Irvine Welsh 2001 talking about 'Glue'

Glue is a surprisingly warm hearted and wide ranging novel from Irvine Welsh, tracing the journey from adolescence to adulthood of four friends from Edinburgh. Here Irvine Welsh answered David Cunningham's questions prior to attending the Scottish Writers In Bulgaria Festival, which took place in Sofia.

Irvine Welsh turns up unforgivably late for our meeting. I wait for him in a murky pub in Leith, Edinburgh - the setting for his most famous novel, Trainspotting (1993) and his latest, Glue (2001). The table at which I sit is awash with spilled beer, coasters aswim on its surface. All the furnishings are different shades and textures of brown. The air is so stale that you feel as if you're sitting inside a very old, very used trainer. Crowding the bar, regulars contemplate me with an expression of undisguised hostility.

The door bursts open. Momentarily distracted from their loathing of me, the regulars cringe at the unbidden intrusion of daylight. Irvine Welsh falls into the pub and continues to reel forward until he slams into the bar. Unfazed by this collision, he promptly orders several drinks. He turns to survey the room, eyes adjusting to the gloom. Spotting me, he lurches over, at least five glasses cradled in his trembling hands. He drops into the seat opposite me. His head is shaved, his expression sullen, his eyes bloodshot. He looks dauntingly wasted. In response to my nervous greeting he can muster nothing more articulate than a non-committal growl, and...

...And all this is, of course, nonsense. Irvine Welsh and I do not meet in a rancid hostelry in Edinburgh. In fact, Irvine Welsh and I do not meet at all. I was originally supposed to interview him for the British Council, who are putting together a Scottish-Bulgarian writing festival in Sofia later this year. The Scottish contingent comprises William McIlvanney, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Robin Robertson, and Welsh. My profiles of these five were to be translated into Bulgarian and published in the nation's foremost Arts and Culture magazine.

The first four interviewees proved easily contactable and accessible. William McIlvanney, Janice Galloway and Liz Lochhead were on hand in Glasgow. It was only when I tried to seek out Robin Robertson (poet, Deputy Publishing Director at Jonathan Cape and Welsh's editor) that things began to get tricky. Rather ominously, it turned out that he was too busy helping Welsh promote his new novel to meet me. So I interviewed him by e-mail instead.

As expected, Welsh himself was even more elusive. Robertson - tirelessly helpful throughout - responded to my agitated enquiries with a series of explanations that vividly evoked the schedule of the commercially successful modern author: "Sorry, he's on tour in the States", "Sorry, he's in the South of France", "Sorry, he's at the Edinburgh book festival." Wherever he was, it slowly became apparent that the nervously assembled list of questions I had sent to him via Robertson were not his top priority. Two magazine deadlines approached and departed, unmet. In the end I had to fulfil my obligation to produce a sixth piece by writing a contortedly generalised survey of modern Scottish literature. On the day I e-mailed it to Sophia, Welsh's answers finally arrived.

Deadlines aside, I'm particularly sad that I won't get to meet him until we're in Bulgaria together this October because reading his books, in order to prepare my questions, erased some long held prejudices.

Like most prejudices mine were based on ignorance. A cursory glance at Trainspotting about five years ago had persuaded me that Welsh's success was a triumph of subject over style. I believed that his titillating emphasis on drug-addled promiscuity and petty criminality covered up some laughable deficiencies in writing and characterisation. An admirer of quiet, reflective fiction (and liver of a mostly quiet, reflective life), I found Welsh's world discomfortingly alien. So I did what people usually do when discomforted: I condemned, in order to excuse myself from finding out more.

Then, a couple of months ago, naggingly aware of the fact that I was soon going to meet the man whose work I had so blithely dismissed, I picked up Trainspotting again. After I had limped irritably along for thirty pages or so - struggling with the Edinburgh dialect in which much of the book is written - something clicked. I couldn't put it down. I was overwhelmed by the ingenuity of the language, the subterranean blackness of the humour, the complex structure. I moved on to Glue and my admiration increased - the new novel revisits the milieu of Trainspotting but sets it against a much larger context, with characters who edge closer to the mainstream without losing their distinctive mania. In the space of a week I had changed from a complacent sceptic into a committed fan.

Briefly, then, the facts - as far as they can be determined. Welsh may be a brilliantly original writer but he is a terrible man to research. Even establishing a reliable date of birth is tricky. He likes playing games with journalists. And at the outset of his fame he certainly manipulated aspects of his past life to amplify his burgeoning enfant terrible image. (Explaining this habit, he has said, "It's mainly out of boredom. If you're physically doing a round of interviews over a week and somebody on Monday morning says ‘What did you think of the Trainspotting film?' and you've been asked this question forty times during the week, I think you have to start giving different answers, just to keep your own interest up.")

