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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
When you construct such flawed characters, are you hoping that, despite their vices, readers will come to like and identify with them, or do you want readers to hate them unremittingly?
I like to empathize with somebody that you wouldn't normally empathize with, and see what's happening to them. It's much more interesting to me, to find something good in somebody that's really beyond the pale in a lot of ways. I think I was influenced by Bertolt Brecht's play "Mother Courage." He makes her terrible. Horrible. But there's something about her, something endearing about her in a strange way. Maybe that's why people take drugs as well. I mean, it gives them permission to behave badly. When people drink it gives them permission to be a kind of way they wouldn't normally be. And I think that's why there's something empowering about really bad bastards. Because they do things that we wouldn't normally do.
So you're living vicariously through them?
I think what I'm trying to do is get a reaction from them, to get a reaction from myself. I think when you write fiction you've got to get a reaction from yourself. Having said that, none of my characters could appear alien to me. Everybody's done things that they feel really bad about from time to time and feel that they've let themselves down. It's not habitual behavior. What you can do when you write is take a fleeting emotion and you can stretch it out into the whole character.
Do you think the use of phonetic vernacular Scottish in your books will keep American readers from your work?
My first book tour was about seven years ago and they keep asking me to come back so it can't be too bad. It means I'm never going to be like John Updike and top the New York Times bestsellers list automatically with every book I put out, or Stephen King or someone like that. What it does mean is, I think I'm going to be appreciated by people who are prepared to look for a wee bit more in literature and prepared to make a bit of an effort.
So is there a practical purpose to it, or is it solely to make readers expend a little bit of effort?
The reason I started to do it was because the characters just didn't talk like that or sound like that in my head. So I thought, if I do it in Standard English, why am I doing that? It's pretentious. Also, I was heavily influenced by the rave culture and acid house and all that and I wanted to get rhythms in it and beats into it, and Standard English isn't a very rhythmic language. It's not a very beat-y language. In the ministry of language it's an imperialistic, a sort of controlling, weights-and-measures kind of language. So it's not very funky, it's not got that kind of funk.
The kind of language that I use, a lot of the words are Gypsy words and it's a Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. It's very informative, it's got that aspect to it that drives it on for me, drives the story line on for me. When you think about it, the book is the last thing that you have Standard English in. I mean, you don't have it in films; nobody talks like that in films, even British films. You don't get it anywhere else. You don't get it in drama; you don't get it on TV. You would find it really strange if people spoke like that but you have to put up with it in a book. Why?
