LIT CRIT: Whiny socialism plus a pinch of salt
Into the paradoxical world of Irvine Welsh
The intravenous injection of Class A drugs is not, to my knowledge, a subject to which ERO has ever given a great deal of attention. Furthermore, one would imagine that up until now hard-core pornography, police corruption, Ecstasy tablets and acid house music also have avoided the harsh glare of the ERO spotlight somehow. Allow me to remedy such oversight: welcome to the world of Irvine Welsh.
Once described as ‘the working-class Scottish guru of the E generation’, Welsh is the self-appointed voice of the post-punk, post-acid house, post-Madchester scene of the early- to mid-nineties: a Scottish Douglas Coupland, without the pretension and hideous pop culture bottom-feeding, if you will. Welsh’s body of work represents far more than a glorification of the drugs/drink/sex mentality that is all too common in ‘trendy’ literature; he is a genuinely talented writer with an eye for the tight structure and pacing of a novel and a turn of phrase that can vary in impact between the subtle and the sledgehammer.
His father was a Leith docker, his mother a waitress. Having left school at sixteen and worked as a television repairman, the young Welsh joined the Scottish Diaspora and arrived in London at the time when punk erupted into the national consciousness. A frustrated musician and DJ, he ended up working for Hackney Council, during which time he studied for an MBA. In the early nineties, it was the boredom of working for Edinburgh District Council that first drove Welsh to exhume his recent past and put pen to paper.
Amongst the short-story compilations and other full-length novels, all set in Edinburgh, three of Welsh’s works particularly stand out as being of particular merit.
The name of his 1993 debut novel will be familiar to most, thanks to blanket-advertising and Ewan MacGregor. Let us be clear: the 1994 Booker Prize-shortlisted Trainspotting is an excellent novel and the film in no way does it justice. Bleak yet vividly realised; nihilistic yet ending on a note of hope; Trainspotting comprises a series of loosely-overlapping short stories held together by the thread of a central pool of characters. Written in (occasionally cartoonish) expletive-rich Edinburgh dialect, Welsh conveys the desperation that leads his characters to drugs abuse while at the same time conveying their desperation to get away from them:
Something hud happened. Junk hud happened. Whether ah lived wi it, died wi it, or lived withoot it, ah knew that things could never be the same again.
Some have accused Trainspotting of glorifying heroin use; such people are no doubt reactionary Daily Mail readers who have never actually read the book. The fates of those characters who cannot shake their addiction are miserable; one dies of AIDS, another loses a leg, another loses a child to cot-death through heroin-related neglect.
The irony of the novel is that although it ends with hope for the future – Renton, the main character, shakes off his addiction and leaves Edinburgh to start a new life – such hope is only achieved by his completely casting off those buoys that have, paradoxically, both kept him afloat and kept him down during his addiction: family and friends. Furthermore, his ‘new beginning’ has a inherently unsatisfactory edge to it. Renton’s famous ‘choose life’ monologue conveys the message, ‘I’ve kicked the drugs that set me apart from society. Now I’m nothing more than a drone. Happy now?’ Welsh creates a metaphor for the damage and destruction that heroin addiction does to all facets of the addict’s life, and Trainspotting could not be further from glorifying the drug.
Filth, his fifth novel, brings full circle the themes initiated by Trainspotting. The story of a crooked, violent and vindictive policeman, Filth is indisputably the darkest and most depressing of Welsh’s novels. Where Trainspotting focused on an extensive group of characters, the whole of Filth is written in first-person perspective and where Trainspotting ends with hope for the future, Filth ends with suicide and despair. The two works together propose a dark and uncaring society with moral corruption at its heart.
Filth is an extremely challenging read, and it is entirely possible that this might be the reason why it received such poor reviews. For the first three-quarters of the novel, until the reason for the main character’s warped mentality is revealed by a clever device (the intratextual voice of a tapeworm in his stomach), it is impossible to sympathise with the character in any way at all. Once D. S. Robertson’s sorry family history is revealed, however, the reader is able to understand and pity him, and the novel becomes a grim account of the causes of human misery and despair and their self-perpetuating nature.
The helplessness of those who fall through the gaps in society is a pivotal theme in Welsh’s sixth novel. Undoubtedly the most mature book he has written to date, Glue is a quasi-socio-political history (if such a thing exists) of four friends, following their stories from childhood to adulthood. In the author’s own words, ‘historically my interest has been in working with young working-class male friendships’. Glue furthers this concept; Welsh examines four such young men and the way in which their friendships survive in spite of the tensions placed on them by society’s demands and expectations.
The book is written with a deft and tender touch unseen in any previous Welsh novel. He explores the friendship that binds the four protagonists by examining the various influences that mould each of them: family, school, drugs, poverty, success and failure in various walks of life. Welsh juxtaposes society, family and friendship and in doing so composes a lament for the passing of working-class solidarity in society as he perceives it.
