magic in the world, unpopular at school and unhappy at home. She is also a wonderful and witty observer of daily life and the blackness of the comedy rings wonderfully true coming through the voice of this honest, decent, caring, sometimes broken young girl.

She is surrounded by a supporting cast that is equally strong and diverse. Her mother, the aforementioned prostitute, is hard-as-nails, exactly the sort of woman you wouldn’t want to have move in next door to you, but someone who, in her own way, loves and cares for her family deeply. Her sister is older, thinks she is wiser, is probably far less so, and the siblings have an authentically troubled relationship through the years. Troubles subsist with her best friend, Gregor, too, and he slides out of the story early only to return, much transformed later on.  

And transformation is an important element in Sadie, Call the Polis. Time, as it does, changes everything. We follow Sadie’s progression from gauche schoolgirl to a mother with her own, definitely troubled children and a welter of cares of her own. Some are life-threatening, some life-changing, and gradually, you come to realise that the familiar and seductive voice of this best friend Sadie has been fooling you (and herself) all along, and the novel has a much darker underbelly than you realised. 

Sadie, Call the Polis is a terrific black comedy, in which serious issues are explored in a highly original way. The humour and the dialogue are classically Scottish, dry as toast, the characters and their outlooks seemingly hard and tough but displaying, if you choose to see it, a warmth and tenderness they won’t admit they crave but do all the same. This is very assured writing and a very fine novel of growing up.