He was born in 1957 (or 1956, or possibly 1958, or even 1961) in Leith and grew up in Muirhouse, a grim, peripheral housing estate a million miles away (socially if not geographically) from the Castle, the Royal Mile, the Georgian architecture and the cultural festivities of Edinburgh's affluent city centre. His father was a docker, his mother a waitress. He left school at 16 and became a trainee television repairman (according to certain accounts he abandoned this trade prematurely after being almost electrocuted.) In the late-1970s he moved to London, sang in punk bands and took lots of drugs.

Throughout the early to mid-Eighties he dodged between the two capitals and took lots more drugs. During this period Edinburgh was experiencing a heroin/AIDS epidemic unparalleled in Western Europe - worse than Glasgow's, according to some analyses, because Edinburgh's city fathers were less inclined to acknowledge a problem that sat ill with the genteel image of the capital they sought to project (and cling onto themselves). Thus the sub-culture and characters of Trainspotting were born. However, instead of going under, like so many of his contemporaries, Welsh, rather surreally, went back to school. He completed an MSc in Computing and an MBA at Heriot-Watt, and rose swiftly through the conformist hierarchy of local government, eventually becoming head of training for Edinburgh District Council. Even more surreally, he also made around £50,000 from property speculation ("I didn't invent Capitalism," he has explained).

While holding down the day job, he published edgy, iconoclastic, viciously comic short stories such as "The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival" in Scottish literary magazines. These formed the basis of Trainspotting. Published in August 1993, it sold 50000 copies before the film came out. The Acid House, an impressively fertile short story collection, soon followed.

It's given to few writers to a write a book that defines an era. It's given to even fewer to become a folk hero. But both these things happened to Welsh with Trainspotting. He acquired totemic status for a generation of young people who, while not as inelegantly wasted as Renton, Sick Boy or Spud, went clubbing and took recreational drugs as a matter of course: the "chemical generation." Yet notoriety seemed to have an alarming effect upon Welsh's prose. Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy, Filth and the play, You'll Have Had Your Hole, provoked a critical reaction that was at best dubious, at worst vitriolic. The critic Jenny Turner memorably observed that he seemed to be going "from weakness to weakness" as a writer. He was accused of dissipating his talent in a number of ways: guest DJ-ing in Ibiza, making a record with Primal Scream, writing columns for style magazines, relentlessly partying and, of course, becoming involved in the occasional minor rumble with the police. He claims to regret none of his post-success divertissements (why should he?) and to be unperturbed by criticisms of them. Yet the sheer heft of Glue (rather ominously his second book in a row to be trumpeted by Jonathan Cape as "a return to form") suggests that here is an author finally prepared to give fiction his undivided attention once more. It was on this topic that I began my questions:

DC: You said recently about Glue that, "The central theme is...once you start fucking up and it becomes a habit, it's a very difficult cycle to break." But are the characters in the novel fucked up by circumstances or do they fuck themselves up?

IW: Obviously it's a bit of both. Some people get a terrible deal from life. I think that no matter how bad circumstances are though, you have to believe that you can make them better. If you don't, you're fucked.

DC: Trainspotting ended with Renton betraying his mates. Glue - the title - refers to the bonds of friendship between its four principal characters. Does this reflect a mellowing in your outlook?

IW: No. There's more betrayal and scheming going down in the book I'm currently doing than in any other. I think it's just that Glue was a reaction against Filth, and this is probably a reaction against Glue.

DC: In the closing pages of Glue there's a meditation on the necessity of finally growing up: not being an adult kid anymore, preoccupied with drugs and partying. Was that a message to yourself as a writer as much as to your characters?

IW: You have to screw the nut as you get older. Your constitution can't handle partying in the same way. As a writer I'll change over the years, quite possibly in ways which would repulse me now. You have to go with it though, as long as it's what you want.

DC: In profiles of you and your work, two Irvine Welshes seem to come across. One is the very anti-authoritarian drifter, akin to the characters in your fiction. The other is a much shrewder, more practical guy who has an MBA, had a successful career in local government and made some money through property speculation. Is this an accurate reflection of a certain duality in your personality? Have you ever felt obliged to play down the latter aspect because it didn't fit in with the image you wanted to project as a writer?

IW: I've no idea what my personality is like and I never think about it. I do know that by the time I started writing I could pull out about three or four different biographies. Obviously, you emphasise certain points more than others, but I think it's a media thing as well. If, for example, you're continually asked questions about what drugs you've taken and when and why, it's going to colour the way you come across.

DC: Most aspiring writers tend to find the day-job a bit of a chore. Yet you appeared to make a great success of you career in local government. To what extent were you really absorbed by this kind of work? Or was it just a way of paying the bills while you wrote?

IW: I liked my job the first year, quite enjoyed it the second, hated it by the third. Like most people on the nine-to-five it was made bearable through working with really great people. Most places I've worked in I've been lucky to make close friends. But the job only became instrumental when I got into writing.

DC: Grahame Greene talked about the "chip of ice" at the heart of every writer. When you were involved in the milieu you describe in Trainspotting were you consciously standing back from it to some extent as well, in order to write about it later?

