Maybe three or four times in your life, if you're lucky, a writer will walk right in and hang up his hat in your head, and you know you've got a companion for life. Like love at first sight, this sort of sweet surprise can grab you from directions you'd least expect. Among living writers, my personal list includes Michael Malone, Cormac McCarthy, Donald E. Westlake, and William McIlvanney, as disparate collection of interior friends as you're likely to meet-and I hope you will.

Just as there are some fine wines that don't travel, there are some fine novelists whose work seems to resist export, particularly to North America. McIlvanney is such an author, celebrated in Scotland but, regrettably, almost unknown here. His latest novel, The Kiln, won the 1996 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year award, yet the only review of it I could find in Canada was a dismissive three-paragraph notice, lumped with four other books, in the Globe and Mail.

Part of the problem doubtless is that although he writes mostly in formal English and cannot write a bad sentence, his characters speak in broad Scots dialect. McIlvanney tells us for example of "plooks", a more expressive word for "pimples", and asks: "Why are all things in Scots designated by the least romantic sound the mouth can encompass? Scottish vocabulary is like a fifth column operating within the sonorous pomposity of English, full of renegade plosives and gutturals that love to dismantle pretensions. It's English in its underwear."

McIlvanney was born in 1936 and lives in Glasgow, where most of his writing is set. He is the author of twelve books, including three of poetry, one of essays, one of short stories, and seven novels. Docherty, which won the Whitbread Award for Fiction in 1975, is the tale of a family surviving abject poverty and dejection in a coal-mining town. In The Big Man (1985), a working-class slugger fights for honour and heritage when his sense of decency is threatened by crass commercialism and drug pushers. These two books, compared by more than one critic to Orwell, have a lambent power which might haunt you for years. When he turned to crime fiction, presumably in search of a broader audience, his hard and civilized detective Jack Laidlaw set lofty literary standards for the genre and won two Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger awards.

In The Kiln, Tam Docherty is a fifty-ish teacher-writer, grandson of the hero from the 1975 book, oppressed by problems with alcohol, money, and divorce. Tam looks back on his life seeking signposts of meaning and redemption. This is a familiar form and theme, certainly, but it's difficult to recall it handled with more grace, humour, or lancing perceptions.

The crucial year is 1955, when young Tam spends the summer before going up to university writing poetry, seeking compliant females, and sweating for tuition money in a brickworks. The kiln is not only a furnace for baking bricks, but the crucible in which his endurance and courage are tested, a searing place within the mind "in which you discover you."

As Kildare Dobbs once observed, "It's hard to take seriously any book or essay that lacks wit or jokes," and humour is a distinguishing characteristic of McIlvanney's writing. In The Kiln, as in his previous novels, he uses jabs of comedy not merely for laughs but to heighten drama, offset despair, and caper around the fire of truth. Among our mainly solemn Canadian novelists, only Richler and Quarrington can come close to McIlvanney in infusing smiles among the tears.

There is strength too in his reflection of working-class values, the spirit of community eroded by greed and hucksterism. His writing is tough and spare and tender as he examines how Grampa Docherty's lessons "in solidarity and mutual concern were being forgotten." Thatcher and Disney have much to answer for.

Notable and impressive also is McIlvanney's artful insertion of aperçus and aphorisms. He is a master of the memorable observation, the telling psychological distillation, pungent as a smokey Tallisker single malt. He notes about a Stratford production: "You were bound to come out with countless arrows of perception lodged in the mind, to be pulled out at your leisure." Among contemporary authors I can't think of another in whose work I mark so many passages for re-reading.

McIlvanney may never win a Booker or a Nobel, but many lesser writers have. Pity. 

Jack MacLeod is a novelist (the author of Zinger & Me and Going Grand) and Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto.