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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The author of "Trainspotting" discusses his new novel, "Glue," real bad bastards and the Brontës.
Jul 9, 2001 | In 1993, Scottish author Irvine Welsh published "Trainspotting," and changed popular fiction forever. Written in the phonetic Scottish dialect, it told the story of Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Renton, four working-class substance abusers living in the government-housing schemes of Edinburgh, Scotland. The life of an Edinburgh "schemie" is a busy one; fights are fought, drinks are downed, pills are popped, speed is snorted and large amounts of heroin are purchased regularly from Mother Superior, a local dealer inventively named for the length of his drug habit.
Suddenly, football was "fitba," sexual intercourse was "gittin yer hole" and Irvine Welsh was famous. A film adaptation starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller became one of the most memorable films of 1996, with ample doses of explicit drug use, inventive and relentless profanity, frantic sex and violence.
A collection of Welsh's short stories, "Acid House," was published in 1994, followed by his second novel, "Marabou Stork Nightmares" in 1995, and "Ecstasy," consisting of three drug-related novellas, in 1996.
With the publication of the novel "Filth," in 1998, Welsh gave the world Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, a police officer in Edinburgh's Royal Lothian Constabulary. An antihero of the highest order, Robertson embarks on a suspect-molesting, drug-taking, hemorrhoid-scratching journey that ends explosively with his mental breakdown. The despicable Robertson shares narrative duties with a loquacious 3-meter-long tapeworm that lives coiled in his gut. It's a hoot. Really.
This May saw the publication of Welsh's new book "Glue," a sprawling novel that follows four friends across three decades. Set in the familiar territory of Edinburgh's squalid council housing projects, Billie, Carl, Terry and Gally first meet at school in the 1970s, listening to the Jam and the Buzzcocks, each desperately trying to lose his virginity. From there, we meet the friends at 10-year intervals for hilarious and heartbreaking updates on where life has taken them. In between going to the "fitba" and "gittin thir hole," each of the characters has to overcome his obstacles; some fare better than others do.
I spoke with Welsh recently about "Glue," "Trainspotting," his other books and his influences, the Brontës among them.
In many ways, "Glue" is a return to the familiar ground of "Trainspotting." It's set in the Edinburgh council housing schemes, and much of it is written in the Scottish dialect and revolves around the struggles of four young men as they grow up. Was this an intentional return to familiar subject matter?
Well, I think the similarity really is the fact that it's very much character-based rather than plot-based. I didn't really have a plot for this one. I just thought, well, I did want to get back to the feel of "Trainspotting," the idea that you've got these characters that are, sort of, sparking off each other and they generate the story from there.
I didn't mean it to be wider in scope, through the years and all that. The first part I wrote was 1990. It wasn't really going anywhere at that point so I moved forward to 2000 and I thought, well, they're not friends anymore and that's the story. But why are they not friends? So I kept going back between 1990 and 2000 and I couldn't really get the plot line. So I thought, I'll have to go back further to 1980 when they were just out of school and all that. So I got a picture of them at these different stages of life. I thought, I might as well go further back again and put the parents in so you can see where they've come from.
Normally, I like to have characters that are living in a short time frame in the novels, and put them in a position whereby they're having to overcome something. Like Renton [in "Trainspotting"] has to overcome his heroin addiction in a short time frame of about a year. Roy Strang of "Marabou Stork Nightmares" has to come to terms with his rape and being in a coma. Bruce Robertson from "Filth" has the murder and the mental breakdown and the tapeworm. It's like throwing stones at somebody over a short period of time and you get that kind of incendiary feeling that you're in their world. But "Glue" ended up a lot more expansive.
You mentioned Bruce Robertson from "Filth." To what extent does a fictional character represent your own state of mind? Were you going through a bad time when you wrote "Filth"? Robertson's a really despicable character.
Yeah he is. I've always liked to do that, though. I've always liked to get real bad bastards into fiction. When you read a lot of fiction, you can see that the person that's writing the fiction obviously wants to be seen as the central character. It's wish fulfillment. I try to get away from that. I like to have really bad horrible characters in the fiction. That was actually quite a good time for me. I felt quite upbeat when I was doing Bruce Robertson.
There are also some fairly unpleasant characters in "Glue." Do you think your readers and critics view you through your characters?
I always get this thing where people say, "Oh you must be really pissed off, or fed up, or depressed, or mentally ill, or crazy or something like that." The weird thing is that every time I've been to see people like poets, who write about flowers and trees and all this affirmation of life and the soul, and this upbeat, uplifting stuff, they're always really miserable bastards. They're always really fucking miserable depressed bastards. It's like comedians. They're always really miserable depressed bastards in real life.