IW: Trainspotting was basically about the eighties but written in the nineties; by the time I'd come to write about it I was detached from the kind of life depicted in the book. At the time I had no concept of ‘standing back from it' as I had no idea that I'd ever write about it.

DC: Did you always intend to write Trainspotting in Edinburgh vernacular or was it something you slipped into because it felt like the most comfortable form of expression for that story and those characters?

IW: It seemed pretentious to write about it in any other way, as the characters voices didn't come to me like that. I wanted to get a rhythm to it, which you don't find in standard English as it's an administrator's weights-and-measures language. It's not a living language and can't be used to depict culture. We wouldn't accept it in television, film or music, and see fiction as a cultural medium, rather than an academic concern.

DC: Once Trainspotting became a huge popular success people seemed to forget that it had also been long-listed for the Booker. Do you ever feel that the furore about its subject matter tended to obscure its literary qualities?

IW: It was actually short-listed for the Booker, Earl Gowrie disclosed, but two members of the panel threatened to walk off unless it was removed. I don't feel its literary qualities have been obscured. I've had a great deal of support from literary circles. Maybe they don't make as much noise as the empty vessels who rabbit on in the media about how outraged they are, but I certainly can't complain about the way the books have been received.

DC: During the post-Trainspotting period you took a lot of flak for appearing to spread yourself too thinly and dabbling in too many different areas. Were you simply attracted by all the opportunities that were suddenly opening up to you as a result of your success?
IW: No. I was simply doing what I've always done. The idea that I was just sitting at the desk in the council when all of a sudden I wrote Trainspotting is pure nonsense. I've always dabbled in music, clubs etc, and usually without much success. It's just that nobody knew about it before. I see no reason to be self-conscious and change because I've sold a few books.

DC: Both Trainspotting and Glue are much more carefully plotted and modulated books than they appear at first. Do you spend a lot of time working out the structure of your novels?

IW: It depends. Some are more character-drive (Trainspotting) and others more plot driven (Marabou), and that really dictates the structure. You always have to think about structure at some point though.

DC: The main characters in Trainspotting are very much products of Thatcher's Britain: dispossessed and self-serving. Renton's ultimate betrayal is a very "me first" Thatcherite gesture. Do you think the novel could have been written in Blair's Britain? And do you find Blair's superficially inclusive Britain a fertile territory for fiction?

IW: There's probably more drugs around in Blair's Britain than there was in Thatcher's. If you believe the Government's own stats there are more people under the poverty line now than under the Tories. A lot of fiction coming from the inclusive side of the divide is just pumped up magazine journalism. There's always going to be something interesting happening where the media doesn't get to, or only sees through its own lens. Despite the conceit to the contrary, that's still most places in Britain today.

DC: Alex Linklater said in Prospect recently that everything you're written is about the struggle to find community in an area where the idea of community seems redundant. To what extent do you agree with that?

IW: I would agree, but this quest for community isn't limited to the milieu I largely write in. It's been a western obsession since the industrial revolution, and particularly after the war, with the impact of the leisure society, affluence, the new towns, de-industrialisation, mass unemployment and now globalisation. I think most writers cover the same territory in their own way.

DC: Though much of the narration and dialogue you write is in vernacular, the language itself is often complex and highly articulate (it's clear, for instance, that Mark Renton is a smart, educated guy.) Do you feel that the language you chose to write in sometimes blinds critics - especially English critics - to this fact? Do you think there's still a feeling abroad amongst literary people that speaking in a vernacular equals lack of education?

IW: Yes. It makes me wonder why it's acceptable in a book to make every character seem as if they were educated at Oxbridge in the 1920's. Most books, if they were literally translated into film would be treated as satire. I think literature is seen by many upper-middle-class people as being a kind of heritage thing, rather than to do with culture today. So many critics seem to operate as self-appointed custodians rather than as proper literary critics.

DC: In the past you've seemed to reject the idea of conscious artistry in your work. Was that partly a defensive thing: a feeling that if you pretended you were only playing at writing you couldn't be judged too harshly?

IW: I think I possibly was being a bit coy, but I tend not to get too worked up about such things. The process to me is largely subconscious, and you tease a plan or a structure out of that. But I am playing at writing; it's not just a job, it's a hobby.

DC: A name that's often been invoked in relation to yours is Alexander Trocchi, yet you've seemed ambivalent about him and his work in the past. Who would you say are your greatest influences as a writer?

IW: It's what rather than who. Some writers do books that influences you, and the rest of their stuff leaves you cold. I always go back to four sources; my Scottish contemporaries, classic English (Austen, Bronte, Eliot) and Russian (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) and modern American.

DC: Can you give anything away about Porno, due to be published next year?

IW: Sick Boy and Begbie's revenge. I'm still not sure about finishing it for next year though.

DC: And finally...How did you get on in the London Marathon?

IW: I completed it, which I'm delighted about as I raised a bit of cash for deserving causes.