Fighting Words : Yes, his book is raw. But Booker Prize winner James Kelman says that’s his native tongue.

The Booker Prize, awarded annually to a writer of fiction working in the United Kingdom and its dispersed empire, may be the most highly regarded such honor in the English-speaking world.

Apart from the 20,000 pounds ($32,000) it brings each year’s winner, the Booker is held in lofty esteem by writers, publishers and readers of contemporary English literature, and its announcement--keenly anticipated before the fact, and regularly dissected and debated after--is a highlight of the publishing year.

The award also has an impact on U.S. publishing, for it grants distinction to writers more or less unknown here. A title yesterday sitting unmolested in the fiction section suddenly moves to the front display, sporting a shiny new Booker Prize! sticker. If the U.S. publisher has the promotion budget for it, the author may even make his or her way to our shores for readings and book-signings.

The current honoree is James Kelman of Glasgow, Scotland, a wiry, chain-smoking, articulate man of 49. A school dropout at 15, Kelman began to write, committing to the craft in earnest in his early 20s and publishing his first collection of stories at 26.

He has built his reputation as a leading voice among today’s most talented Scottish writers on the strength of his several novels, plays and collections of stories. Kelman recently completed a tour of major U.S. cities (including Los Angeles) aimed at promoting the novel for which he won the 1994 Booker Prize, “How Late It Was, How Late . . . “ (Norton, 1994).

Although not widely traveled outside Scotland--he needed directions to London the first time he was nominated for a Booker Prize some years ago--Kelman did spend a few months in Los Angeles as a youth of 17, accompanying his father on an unsuccessful job-seeking trip.

It was a momentous time: The week he arrived, John F. Kennedy was assassinated; the week he left, the Beatles had five singles in the U.S. Top 10. Still, his recollections are mostly of taking the bus from Pasadena to walk the streets around Broadway and 7th, looking for work at hot-dog stands and the like. The tour just completed marked his first return to America in more than 30 years.

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“How Late It Was, How Late . . . “ is the story of a man suddenly gone blind: the challenges he faces not only finding his way around his once-familiar hometown, but figuring out how to survive materially.

It’s anything but an action novel: Sammy, the protagonist, spends a great deal of time tapping his way hither and yon, feeling for walls with his hand. Otherwise, he mostly wanders about his vanished girlfriend’s flat, thinking things over. The book, told mostly in the first person, contains no sex, no explosions and a vanishingly small amount of violence. The plot is exceptionally straightforward, featuring only one central character and a few peripherals.

And yet the Booker announcement stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy in Britain. This was due in part to the book’s style, which is indubitably attention-getting: From start to finish it’s written in the voice of a hard-drinking Glaswegian laborer and small-time crook. (“The sort of lumpenproletarian Scottish drunk one might cross Sauchiehall Street to avoid,” as the Times of London’s editorialist put it.)

As is true of many of his class, Sammy can--and does--express a variety of emotions and points of view with the “F-word.” Sammy’s creative use of the oath--as an interjection, in its adjectival form and in a dazzling handful of other ways--puts one in mind of the Eskimo and their three dozen words for frozen water. Still, separated from its nuances, the word makes an undeniable impact with repetition--and by one count, it appears some 4,000 times in a novel of 374 pages.

For some readers these factors made Kelman’s Booker illegitimate--the first expression of that judgment having been (so they say) the judges’ failure to bestow the award unanimously. One of the judges said Kelman’s profligate use of the “F-word” meant the book “failed my Aunt Mabel test.” Another, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, called the book “a disgrace” and “completely inaccessible.”

No such controversy had attended the “short-listing” (admission to the final Booker judging) of Kelman’s previous novel, “A Disaffection,” possibly because the central character was university-educated and the text sprinkled with literary references.

Kelman would agree. He thinks that the negative reaction to “How Late It Was, How Late . . . “ reflects an inbred, reflexive prejudice--one dominating decisions made about things like the Booker Prize by an upper-middle-class elite.

