Review: Irvine Welsh, Bristol Festival of Ideas

“You all look very sexy,” says Irvine Welsh, addressing the audience at Waterstones to promote his eleventh novel The Blade Artist.

In affable mood and fresh over from his Chicago home, he almost – the psychopathic tendencies aside – mirrors the movements of the book’s protagonist Begbie, who has relocated to California and is returning to Edinburgh for the funeral of his murdered son.

Welsh made his name with 1993’s Trainspotting, the story of a group of disparate friends and characters and their addiction to heroin. A stream of other books have followed, some of them – Glue, Porno, Skagboys – also featuring the same characters. Francis Begbie was the violent terrifying presence throughout.

With the filming and recent release of the sequel to the equally popular film of Trainspotting, T2 Trainspotting, again directed by Danny Boyle, Welsh started re-spending time with the films characters and got the idea for the new book.

“It started as a result of a Christmas story for The Big Issue a few years ago,” says Welsh. “We always associate Christmas with nutters and psychopathic families, people having a horrible time.”

In it Begbie returns to an Edinburgh where, as Welsh explains, he has a rather ‘arrogant’ attitude to some of those he left behind, feeling that he has moved on whereas they are stuck in their same old grooves. And while there are those who want the old Begbie to exact revenge for his son’s murder the new Begbie feels compromised: he wants to do things his way. “Why not make him the most reasonable person in the room,” as the author puts it.

After reading a couple of extracts from the book to the Waterstones audience Welsh explains that writing it “…gave me a chance to explore the way he (Begbie) was. He was influenced by a violent gangster grandfather and realises that he can’t do without that buzz of violence however much he’s changed. He learns to do it more judiciously if you like – without going to jail.”

Comparing the conflicts of personality in this new Begbie – who has married the American art therapist he met while serving time in a Scottish prison and relocated to sunny California, and is now a teetotal father of two and reinvented as the successful painter and sculptor Jim Francis – Welsh says that he’s always liked that kind of conflict and duality in a character.

He cites another Edinburgh writer from another era, Robert Louis Stevenson and his Jekyll and Hyde character – based on another Edinburgh citizen with a double-life, Deacon Brody – as an influence. “It’s a fascinating area for a novelist to explore.”

“When you write about nutters you keep the book short. You don’t want to spend too much time in the character’s head,” Welsh says, comparing the brevity of The Blade Artist and another of his novels Marabou Stork Nightmares with the length of another, Filth – “too long, the wife ran away and left me.”

Answering a question from the audience about which of his characters he saw himself as, Welsh said that he always thought he was a Renton character, “…a bit distant, cynically intelligent, lacking in social skills. It’s a subconscious game a lot of the time”, while also conceding that he could be seen as Spud as alluded to in the recent film.

“I buried a lot of friends in Edinburgh in the Eighties,” he says when asked about inspiration for Trainspotting’s characters. ‘The main reason being because of the McFarlan Smith plant there which produced pharmaceutical heroin…and people using and sharing industrial syringes. They (the characters) were a representation of the people I’d lost really.”

Asked about the influence of music in his stories he said that he made a playlist up for each of his characters. “You realise that music is a disease by association, so whatever your older brothers or sisters are listening to you’ll inherit. So, great, if they’ve got a cool record collection, but you’re fucked if they haven’t.” He admitted to a lifelong love of karaoke as a result…

Irvine Welsh appeared at Waterstones Bristol Galleries on Wednesday, April 5. For more on the author and The Blade Artist, visit www.irvinewelsh.net

For more Festival of Ideas events, visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk/whats-on