What binds Kelman's later novels together is their strong antiauthoritarianism, and especially their interrogation of the working of state agencies and apparatuses. The author seems to require the longer fictional form for this kind of sustained investigation, for his short-story collection The Good Times (1998), published between these novels, does not contain comparable reflections on, or acts of defiance to, the ruling order. It is not that the ranters and railers against class iniquity or oppression are totally absent from its pages. The incessant talker in ‘Oh my darling’, for example, works himself up into a rage because the record label His Master's Voice carries for him class connotations, and a modern café in which he feels out of place has a bourgeois touch. But such occasional outbursts of anger on the part of a nervous fantasizer more preoccupied with other things come as an aside rather than a full-blown diatribe in its own right. (Another story with the occasional dig against the political system is ‘Into the Rhythm’.)

Or take the piece ‘pulped sandwiches’, which is set on a building site of the kind that we find in Ken Loach's film Riff-Raff (1991): small, with possibly subcontracted labour, poor tools and a ‘spying’ gaffer. The speaker-narrator of this story, an ageing builder, bitterly reflects on the changed working conditions: ‘In the old days ye would have swung the sledge and nobody the wiser when ye stopped for a smoke, there wasnay nobody could tell except maybe they might have listened for the chip chip. But not this goddam hammer. Once ye stopped working they knew, they heard that silence’ (Good Times, p. 44). Yet his distrust of the ganger is of no consequence. The story ends on a subdued, even docile note when the narrator grudgingly accepts working overtime on a Friday evening, despite having a date with ‘the missis’. By contrast, Riff-Raff works towards a dramatic finale. After the sacking of one builder, who complained about the unsafe working conditions on the site, and an industrial accident, which kills or maims another, the film ends with a revolutionary beacon reminiscent of Souvarine's, the Anarchist ‘s, sabotage of the coalmine in Zola's Germinal.