IF JAMES Kelman was not a writer, he would probably be a neurosurgeon, so adept is he at following the movements of the mind. Kelman’s pen has followed many Scottish minds since his first novel, The Bus Conductor Hines, was published in 1984. Like its protagonist, Robert Hines, Kelman’s other characters are working class. They have real — if poorly paid — jobs. Others struggle just to get through the day. In the Booker Prize-winning How Late it Was, How Late, the Glaswegian Sammy is caught in a Kafkaesque system weighted in favour of those further up the class hierarchy. Kelman’s fiction gives readers an insight into how consciousness copes with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

His 2012 novel, Mo Said She Was Quirky, is about a female croupier called Helen whose grief is rooted in unloving relationships and the disappearance of her brother, Brian. She lives in London with her boyfriend, Mo, and her daughter, Sophie. The novel captures 24 hours of her life after she catches a glimpse of a man who could be her lost sibling. Mo recalls Brian’s tumultuous relationship with his father and, similarly, fears for her daughter’s relationship with the males in her life.

The bond between a father and son is at the heart of James Kelman’s new novel, the beautiful and musical Dirt Road. At the beginning, Tom and the sixteen-year-old Murdo leave a small Scottish island to visit the American South. Murdo’s mother has recently died of cancer, the same type that killed his sister, Eilidh, five years earlier. We follow their two-week trip from Murdo’s perspective. Kelman moves seamlessly from the external world of highways, bus stations and the landscapes of the Bible Belt to the internal thoughts of Murdo, an accordion player and a wanderer in mind and body. In Allentown, on the road between Memphis and Alabama, they miss their bus connection due to Murdo’s waywardness.

After a night in a motel, Murdo goes in search of an attractive girl, Sarah, he has seen at a service station. He walks into a poor district and happens upon a black family playing Zydeco, a traditional French creole music from Louisiana. Dirt Road is infused with the tremors and vibrations of song, from blues - the music of the dispossessed - to the odd sound of “Hielan Dance” in Alabama. Kelman’s understanding of what music is composed of is wonderfully realised. Murdo thinks and feels in music: “the strong effect it had inside ye. The music into the body, connecting ye. Sound wasn’t just mental it was physical, made up of these tiny wee particles just like anything else; yer hair and yer teeth, yer socks and yer shoes; yer entire body: sounds were part of it”.

Kelman is a master of creating authentic and complex inner voices for his characters. Too much has been written about the supposedly controversial nature of these voices and not enough about the quality of them. Murdo’s thoughts, for example, are never reduced to a single subject, but run together in associative loops. His musings and small epiphanies frequently return to the losses in his life. Thinking about the trails a musician creates while playing reminds him of performing the Blue Danube Waltz for his mother, “making her laugh. She told dad and dad said, ‘We’ll call it the Grey Clyde Waltz’. She laughed at that too, the quiet laugh she had. Nobody else in the world had that one, like a gurgle up from the throat… how de ye get that? And then it was gone. Mum was gone. So that was her laugh gone too”.

The Allentown family includes Sarah and her charismatic grandmother, the sage, funny accordionist Queen Monzee-ay. Murdo’s youth means that, unlike his father, he is less fearful of the racial and class divides in the American South, subtly dealt with in the novel. Music transcends society’s divisions. When Queen Monzee-ay hears Murdo’s accordion playing, she invites him to play at a festival in Louisiana. Murdo agrees, sensing the romance of the stage, and the chance to escape his troubles and see Sarah again. When his wary and overprotective father shows up, his hopes for a holiday of youthful abandon seem doomed. The pair carry on south to stay with their conservative relatives in Alabama. Murdo has to deal with competing impulses: the safety of home and the excitement of the musician’s life on the road.

All families grow out of their own skin. Sometimes parents suffer more than children. In Dirt Road, Tom has to choose between allowing Murdo his freedom and keeping the last stitch of his family together. For all this painstaking grief, the novel contains a rising beat of hope.

It is filled with more light and less dark humour than Kelman’s previous books. Perhaps it is the move from the wet, dank cities of Glasgow and London to the wide open spaces and optimism of America. Wherever Murdo goes, however, Scotland is never far away. It lives on in his mind. Near the end, alone and busking in a foreign city, he sings a song for his father: “I was born and raised in Glasgow/in a Glasgow tenement/and when people spoke of my bonny land/I didn’t know what they meant… for I have seen the Highlands/ I have seen the low, /I will brag of my native land, wherever I may go”.


Dirt Road by James Kelman is published by Canongate, priced £16.99