Scotched

Part 2

by Chris Wright

Still, people tend to identify the three closely. McLean says "stupid" articles like the one in the New York Times contribute to this popular sense of homogeneity. A friendly, baby-faced man with a penchant for chipping into conversations with ironic one-liners, McLean says he is both irritated and amused by much of the analysis he and his contemporaries have received. All three authors laugh bitterly at the absurdity of characterizations like the one that ran in the Times ("They live the life of Edinburgh Beats -- get up at noon, drink, talk and write the day away, and party all through the night"), which serve to both reinvent and reinforce the old stereotype of the hard-living, hard-drinking Scotsman. "You get rid of one set of myths," sighs McLean, "only to have them replaced with another set."

Kelman agrees: "You consciously fight to assert the reality of what you're doing, the reality of your work, only to have it swept away by the tide of sentimentalization and mythology. It's a way of depoliticizing you. It's one of the most effective ways they have of not allowing our position to come through." Kelman's talk is thick with theys and thems. He is a deeply skeptical man, suspicious of the English literary establishment, convinced that there has been a long and systematic effort to undermine Scottish language and culture.

Welsh, meanwhile, displaying a pragmatism entirely at odds with his mad-druggie public image, goes on to speculate that the sheer scope of cultural events covered by the popular press inevitably leads to threadbare coverage: "There's so much going on it's difficult to spend a lot of time trying to understand it all. So any superficial construct you can have to understand something tends to be adopted." He continues, "After a while you get the feeling that your work has absolutely nothing to do with you; you feel completely alienated from the thing that you have created." Then he adds, with as close as he gets to a smile, "Actually, it's quite liberating."

Another distortion that Welsh has had to withstand is the identification of his personality with those of his characters (as, admittedly, I was doing earlier). "A lot of the characters I've created have very different politics and social attitudes to me," he insists. "I've created characters who I absolutely hate and detest." He says it's understandable that people "identify the writer with the voice," but goes on to suggest that many of the voices he uses in his fiction, far from being his own, are actually intruders: "You haven't necessarily got control -- these voices start hammering into you. All the voices that you've heard throughout your life start hammering into you and arguing and shouting." And I realize once more what a strange, starey man Irvine Welsh is.

It's not just the chilling realism of Welsh's characters that makes his work such a success, but their freshness, their unique brand of visceral energy. "You go to Waterstone's or Barnes & Noble," he says, "and 90 percent of the novels have the same narrative voice. It's the same fucking person who's writing these books. That's one of the reasons I write such over-the-top characters. I hate this thing where the hero slays the dragon and marries the princess. There's so much fiction written from wish fulfillment. It's the James Bond syndrome: this pure white character who has to be a bit tidy on the streets with his fists and a fantastic shag and all that. It's a load of fucking nonsense."

The two million people (his figure) who have bought Trainspotting would probably agree. Despite the popular and critical success of his work, though, Welsh has not had a particularly easy time with the press during his career. Along with intense public scrutiny have come scandal and insinuation: he has been accused of lying about his age and lying about his background; he's been accused of acting as a pop-culture Pied Piper, leading Britain's youth along the path of drug dependency; and, in a bizarre case of reverse libel, he's been accused of lying about the fact that he's done heroin. ("No you haven't." "Yes I have.") So it comes as little surprise that Welsh is less than enthusiastic about media appearances. "I get asked to write articles, to do loads and loads of TV shows, but I won't. I won't go on TV and debate drugs, for example, because the whole thing is set up to demonize you."

McLean acknowledges that Bunker Man, too, with its stark confrontation of violence and misogyny, will probably attract its fair share of negative press. "I haven't had to deal with that yet, but I was aware that some people would be made uncomfortable reading it because I was uncomfortable writing it."

And James Kelman is certainly no stranger to controversy. After his novel How Late It Was, How Late won the 1994 Booker Prize, the British literary establishment erupted in righteous indignation over the choice. One of the dissenting Booker judges called the novel "crap," and various newspapers blew hot air over the book's use of profanity (4000 instances of the F-word, according to one diligent source). The conservative broadsheet the Daily Telegraph did not mince its words: "this book is ugly," the paper chimed, and lamented the book's "pollution of the language which forms an essential part of our culture."

Part 3

Chris Wright is on staff at the Boston Phoenix.