Welshspotting: Ten Minutes With Irvine Welsh

Image: Colin McPherson/Corbis

If you had to find a word to describe Irvine Welsh’s works, it would be this: Brutal. He writes bleak stories, and he manages to offend feminists, homosexuals and liberals all in one sentence. His characters are flawed, usually working class folk from broken homes and poor families, often drug addicts, and they have flimsy morals bent on convenience, and most have a violent streak.

Welsh was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1958 and has seen the social fabric of Scotland break down during the Thatcher years in the 1980s and never quite get repaired. He says his works are an outpouring of the despair of those times. He claims that was when the heroin problem really took hold of Scotland. Welsh got into the rave scene in the late 1980s and most of his characters principally abuse heroin and ecstasy.

He shot to fame with his debut novel Trainspotting (1993), a collection of stories about working class youth in Edinburgh and their drug problems. He stripped the issues of addiction, football hooliganism, sex and misogyny to their bare minimum. He made it difficult for the non-Scottish reader by writing in phonetic Scottish. Female critics despised it. Danny Boyle’s on-screen adaptation of the novel in 1996 added to his profile.

Welsh’s characters often cross paths in his novels: Characters from Trainspotting have made appearances in Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Glue (2001) and Porno (2002). He delves into fantasy and supernatural on occasion; his second book, The Acid House (1994), a collection of short stories, had instances of God transforming a man into a fly and a baby and a drug user’s minds swapping bodies during a lightning strike. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006) had a government employee placing a curse on his co-worker. His last novel, Crime (2008), took his protagonist to the USA, unusual for Welsh; he said he wanted a change of surroundings.

Welsh’s Skag Boys, a prequel to Trainspotting, will be out this year.

We spoke to Welsh on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival.

On the breakdown in Scotland’s social fabric during the Thatcher years and the impact of the recession today
Well I think, it’s the same in the whole of the UK, particularly in Scotland, which is kind of marginal in the UK. I think it’s not a lot of social fabric left because it was kind of wrecked under Thatcherism and [Tony] Blair didn’t really restore it, didn’t really change anything, just maintained a kind of status quo, so it’s badly in need of repair. and the last of it is going to be thrown out under the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition. It just seems sad and unnecessary to be taking this kind of approach.

Most other governments in the West are taking a different approach to sorting this problem [of recession] out; they are trying to spend their way out of it. But I don’t think it’s going to work in the long run. You are going to cause a lot of problems. If you have less people at work and more people dependent on the State, you are back to square one really.

On the reactions of his fans when he tackled supernatural subjects
It’s difficult to say. I don’t mean to sound arrogant but the brain is a very selfish thing; you can’t see an audience or a fan base, you just have to write for yourself. Sometimes you have to accept that you go in and out of fashion, your stuff will be more relevant at some point than at other times. There are certain things that happen that people just want to see and you won’t want to see at different times in your life. So you just have to chart your own course.

I think people are growing up and changing as well. They are going to respect the fact that you’re going to change and you’re not going to write ‘Trainspotting 2’.

On his fan base over the last 20 years
Audiences are getting younger all the time. When I started touring after the first book, I was 30. My readers were in their late 20s, early 30s; now when I tour, it’s school kids, teenagers basically; they’ve seen Trainspotting on DVD. It’s still bought by older people, but the ones who come to readings, particularly in Britain and the United States, are very young. I have been getting older and the audiences have been getting younger; it’s a strange phenomenon.

On his new book, which will be out later this year
I think it’ll be interesting for a lot of older people. It’s a grown up version of Trainspotting in a lot of ways, so I think they’ll kind of vibe on it. And hopefully a lot of younger people will as well, because they’ll see a lot of things that were happening in — what we were talking about — the Thatcher era.
 
On his characters
I think most probably [I identify with] Renton (Trainspotting, Porno). But I also think you have to identify with all of them. They are all different versions of yourself and what you could have been. They all feel very personal to me.

The names came from the Edinburgh phone book. Oh the nicknames, shite! Everybody’s got nicknames in Edinburgh; you’ve got five different nicknames. That was the easiest part of it.

On the inspirations for his characters
A lot of them are dead. A lot of people did die in the 80s and into the 90s, to the HIV/AIDS, overdoses and stuff. But a lot of them are alive, they’ve come through it all. It’s a mixed bag really. They are all doing something now, different stuff. Some of them are still living marginal lives while some are quite successful. You can’t really generalise.

If you go through that and come out through the other side, you come out quite altered, quite strong. You can take on anything and you embrace the next set of problems in your life.

About the ‘accent’ in his writing and whether it gets in the way for his reader
Sometimes an American may ask me to translate what a few words mean and all that. But most are fine about it. I think I would probably have a bigger audience in Australia, America, South Africa —  the English-speaking countries —  and a 100 different countries if I wrote in normal English but I prefer to have a discerning audience and an audience who has worked hard to get into it.

His next book
It’s set in Florida. A female-centric character; she’s a personal trainer. That’s the next project.