AS A man who describes his rise as ``geriatric'' and who took thirty years to relinquish hold of his first book, only to be rewarded by winning a #20,000 literary award, Jeff Torrington has finally defied a lifetime's refusal to recognize urgency.

Briskly disregarding second book syndrome, traditionally the most difficult phase of a writing career, he has completed two manuscripts and started a third in the three years since winning the Whitbread prize.

Work proceeds. He has a novel up his sleeve, another on the way, and The Devil's Carousel, a cycle of stories linked by recurring characters and a shared location in the fictional car manufacturing plant of Chimeford, is launched on Monday.

``Time's against me,'' he reflects. ``I'm down to one-finger typing. So I have had to accelerate my rate of production.''

Paradoxically, it is a burning revulsion for the dehumanising effects of involvement with mechanized production that drives the new book. It does for the car assembly plant operation what Robert Tressell did for artisan labour in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It could be taken as a coda and an act of homage for another lost passage of industrial culture.

Although Torrington has been careful not to commit the setting of his cycle of 14 stories specifically to Linwood, aiming for a different form of universality than was achieved in the specific Gorbals world of Swing Hammer Swing, it is difficult for the local reader not to overlay a little of what is remembered of the ill-fated Linwood plant.

The fact that Torrington was made redundant with the closure of Linwood in 1981 makes it idle to pretend other than that the meticulous detail the Main Assembly Division (MAD) and its high track, and the seven stations manned by 7000 workers to produce of 50 cars an hour, from harness section to axles, to gearboxes, to wheels and tyres, to engine drop-point, via prod/con office and finally through the seats section on this carousel, are all drawn from experience.

He was eight years at Linwood as a telex sequencer. The incentive was a #10 rise in 1973 on his telegraphist job at the General Post Office in George Square, Glasgow, and the convenience of being a twenty minute walk from his employment. Torrington confesses he sold his soul for a job he came to hate. It was a staff job, imposing a status that provoked antagonism from boiler-suited operators.

As the Imps, Hunters and Avengers rolled by his window, he detected more sinister undercurrents than these names implied. There was more than impish mischief behind strikes he came to recognize as being deliberately engineered by management to tide over periods of over-production. When vengeance came with closure it was sour. He was among those who voted to fight on and resist the auction of machinery by Peugeot-Talbot, who had taken over from Chrysler. He left with a #3000 cheque.

In the beginning, he had been seduced by an appalled fascination. When he first viewed the line he was reminded of Chaplin's Modern Times, a flirtation of fancy he would later regret as infantile. Imagination and and an off-beat sense of humour have had a habit of leading Torrington into predicaments.

IT has also been his source of buoyancy after being diagnosed as suffering Parkinson's Disease in the same year as Linwood closed. It was the end of his employment career, and the start of a serious attempt to make it as a writer.

If The Devil's Carousel is a belated spin-off of his Linwood days, it is perhaps not the only one. He has been spared any love of cars, which he counts as a blessing. He has an autophobia to match a sweety factory worker's repugnance for confectionary. He has only one thing to say about the motor car: ``What a terrible thing to do to human beings.''

The other legacy might be a compulsion to strip words down and reassemble them. His obsession with careful drafts and re-drafts might be diagnosed as a defiance against mechanised processes. His fiction is, by analogy, hand-built. ``What else do you think I use?'' he would be entitled to retort, as does one of his characters. ``My feet?''

There is a difficult irony in this. Aged sixty, with the past 15 years spent fighting the onset of infirmity, his day at the processor can only rarely exceed a single hour. He is forced to subside into reading or the acute activity of his imagination. Yet he refuses to surrender control. He says his new wife, Margaret, ``prevented the roof from caving in while I laboured at the prose-face''. But the only thing he will consider dictating to her for easier transcription is correspondence.

This is what makes his production rate so remarkable. As the new book is signed over for American and German editions he moves on to the next. One novel has not yet been presented to his publishers. The other is under way. It is about an artist who becomes a writer after a shooting which leaves him without the command of his right arm. ``I told that to an interviewer and she suggested it was about me,'' he says with evident surprise. ``Maybe it was.''

John Linklater meets Jeff Torrington, a writer set apart from the literary assembly line