> I was much amused to find in the Longman's Anthology
> of British Literature the statement that Trainspotting
> made "Glaswegian knockabouts and their dialect
> emblematic of the modern condition." I had hoped that
> this introduction was penned by a witty inhabitant of
> auld reekie but apparently not.
Can you believe?
Actually, it's worse than that -- my son, who was brung up in the East
Midlands of England, has no trouble with Irvin Welsh's dialect, while I trip
over the fact that he writes seriously Edinburgh.
It gets worse if you try to work-out where Christopher Brookmyre is writing
from, or exactly which year the characters in an Ian McLeod novel were
dancing to whichever punk band played in the QM Union in the seventies.
Deeply parochial.
:-)
Hamish Macbeth
|