ABSTRACT
Early post-war Scottish fiction favours realism, although the works of two practitioners, Robin Jenkins and Muriel Spark, come from idiosyncratic personal beliefs that they touch only intermittently on common experience. Postwar stock-taking demanded facing up to the present with the kind of paint-stripping realisms employed by Alan Sharp and William McIlvanney as well as Gordon Willams, Archie Hind and Hugh C. Rae. The more conventional realism practised by James Kennaway and McIlvanney intensifies into the violent metaphors of Rae and Frederic Lindsay, while socio-political protest gathers momentum in the satire of Alasdair Gray and the fierce, vernacular fiction of James Kelman. Many writers turn, like Alasdair Gray, Emma Tennant, Iain Banks and A. L. Kennedy in So I am Glad, to fantasy or to magical realism. Kennaway's novels depict tense relationships between people whose identities are threatened by each other in the context of corrupt or disintegrating value systems.
