Synopsis
Depicts the eccentric characters who populate the Centaur Car Company automotive plant, from Tombstone Telfer, who believes that smiling causes cancer, to the smelly shop steward, Curly Brogan
Reviews
The hapless lives and hard times of Scottish autoworkers are the core of Torrington's follow-up to his 1992 Whitbread-winner, Swing Hammer Swing! (1994), though the zest and wit that marked that earlier debut novel appear only fitfully here. The cast includes Steve Laker, who drops his anti- multinational stand to take a job as telexer in the Yank-owned Centaur Car Company plant, where he finds deplorable working conditions and bosses so far from being human that the line workers refer to them as ``Martians.'' Next up is Wormsley, a careworn man with a wife insistent that he work the late shift, having, when we meet him, a worse night than usual on the line. Feeling poorly, he visits the company infirmary only to be sent home immediately, though he drops dead in front of a fishmonger's shop before he gets there. Humor is interlaced with tragedy from that point on: One worker fakes his death to get a few days off, then returns to find himself suspected of theft and canned; a Christian supervisor confronts the plant's porn king, forcing him to tear down all his pinups, learning to his shame--a shame so great that it drives him to suicide--that a photo of his own university-educated daughter is a prize in the man's collection; at his retirement ceremony, the head of company security is given binoculars--with which he spots a team of thieves he'd spent his entire career trying to catch. Friction between workers and management keeps things in a constant state of upheaval, until the corporate parent, with eyes only for the bottom line, makes a decision with disastrous consequences for everyone. Colorful, yes, but little in this view of factory life is new, and the episodic style, while it does offer vivid stories and characters, works against Torrington's greater strength as a realist, his ability to catch the dense particulars of working- class neighborhoods and life. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"Working Stiffs" might have been the title of this novel, which is a wicked send-up of life in a Scotland auto factory?a "multi-nat," in the parlance of its tough, irreverent crew of characters. Nothing is sacred and nothing is spared in Torrington's merciless if humorous gaze, not the faked demise of a crafty union steward nor the real death of a luckless "nightshifter." The workers attempt to gain some measure of control over their working lives by dint of mischief, sarcasm, and pure cussedness until forced to confront their essential powerlessness in the end. The local slang and shop jargon, while sometimes difficult to follow, is effective in evoking the workers' world, and the ending, abrupt and pitiless, serves to point up the ironies of that world's collapse. Recommended.?Kay Hogan, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham, Info/Instructional Svcs.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Torrington wrote his acclaimed first novel, Swing Hammer Swing! (1994), when he was 58 and reportedly worked on it for more than 30 years. This follow-up is set in a Glasgow automobile plant, the Centaur Car Company, and follows the fortunes of several factory workers. Among the more memorable characters are Curly Brogan, the shop steward with incredibly bad body odor who attempts to fake his own death; Sputnik McQuirr, so unnerved at being issued a new number for his time card that he embarks on a vandalism spree; and Twitcher Haskins, the senior chief of security who, after being awarded an expensive pair of binoculars upon his retirement, finally espies the thief who's been pilfering auto parts for years. Chock-full of slang, Scottish dialect, and linguistic pyrotechnics, the novel is a somewhat difficult read. Yet the pun-loving Torrington offers a large dose of irreverent humor and an inside view of the sheer drudgery and in-the-trenches camaraderie of life on the assembly line. Joanne Wilkinson
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