Irvine Welsh: 'When you grow up in a place you think it's mundane. Then you realise it's mad'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/17/irvine-welsh-interview-a-decent-ride

Version 0 of 1.

A pot of green tea ordered at 9.15 on a Sunday morning is neither the beverage nor the hour one most readily associates with Irvine Welsh. And yet, though his dancing and drugging days are not entirely done with – more of which later – Welsh is a realist, too. Thus he begins a long day of events to publicise his 10th novel, A Decent Ride, in sober form.

Born and bred in Edinburgh, Welsh is now a visitor here. Even if the pull of his elderly relatives means that a good chunk of the year is still spent in Scotland, he is mainly resident in his wife’s home city of Chicago (“like New York but without the arseholes”). It’s a strange thing to think about a man whose literary output so defines the modern Scottish novel, but it does give him a unique outsider’s perspective on the political upheavals of the past few years, and their latest extraordinary incarnation in the SNP’s prospects of a share of power at Westminster. “In some ways it feels like a different country already,” says Welsh. “I think it’s got that confidence now, whatever its future is, whether it’s an independent country or a change-maker within the UK.”

Does his self-imposed exile offer him a different prism through which to view Scotland? “When you grow up in a place, you always think it’s mundane. Then you travel around and live in different places and you realise that you’ve got it the wrong way round,” he says. “It’s where you come from that’s the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place. I’m seeing it with very different eyes now.”

Related: Miliband and Cameron are too boring for fiction, says Irvine Welsh

Then again, Welsh has always been a bit of an outsider. He cemented that status with his first novel, Trainspotting, which, more than two decades later still defines his position and the public’s perception of him – but which also liberated him as an artist.

“You’re either glass is half-empty or half-full with that kind of thing,” he says, his tall frame folded round a small table in an Edinburgh cafe. “When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.”

He says that he has never resented his phenomenally successful debut, published in 1993, which charts the exploits of a group of friends, boozers and heroin users in Leith, a few miles north of our central city location. “I’ve been able to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. I’ve been indulged more by publishers.” His latest novel will be commercially successful, he says with that confident pragmatism again, “basically because its on ground that I’ve staked out, and people do respond to repetition. But I can also do Sex Lives of the Siamese Twins, which is in different voices and different places.” He pauses for the neatest phrasing: “I created something that became a phenomenon without becoming a prisoner to it.”

A Decent Ride indeed returns Welsh to familiar territory: that gleefully grotesque and wilfully filthy Caledonian universe that could teeter on pastiche but for the moral ballast that informs every word. It follows (literally, of course) the sexually dysfunctional travails of a familiar character, “Juice” Terry Lawson, a priapic taxi driver who first appeared in Glue, Welsh’s anthem to enduring friendship, and who also enjoyed a cameo in the Trainspotting sequel, Porno. It is narrated in the same scabrous yet queerly lyrical vernacular that owes as much to Welsh’s own imaginative ear as it does to the mean streets of Leith.

But it’s more than 22 years since the former council worker drafted Trainspotting from old diaries while studying for a belated MBA at Heriot-Watt University. Welsh is now an established writer who describes himself as a leisured gentleman. Does the question of authenticity come into play when a wealthy Chicago-dweller is writing about an Edinburgh cabbie?

“Some of my closest friends are Edinburgh taxi drivers,” Welsh replies with no trace of irony. “A lot of my friends were in the building trade, but when you get to my age, you don’t want to be mucking around on building sites, so they drive taxis.” One of his best friends, who he’s known since 14, is driving him to events today.

There’s a misconception here about the way people live their lives, Welsh adds. “If you’re a writer and become successful, you don’t have the same visual recognition. You can still be very much a part of things. I can still go to a pub in Leith and sit and have a few drinks with pals. I live the life that I’ve always lived over here.”

I don’t think that Welsh is being disingenuous, but it is far from accurate to say that his life has not changed with his stratospheric success. “In terms of lifestyle, I’m a leisured-class person,” he accepts. “I’m getting paid doing my hobby, which is a pampered thing. I don’t have mortgages or red bills, so I don’t have a middle-class life, and I don’t have a working-class job. I have a pampered life, I travel and I write. I’m very much a leisured gentleman.”

Given all this, does he think that he pays enough tax? “I don’t think there is either too much or enough,” he replies evenly. “It’s got to be determined by the society as a whole. I don’t really see the point of having loads and loads of money piling up in the bank, or just being spent on trinkets. There’s a lot of rebuilding to be done in society. People like myself should be paying more tax.”

That question of authenticity is also laden with assumptions that working-class writers have a unique responsibility to represent working-class culture, or else are too busy being realist to create a parallel universe of their own. I very much doubt that Ian McEwan gets asked if he’s still authentic when he writes about middle-class characters from his London mansion. Welsh suppresses a grin.

“It comes from that tradition that working-class fiction has to have these things going for it. Authenticity is such a strange word to use in terms of fiction anyway. Every writer draws on their own social and cultural experiences. The formative years, where you grew up and spent your youth, that’s the bedrock, and you embellish it.”

“I’ve never felt under any pressure to try to authenticate a culture or class or place,” he adds. “What I write is a product of who I am and my own experiences. All you can represent as a fiction writer is story and character.”

