SWING HAMMER SWING By Jeff Torrington (Secker & Warburg, $153) YOU can always spot a potential literary prize winner: they are so infuriatingly difficult to read.
Anyone who regularly reads the winners of the Booker Prize or the Whitbread Prize will know exactly what I mean: the judges always go for dense, impenetrable writing; the plots are hidden under multiple layers of meaning, and the protagonists are usuallythoroughly unappealing.
The one word which will never ever appear in a review of a literary prize book is ''accessible''.
Swing hammer swing! fulfills this premise perfectly. The first thing you have to worry about is the language in which it is written. It isn't English. The book is a record of the lives of some down-and-out families in the Gorbals, a slum in the city of Glasgow, Scotland.
The story is told in the first person in the heavily-accented language of the streets. One character says: ''Yon rid-heided wee besom, her wae the snooty neb that worked in the Empire Dairy.'' You what? Few people outside Scotland are going to understandall the dialogue. This doesn't matter much, since the book does not aim to be tightly plotted, but is deliberately rambly and atmospheric.
It is winter. The central character, Tom Clay, is eking out a sad existence in a crumbling condemned tenement, living off his wits while his wife is in hospital having a baby.