Sticking to your roots

There's a curious thing about Glue, Irvine Welsh's new novel. It's nothing to do with the actual book itself, more the packaging, the baggage. There are two references to Welsh in the book and both say simply, "Irvine Welsh lives in London." Now then. There's nothing wrong with living in London (well…) but it's not something you'd necessarily associate with Irvine Welsh.

"When you have your first dust jacket you kind of waffle on, thank everybody and you try and be smart and write all sorts of rubbish, but eventually you cut all the waffle out, so I try and keep all that stuff to a minimum." But… "Irvine Welsh lives in London"? For someone who's writing is so geographically specific, isn't that a strange thing to write? "No, I don't think so. I've lived in London on and off for about 20 years. I've always moved between London and Edinburgh. I'm up all the time. I've still got a place in Edinburgh and I go up every second weekend. I've still got a season ticket for the football and still feel part of the scene up there."
Irvine Welsh might live in London, but his writing hasn't made that move south yet and Glue is as Edinburgh-based as anyone might reasonably expect, and is characterised by the rhythmic slang that Welsh has made his own.

"Topsy hud been oan at ays aw week; at school, then at oor work, aboot ays no gaun tae the Hearts game at Montrose. It wis jist cause ah'd been at Hibs oan Saturday. Ah think eh thoat ah wis changin sides. Nae chance ay that. Ah still shite masel thinkin aboot that gob that went doon ma throat. Ah dinnae mind a punchin or a kickin, but that's disgustin." Most writers struggle to find an individual voice, a voice that they can call their own. Welsh's blessing - and probably his curse as well, but ain't that always the way - is that he found his something in the first book he wrote. There ain't no one who's going to write a sentence like, "Ah still shite masel thinkin aboot that gob that went doon ma throat", because it is so obviously Welsh. Even if someone wanted to write like that, they couldn't because it would sound like they're ripping him off. Picking out a random extract like that, it's a ridiculous thing to do and on the page here, in isolation, it looks strange, foreign. But in the book, the words take on a hypnotic feel, they flow. It kind of bounces the pages along. And even if there are words you don't immediately recognise - and I had to check "masel" a few times - it doesn't matter: you know what the sentence is saying even if you don't know what it means. "Hypnotic? Yes, I think the reason it's hard, particularly at the start is because of the words on the page, the way they look. You're not used to seeing words on the page written like that. And it's just as hard if you come from Scotland."

"The lingo is much easier for me because these are the voices that come to me and the characters come to me that way. It would have been pretentious to have written Trainspotting in standard English, it would have just been ridiculous. Anyone who knew these characters could never have envisaged them speaking that way, so it would have been ridiculous to have attributed that to them. Standard English is quite problematic when you're trying to do different cultures, because it's an imperialist language. It's a kind of weights and measures. It's a controlling language and it's not got the kind of funk to it that can bring the characters to life. When I started writing I wanted to draw on the Celtic oral storytelling tradition, and that's a tradition that's a bit more performance based. It's got a beat and rhythm to it and I wanted to capitalise on that."

The story of four lads, Glue takes us from their early days in the dark Seventies through to the present - complete with requisite soundtrack and chemical assistance. To anyone who's read him - or is aware of Welsh - the characters will seem fantastically familiar. "When you're writing characters you always come down to your basic types and make modifications and take it from there. I think these things have got a life of their own. Sometimes I don't think you really write a book as you're some kind of cipher."

"You start off with some kind of standard plan but it never happens, it always changes. In some way they're probably refinements or modifications of the Trainspotting characters: you've got the cynical outsider intellectual, you've got the fanny merchant, you've got the hard guy and you've got the doomed loser. They're the same but in different kind of ways, they're different refinements. Birrell has channelled his aggression into boxing not like Begbie - he's made his hobby pay. Juice Terry's a different character to Sick Boy. He's much less of a schemer, he's much more a machine and as long as he's shagging regularly he's quite happy. Carl is different from Renton in that he's more dynamic. He's someone who does something rather than sit in an armchair, and Gally is more headstrong than Spud."

Glue is Irvine Welsh's sixth book including novels and short story collections like The Acid House and is perceivably bigger than anything he's done before. Not bigger as in bulk, though at 469 pages it is that as well, but bigger in scope, in feel, in ambition. It has the feel of book that's trying to say something. The PR blurb calls it, "An important and prodigious book" and while we know what value to put on PR blurbs, Glue kind of feels like that.

"I don't think it's a more important book… I think I'd be hard pushed to write a more important book than Trainspotting. I think books become important because of the impact they have and what they show up. I don't think Trainspotting's my best book, but I'd have to say it's the most important because it's had the widest influence." Is it one of those things that's become as much a millstone as a pension plan? "A millstone? I always saw it as more as a kind of opportunity. This is what most writers are trying to achieve and to have achieved it with my first one… Well, I realised there's no point in worrying about it. It does cast a shadow, there's no doubt about it, but it's also opened lots of doors as well. I've always seen it as a positive thing."

Do you still like it or are you a bit sick of it all now? "I think the actual book itself is great. The stuff that went along with it, the publicity and the celebrity didn't do that much for me and it was something that I was keen to shake off as soon as possible, but the actual book itself and the other stuff that's associated with it like the play and the film have been great for me." But by setting the story in so many different time frames and by referencing the social changes that took place in Britain along the way, Glue does, whether Welsh admits it or not, set itself up as maybe not "important" but as a comment.

"No, not really. Just because of the scope of the book it feels more like that than previous things I've done. I've always written about people in a short time frame before so you can dive into their world or dive into their head. This has been much more looking back, because it's a longer time frame you can see their influences working on them more, so it humanises them a bit more."

Are you not a bit bored by these characters? "I still feel that's where my head's at in terms of what I'm writing. I don't want or desire to move on to writing about different social milieu's and all that kind of stuff. I've no great interest in doing that."

And there's another thing. When Irvine Welsh started writing he was skint, a chancer, a failed heroin addict. Now he's presumably rich and well-oiled and living in London. Now then. We know that rich doesn't necessarily equal happy, but… is it still valid to write about squalid Edinburgh life? Isn't what your life is now going to seep into your work? "I think it will inevitably. I'm quite happy writing about the sort of things that I write about. I think you've got enough middle class novelists and some of them really good, some of them not so good, but they write about what they are. And I'm still writing about what I am. But yes, it's that caught between two stools thing. I probably don't live that life to the extent that I used to, but I still have enough of a handle, enough of an insight."

Glue is published on May 3.

copyright New Insight 2001

| Home | Eating Out | Films, Books, Music | Listings |
| Astrology | Health | About Us | Subscription | Contact Us |