BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Finishing His Journey Battered but Unbroken : HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE, <i> by James Kelman</i> ; W.W. Norton; $21, 384 pages

The mechanism for awarding literary prizes now consists of three steps--selection, announcement and dust-up.

The last stage is a new, yet integral phenomenon, for it no longer seems possible to celebrate a book without having someone else come along to take offense on grounds real or imagined, for a book’s rudeness, immorality, favoritism, its lack of balance, of sensitivity of good intention.

Glasgow native James Kelman won Britain’s Booker Prize in October for “How Late It Was, How Late”--but not without creating a controversy, for numerous critics and two of five Booker judges were reluctant to throw laurels at a book containing so much vulgar street language.

Every page is indeed replete with four-letter words, but outrage at such profanity is actually more appalling than the profanity itself: Are these would-be censors unaware that millions of people talk this way, that such expletive-laden language is endemic to very real, often bitter, perpetually angry subcultures? And once you get the hang of Kelman’s Glasgow dialect, it becomes almost hypnotic.

“How Late It Was, How Late” is told through 38-year-old Sammy, an itinerantly employed laborer and ex-convict who has awakened on the street after a two-day binge in the wake of a fight with his girlfriend, Helen.

Sammy is a bit listless, somewhat guilty about the domestic argument, incensed about having his leather shoes stolen and replaced by sneakers, and generally riled with the world. But he is also thoughtful, as the following slightly expurgated passage indicates:

“Funny how ye tell people a story to make a point and ye fail, ye fail, a total disaster. Not only do ye no make yer point it winds up the exact (expletive) opposite man, the exact (expletive) opposite. Mind you the woman (not Helen) . . . was probably right, he probably was trying to get off with her. But so what? So (expletive) what? Males and females. Ye do your wee dances, almighty where’s the harm. Plus some folk, they’re never happy unless they’re giving ye a sharp (expletive) talking to. Especially women, or else upper class bastards.”

This passage occurs early in the book, when Sammy is in jail, having been arrested for assaulting a pair of police officers (“sodjers”) soon after rousing from his bender. He’s not particularly distressed about the incarceration, in part because he’s used to it, having served more than a decade for minor roles in two crimes; but he is unnerved at discovering, on the heels of a police beating, that he has gone blind.

“How Late It Was, How Late” may be notorious today for its language, but the novel will be known for Kelman’s depiction of Sammy’s attempts to cope with his new disability. Sammy is released from jail, his blindness much doubted, despite being an “incorrigible,” and with neither the ability nor the money to return to Helen’s apartment, which she has let him share. Sammy eventually navigates there on foot, with the help of a few strangers and his own dogged determination, never even thinking to cadge a ride home.

Much of the novel is taken up with Sammy’s attempt to register his blindness with a social-service agency, so he won’t be assigned now-unsuitable work, and with further interrogations by the police, who believe Sammy consorted with a political fugitive.

The book can thus be read as a moralizing novel, one in which the lower orders of society are shown never getting a break, being blamed for things they didn’t do and wrongly assumed to be stupid, weak, irresponsible, dishonest.

Kelman--whose “A Disaffection” was short-listed for the Booker in 1989--certainly makes Sammy a courageous figure, much more respectable and admirable than anyone realizes. His instincts are to cooperate rather than confront, to take care of himself rather than burden others, to think rather than drink.

Like Joyce, Kelman knows that the ultimate test of the traveler is not whether he arrives at the intended goal but how he copes with obstacles put in his way. And Sammy, like Leopold Bloom, makes his journey intact, battered and unhonored, certainly, but likewise unbroken.