Boyracers

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by Alan Bissett


  Ten years. Enough for me to come at the book with some objectivity. I was a very young man when I wrote it. I still love its fizziness and charm, but it’s obviously written by someone who had no idea what he was doing. It’s all heart and no shape, all energy and no definition.

  So, for this edition, and in order to mesh the story with its imminent sequel, Pack Men, I typed the whole thing back out again. I mean, I retyped every single sentence.2 It seemed like the only logical thing to do in order to understand it again. What occurred was a weird time travel experience, whereby thirty-five-year-old me became twenty-four-year-old me being sixteen-year-old me. I liked revisiting these past selves, clothing myself in their naive thoughts, but it was immediately clear that the book had been written and edited too quickly. It had perhaps too much youthful whoosh! and gasp!, and not enough discipline or craft. Errors of plotting and chronology had slipped through and terrible decisions of formatting and punctuation had been made in the name of experimentation. I’m very much in favour of the free play of words on the page, but, as Norman MacCaig once said, ‘The real journey of any writer is towards lucidity.’ For these reasons I have tidied up the prose somewhat in this edition, put it through a car wash. The material itself remains almost exactly the same, but it’s been given a good edit, with a clearer eye than I had then. Think of this as a digitally remastered version, if you like, of that debut album by a Northern rock n roll band.

  After all, the world of Boyracers is a digital one. Theirs is, as I’m sure yours was, an attention span battered by MTV, sitcoms, computer games, song lyrics, film quotes and advertising jingles. The story finishes – by coincidence, not by design – the day before 9/11, in Scotland as it was at the start of the new millennium, before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, before the election of a SNP government in Holyrood, before Lord of the Rings and vast superhero franchises, 3D cinema, the financial crash, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the e-reader, George Bush, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the hollowing-out of the public sector (and Scottish football), and the mass spell cast by the internet. What a huge ten years it has been. Boyracers is an artefact from an era when mobile phones, text-messaging and online communication had only just come into widespread usage, but in its pages we can see the world speeding up and becoming illusory, less in tangent with real emotion and deep connections between people. The book betrays a sense of trying to hold on to a world that will inevitably flash into the past.

  And so it has. The turn of the millennium in Britain was buoyed by an expanding property market, employment, widespread university access, rising living standards, the demise of the Tories (oh, the irony) and Scottish football clubs who could actually compete with the best in Europe. The masters of the universe have since found ways to take it all from us again. Let’s admit it, we fell for their pish. It was a hallucination based on financial sector greed, phantom money and insatiable consumerism. It would be impossible to write, for example, a sentence like ‘We are a generation who awoke to find all gods dead, all wars fought’ with a straight face now, given Boyracers was published at virtually the same moment the planes struck the Twin Towers.

  This is why, despite its flaws, I still love this book. It represents good times, that I lived through and created in. It’s not only written by and about a person I’m not any more, but describes a Britain we might not see the likes of again for a while. For sure, it’s going to be a hard winter under modern capitalism, but if there’s any message in Boyracers that still comes through, it’s that there’s always a road leading out. We just have to trust ourselves to follow it.

  Alan Bissett

  March 2011

  1 It actually was Room A.101 of the Pathfoot Building, Stirling University.

  2 Actually, I only typed the first half. My girlfriend, Kirstin, typed the rest of it and contributed wise editorial suggestions.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks again to everyone who was thanked first time around, but especially Thomas Tobias, Victoria Hobbs, Mollie Skehal, Magi Gibson, the members of Stirling Writers Group circa 2000, Caroline Waddell and the late Eileen Gibson.

  Thanks for her diligent labour on this edition, and for her insights into the novel then and now, to my partner, Kirstin. You walked these lines with me.

  Thanks to Alison Rae, Neville Moir, Jan Rutherford and Vikki O’Reilly at Polygon for their support with this edition.

  Heddy Haw

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2001 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  Copyright © Alan Bissett 2001

  The moral right of Alan Bissett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ebook ISBN: 978–0–85790–036–4

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Lyrics from ‘She’s In Fashion’ (Anderson/Codling) ©1999 by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd

  Lyrics from ‘Metal Mickey’ (Anderson/Butler) © 1992 by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd

  Lyrics from ‘To The End’ (Albarn/Rowntree/Coxon/James) © 1994 by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd

  Lyrics from ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’ (Rowlands/Simons/Pettiford/Wigfall/Fowler) © 2000 by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd

  ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ words and music by Jim Steinman © 1977 Edward B Marks Music Company. All rights reserved. Lyric reproduced by kind permission of Carlin Music Corporation, London NW1 8BD

  ‘Kids In America’ words and music by Ricky Wilde/Marty Wilde © 1975 Rickim Music/RAK Publishing Ltd

  ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’ words and music by Alan Merrill/Jake Hooker © 1975 RAK Publishing Ltd

 

 

 


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