He sounded that theme in his acceptance speech--which was cut short, ostensibly for reasons of time--when he said that the prejudices held by this elite have “been around for a very long time, and for the sake of clarity we are better employing the contemporary label, which is racism. A fine line can exist between elitism and racism, and on matters concerning language and culture, the distinction can sometimes cease to exist altogether.”

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He returned to this theme in the question-and-answer sessions following his U.S. readings, and in an interview conducted midway through his tour.

“One of the reasons the Booker Prize makes international news,” he says, “is that the award is open to all writers in the former British Empire: from parts of Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the subcontinent, some parts of Southeast Asia. Winners have come from Nigeria and Canada; Salman Rushdie has won as well. Some of the writers from different places assimilate to the voice of authority; they don’t use language, the indigenous rhythm and syntax of their local cultures, the way I do.”

Carrying on along these lines, Kelman makes clear his belief that writers from minority cultures who employ “the Queen’s English” do so either to forestall criticism (or worse, anonymity), or because they’ve been propagandized by their education--the state’s best opportunity to marginalize “colonial” indigenous cultures.

Kelman, the first Scot to win the Booker, certainly feels that’s true in his own proud and ancient nation, whose writers, he says, are judged quite differently when they use their own language instead of “proper” English.

He rebels against the branding of the working-class Scots tongue as a dialect, a vernacular, a patois, or anything other than a proper language, while insisting that that same prejudicial elitism has permeated Scotland’s academic and literary Establishment. At one point he refers wryly to “a wee attic” in Scottish universities where the nation’s own literature is reluctantly taught.

“You’re stamped upon as a child,” he says. “Purely standard English is taught in Scottish schools. When you go through the education system, you’re taught what you’re not. You learn your inferiority: You come out of there knowing you’re no good, and that your culture and your songs are no good--they’re not real. There’s no possibility of your culture producing real art.”

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Kelman proclaims that he writes within a literary tradition of “decolonization”--but that has not, he believes, been given due attention in all the hubbub over poor Sammy’s great affection for the “F-word.”

As part of that tradition, he says, he’s obliged to endure the supercilious inquiries of critics and others who wonder if he’s read any of the writers to whom he’s often compared, most prominently Franz Kafka and James Joyce.

“Some of the critics are so prejudiced that they can’t see at all what I’m doing with the language. They think I don’t revise my work, or they’ll express surprise that I’ve heard of Joyce, or whoever. When I tell about this, black writers in the U.S. know immediately what I’m talking about: It’s the equivalent of being thought to possess natural rhythm.”

It’s difficult not to seek out an overt political agenda on the part of a writer so committed to promoting and preserving his cultural roots. Reminded that he once described himself as a “libertarian socialist anarchist,” Kelman says with a laugh: “That was just to annoy people.”

He energetically disavows any specific affiliation--particularly with the Scottish Nationalists, with whom he is often assumed to be in sympathy.

“The Nationalists have M.P.’s now sitting in Parliament,” he scoffs. “I’m anti-parliamentarian, and I’ve never been involved in any party politics. I don’t believe that any state would offer you the political means to revolutionize it.”

How then will the Scottish people--by his own account subjugated by an upper-middle-class English elite, and denied access to their own language and culture by the schools--manage to protect those things?

“If a culture or a country wants to determine their own existence, then they’d better bloody start,” he says flatly. Asked what form that action is likely to take, Kelman denies access to any special knowledge or insight.

“I really don’t know. That’s something that has to be explored by every people who are after the right to determine their own existence. They have to experience their mother tongue in that process. What happens then becomes a function of what those in power do and don’t allow to happen.

“I’m not advocating the use of violence, or making a Marxist argument about a grand design that’s going to get played out come what may. I’m just saying that if someone wants to be free, then they have to be free. You don’t go up to someone oppressing you and say, ‘I’d like to be free now.’ ”