Devil's Carousel

Long before Irvine Welsh burst onto the literary scene, Torrington published his acclaimed Swing Hammer Swing!, a dialect-soaked romp through working-class Scotland. His new novel speaks through the voices of outmoded Glasgow autoworkers. It's a pure, raunchy satire--he's not immune from resorting to bathroom humor to score laughs--that is ambitious, if a bit uneven. The Centaur Car Company is an oddball workplace populated with assembly-line workers with names like ""Curly,"" ""Laker,"" ""Cutter"" and ""The Worm,"" who are managed by Mandarin masters called ""Martians."" When they aren't scheming to fake their own deaths or trying to come to grips--not always successfully--with the numbing routine of their labor, Centaur employees publish a homegrown underground paper called ""Kikbak: A Laffing Anarkist Publikayshn,"" parts of which Torrington inserts between chapters. Medical problems and other mishaps abound: the Worm has a heart attack; everyone smokes constantly; a worker drowns himself in a water tank; the plant's Marxist shop steward neglects all forms of personal hygiene. Narrative pace comes through the growing realization that Centaur is an anachronism: building cars with human labor makes for an interesting proletariat, but not a secure competitive position in the marketplace--a realization symbolized by automated welding contraptions called ""Daleks."" This is Torrington's underlying message: that with the irrelevance of this kind of work comes the demise of this breed of frisky rough-hewn lingo. His prose is at times hard to parse, but few can fault his powerfully melancholy vision, or his crusty sense of humor. (July)