This central theme in Glue crops up time and time again in Welsh’s novels, unfailingly underpinning the stories he tells. His personal bugbears, it would seem, are the aforementioned principles of working-class solidarity, and a single-minded determination to hold modern society to account for failing to uphold them.
The majority of his books are set in the housing schemes of Edinburgh; the dialogue is invariably written in the local dialect, spattered with Leith rhyming slang. This gives the reader a genuine sense of the ‘community’ per se about which he writes. His main characters are invariably alienated from this community yet inextricably bound to it. They invariably suffer more for their recalcitrant attitudes, and this alienation epitomises the perceived decline of these areas of Edinburgh – and society in general – since the 1980’s.
Welsh lashes out repeatedly at the middle-classes and at society’s failure to provide equally for all and sundry. In Glue, for example, Welsh is disparaging about the cheap housing estates built in the sixties to house those who could not afford better – ‘it was a dumping ground for social problems’ – whilst at the same time he mocks those who buy their own council flats and attempt to improve them as ‘the replacement-doors-and-windows party’. Welsh’s argument seems to be that the communities created by the housing estates were somehow ‘not good enough’ in the first place, yet at the same time he views attempts by individuals to better themselves as even more deserving of criticism in the first place because they further corrupt the society he has already condemned so bitterly.
This is a paradox that is evident throughout Welsh’s work. On the one hand he maintains that the problems his characters suffer are due to society’s lack of care, yet on the other hand he champions the right of his characters to do as they please and is harshly critical of any attempts society makes to rectify the situation. For example, in Trainspotting, he makes it perfectly clear that the reason the main characters turn to heroin is a sense of alienation from society:
It kinday makes things seem mair real to us. Life’s boring and futile. We start oaf wi high hopes, then we bottle it ... We fill up oor lives wi shite, things like careers and relationships tae delude oorsels that it isnae aw totally pointless. Smack’s an honest drug, because it strips away these delusions.
Welsh maintains that society has deprived his characters (and by implication their whole generation) of hope, by offering nothing more than a dull career and a lifelong struggle to make ends meet. They take drugs entirely of their own volition. Yet when they are caught and brought to court, Welsh is damning of the state’s efforts to help;
The state-sponsored addiction: substitute methadone for smack, the sickly jellies, three a day, for the hit. Ah’ve no known many junkies oan that programme whae didnae take aw three jellies at once and go oot scorin.
It seems that Welsh wants to have his smack and shoot it too – he maintains that the state and society are to blame for their addiction in the first place, yet he condemns the state for their attempts to resolve the problem, with no acknowledgement of the individual’s responsibility for their own predicament. It is this whiny dichotomy that all too often sours Welsh’s work. His desperation to avoid being perceived as having ‘sold out’ from the background of which he is both so proud and yet so scornful leads him to preach nasty socialism of the worst kind, where he holds the State liable for the actions of all the individuals within it.
The comments he makes in interviews are telling. When asked about the wealth he has amassed from his books and film deals, he is self-deprecating: ‘I admit I do indulge myself sometimes. I do travel first class occasionally. I go to better restaurants than I used to.’ I’m sure this ‘working-class boy made good, still in touch with his roots, though’ attitude presses all the right buttons with the chattering Islington middle-classes, but to others it may smack of rank hypocrisy, particularly in the light of his criticisms of Edinburgh’s gentrification:
I'd like to see Edinburgh have a bit more respect for its own people ... I've never slagged off Edinburgh. I've always loved Edinburgh. But Edinburgh was the first city in the world to create its own suburb and its own ghetto when it created the Old Town and the New Town.
He condemns his characters for bettering themselves; he has clearly made a fortune from his books, however, and yet is still happy to criticise Edinburgh’s attempts at gentrification in the context of the society in which he has done so well.
This constant complaining is a shame. Welsh is a talented writer who has written a handful of genuinely excellent novels. His written style is well-executed, and is occasionally highly original, for example, the talking, all-revealing tapeworm in Filth or the coma-dreams of the main character in Marabou Stork Nightmares (his second novel). He has a thoroughly worthy (if laboured) point to make about those who are let down by society – The Vulnerable, anyone? – yet from this valid argument he draws all the wrong conclusions: in short, that the State should provide for all, regardless of a person’s own individual actions.
Welsh’s books are often highly readable, however, as long as one is prepared to take the whiny socialism with a pinch of salt. Admittedly, these novels are not typical ERO fare; the novels’ heady mix of drug addiction, moral corruption, societal decline and socialism often require a firmly-fixed tongue in cheek whilst reading. They are worth reading, however, if only for confirmation of one’s natural sense of moral and ideological superiority. And what ERO aficionado would not enjoy that?
Andy Fox is a third year Law & Politics student at Cardiff University. He was Welsh Chairman for Conservative Future and Deputy Chairman (Political) of Cardiff Central until two weeks ago, when he resigned in protest against Chairman May’s Great Leap Forward – but the party’s (temporary) loss is literary criticism’s gain.
Andy Fox, November 4, 2002 03:10 PM