Alisdair Gray’s first published novel was the mighty Lanark, which combined the life story of a young Glasgow artist with the fantastic adventures of a man called Lanark on a number of inhospitable planets. The universe it describes is in flux, but has some reliable principles: energy, for instance, is always acquired at someone’s expense. Last year’s 1982 Janine was more consistently located, in the head of a sadomasochistic superviser of security installations trying to drink his memories away in a Scottish provincial hotel, but similar ideas were present; Scotland was viewed as a giant security installation itself, packed with English warheads, and as a slave who had come to enjoy the state of bondage.

England was appropriating Scottish energy long before the oil started coming ashore. As Gray put it for an American readership, Edinburgh is Scotland’s New York. Scotland has no Washington. So it’s about time Gray addressed himself to the bright planet that lives off the dark ones, to Scotland’s Washington: to London.

Gray sets his fable in ‘a prosperous decade between two disastrous economic depressions’, namely the Sixties. London appears as it might in a youth-conscious film of the time, as a series of iconic backdrops. Kelvin Walker arrives from Scotland at Victoria Coach Station determined to make his way, and meets a girl called Jill in a Charing Cross Road cafe; she treats him with amused condescension until she realises that his naivety is real, and that he is ‘much more foreign’ than she has assumed. He claims to be flush with money, and offers her dinner; his first meal in this magical city, where money has accumulated for so long that it has ‘flashed into wealth’, is eaten at the restaurant on top of the Post Office Tower (where Rita Tushingham’s and Lynn Redgrave’s London adventure had its crisis in Smashing Time). The bill, to Kelvin’s horror, exceeds by three pounds his total resources.

Now penniless, Kelvin moves in with Jill and her artist lover, until such time as he can get a job. Although his background is bizarre and his experience almost nonexistent (he was brought up in the John Knox Street Free Seceders Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and though now an atheist flinches at the impropriety of calling Jesus Christ by his first name), he is not without resources. He will make no attempt at an orthodox career, since ‘nowadays the ladders are so long that the folk at the bottom have to retire before reaching the middle.’ He will apply only for jobs with a starting salary above £5000 (this is the Sixties, remember). He impersonates his home town’s only famous son, who produces the BBC’s dullest current affairs programme, so as to get interviews.

His interview technique is erratic. He tells his prospective employer on the first occasion: ‘You have no doubt noticed a stain on my trouser leg caused by mince . . . You yourself, I notice, have a small but perceptible egg-stain on your tie. Don’t you feel this makes for some sort of bond between us?’ This is not a successful approach.

Kelvin does get a job in the end, and at the level he desires: as an interviewer on the BBC’s dullest current affairs programme. Since The Fall of Kelvin Walker is a satire as well as a fairy tale, there is a reason for this: the BBC is badly in need of abrasive regional personalities to give the plum-voiced powerful a convincing drubbing, by which their plum-voiced careers will be greatly extended. A simpleton who asks devastating questions is clearly, from the BBC’s point of view, a major asset.

Not that it quite works out like that. Kelvin becomes a national figure, with his own newspaper column over and above his television appearances. He has gained his faith in God (at the same time as he gained intimacy with Jill), whom he used to regard as a dour headmaster; but now he has a real chance of becoming prefect. Kelvin’s rapid rise threatens the BBC, and soon he finds himself being grilled on television in his turn; only this time the aggressiveness is real. He is cast as Gilbert Harding on Face to Face, or as this week’s celebrity in a destructive version of This Is Your Life. His father, imported at great expense, denounces him, he breaks down and returns to Scotland, where he becomes a go-getting bigot and, eventually, 293rd Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Seceders Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

These plot-turns, in a book of no more than a gross of pages, have an oddly derailing effect. It’s as if the book moves from the world of Being There to the world of Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Alasdair Gray’s verve, on this occasion, has a strong element of impatience.

Already time has been telescoped so as to provide a pleasing range of modish opinions: Gay Liberation, for instance, against which Kelvin rails in his column, was a phrase coined only in 1969 (and in America at that). At one point in the book, the oil in the North Sea is mentioned as a distant prospect, a little later Aberdeen has already been transformed by it into a centre of power. The landlady Mrs. Hendon is clearly unattractive on her first entrance (‘a large woman wearing clothes of a kind that would have looked better on someone younger and slimmer’), but subsequently she becomes a sexpot, her sweater and jeans both ‘splendidly filled’ as her role in the plot shifts from harridan to siren. Alasdair Gray would not take these liberties on his home ground.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker is charming, pointed, funny, well-written and something of a disappointment after the excellence of 1982 Janine. It should nevertheless be read by the English for the rare pleasure of seeing themselves described as rich, wild, nonchalant and reckless, seductively sure and shallow: very much the way, in fact, that they are used to imagining Americans.