“I don’t hate the English, they’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonised by wankers.”
So said Mark Renton in 1993’s ‘Trainspotting’. But if Irvine Welsh is enthused by the prospect of divorce from the English wankers later on in the year, he’s content to give little away, merely suggesting that after 30 years of a “neoliberal impasse” it’s good enough to see something, anything, drastic happening in British politics.
His perceived neutrality might have something to do with his relocation a few years ago to America; specifically, Miami, in which he has set his 9th novel ‘The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins’.
He explains the novel’s preoccupations with modern culture’s obsession with statistics, body image pathologies, the vapid means of measuring human beings’ worth and achievements, and so on. The way he sees it, “consumerism has ticked all the boxes it can, and we’re still not really any happier”; instead, humans are held captive inside a zoo for which they are seldom emotionally designed.
Welsh is a novelist whose recent output has been on a decidedly downward trajectory – perfectly readable, albeit no longer reaching the gloriously grotesque realism of early novels ‘Glue’, ‘The Acid House’ or ‘Filth’. He was in a league of his own as the gutter poet of Leith, drawing reprehensible characters better than pretty much anyone in contemporary literature. But inevitably, the transition Stateside was never going to yield the same raw and instinctive creativity.
That being said, the move has served to prevent him re-treading worn ground on a path to turgidity, as has happened with Bret Easton Ellis, who I have often thought of as being Welsh’s American counterpart. Both achieved notoriety and subversive success – Welsh with ‘Trainspotting’, Ellis with ‘American Psycho’ – both were firmly embedded in the psychology of their locality – Welsh’s Edinburgh to Ellis’ LA – and both have hit a post-millennium creative decline (rather steeper on Ellis’ part). Perhaps what Ellis really needed was to relocate to Scotland…
I ask Welsh how he felt seeing his debut novel 'Trainspotting' being adopted as to key text for the 90’s Britpop and ‘Cool Britannia’ era (one that is currently ablaze with renewed nostalgia on its 20th anniversary despite nostalgic saturation being its original raison d’etre). He agrees that it was odd to “suddenly see my novel become Danny Boyle’s film, and then become Richard Branson’s train advert”.
On the point of whether, in 2014, the literary scene would be capable of cultivating a novel of such subversive significance he takes a rather sceptical tone, blaming the global nature of culture that largely prohibits any work of art from building an underground swell of appreciation.
All in all, Welsh is both affable (signing books and posing for selfies after the event for a long queue of people), and a consistently entertaining literary force. After all, which other modern writer could have crafted such hideously iconic characters as Francis Begbie, DC Bruce Robertson or a tapeworm with an existential crisis?
No comments:
Post a Comment