BOYRACERS by Alan Bissett (Polygon Books, 2001)
“Like characters in a plotless novel, we race through night after night, story after story, film quote after film quote, eternity stretching out before us like an open road”.
The above quote may sound like a romantic dream, but this rambling, albeit entertaining, tale is set in Scotland not America so the symbolic open roads have a nasty tendency of going in ever decreasing circles or else ending up at brick walls.
The ‘boyracers’ of the title are groups of teens who race cars in industrial wastelands in the city and exemplify the speed of life which is a double-edged sword of excitement and terror. A kind of modern equivalent of the ‘chicken’ game played out in Rebel Without A Cause.
This is not the story of the racers themselves but of four young male onlookers whose beat up car named Belinda is not built for speed. The Falkirk friends are soccer mad Irn-Bru addicts in pursuit of any combination of sex, booze and rock’n’roll that they can find.
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