It’s worth remembering, too, that Welsh – who misspent his youth in London in the late 1970s and returned to Edinburgh to embrace rave as well as literary culture - has always been as much punk as professional prole, trading in raw cheek equal to raw truths.

But it’s also the case that, when Welsh was first published, his voice was simply like nothing else in mainstream print at that time. It was a genuine shock for a Scottish literary establishment used to being unobtrusive at best, and at worst tweedy. “If you set yourself up in a very self-conscious way to challenge a literary establishment, I don’t think it works,” says Welsh. “I did want to represent characters that I didn’t see in fiction, but I did see around me. But when you write a book, you’re immersed in that world you’ve created. You don’t have any assumptions about who is going to read it and how it is going to be received.”

A number of different factors contributed to Trainspotting’s success, he suggests. “We changed from being an employment-based economy to a drug-based economy, and that wasn’t really acknowledged in fiction. The characters are universal and they translate across different cultures. There was an energy in the prose style, while a lot of literary fiction is quite turgid and stiff. These things combined created something.”

By no means all of the critical reception was positive – according to Lord Gowrie, the chairman of the Booker prize panel that year, Trainspotting was rejected for the shortlist after two judges deemed it offensive. Nor has that changed – Welsh is still dismissed by some as surfing an increasingly ageing wave of lad-lit, or Hibernian gross-out. Welsh’s comments remind me now of an acute essay he wrote about the reaction to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, in which he spoke of: “Intelligent people who couldn’t get past their own shock and discomfort to ascertain the true nature of it.” I suspect he feels the same about his own treatment.

Related: Irvine Welsh – American Psycho is a modern classic

Whatever he feels about it, it doesn’t stop him working. Welsh’s output only seems to increase and diversify as he matures: screenplays, literary criticism, nuanced essays on British politics, and in particular Scottish independence, and now his passionate Twitter commentary on Andy Murray’s tennis tournaments.

Will he ever stop? “I don’t think I can,” he says, cheerfully enough. “If I could excel at some other art form, that would help me express stuff. But writing seems to be my art of choice. That incredible freedom you have with the blank page, and now I’m going to sully it with all my limitations ... Writing the first draft of a book is the biggest high you can get, because there are no rules.”

Beyond the inveterate swearing and porny contortions, that moral ballast that steadies Welsh’s writing is really a belief in redemption, even for the lowest among us. “It’s my intuitive feeling, but it’s also been my experience that we’re all trying to become the best version of ourselves,” he agrees. “I like darkness, but you’ve got to be groping for the light switch all the time.”

There are parts of A Decent Ride that are pitch black, I say. “But if you do something with comedy, you can get away with anything ... ” And you often do! He laughs, then clarifies: “You can get away with anything as long as it works in context.”

So it is with his complex views on his own origins, on the country that still beguiles and infuriates him. I remind him of that famous speech by Mark Renton, the character in Trainspotting one suspects held closest to Welsh’s own political mores, rendered so memorably by Ewan MacGregor in Danny Boyle’s film. “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilisation. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in ... and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!”

There have been three phases of Scots’ consciousness, Welsh suggests: “When I was growing up, it was that childish one: it’s the English’s fault. Then it changed in the 80s and 90s to the Renton thing: it’s our fault, the self-flagellating thing. Now it seems to have evolved into a healthy pragmatism that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is; the point is to get on with it and make it better. That’s been the evolution in my lifetime and it’s made it easier for people like me to get involved. Twenty years ago I would have been very anti-independence.”

He has yet to meet first minister Nicola Sturgeon, who describes herself as a huge fan, but thinks her leadership is “a great move for the SNP”. Alex Salmond and Sean Connery took him to lunch years ago, he says, and tried to get him to join the party. “I wasn’t interested, but they were really nice about it and not pushy at all.”

Would he join now? “I’m closer to it, but I’ve still got an emotional attachment to a Labour party that no longer exists. I don’t think I’m a party guy. I’m probably more useful to a cause not being in a party.”

Related: Irvine Welsh: this glorious failure could yet be Scotland's finest hour

Talking of which – does Irvine Welsh still go clubbing? “These legs” – he slaps his knees ruefully – “they aren’t dancing legs anymore.” Nevertheless, he mentions he “had some people round for an all-nighter” in February, and talks fondly about seeing old pals on the dancefloor: “People with beer guts and chubby and all that, mashed out their heads.”

So when was the last time he took a class-A? “December, when I was here.” So Scotland is a bad influence? “Scotland is still a terrible influence! I’ve not had a drink since 2 January, and I’ve been here for two days and I can already feel the pull of it, in a way that I just don’t in the US.”

As he prepares to leave for a book signing, I ask Welsh what he likes about being Scottish. He shrugs and smiles: “There’s just something really cool about it, I can’t put my finger on it. When you travel the world, people are really interested in your accent and sometimes they can’t quite place it or it becomes a great conversation piece.”

“I just find it such a fascinating place,” he says. “It feels like some sort of inherent blessing.”

• A Decent Ride is published by Random House at £12.99. Buy it for £9.99 from bookshop.theguardian.com