Irvine Welsh: Curator of the Streets
By Benjamin Arnoldy

"The first sentence I wrote was: 'Well, the thing is, ah've goat a bit ay an itchy knob.' The second sentence I wrote was: 'Well ye do huv a long foreskin.'"

Author Irvine Welsh enthusiastically flipped to page 252 of his new 469-page novel, "Glue," to show off those seminal sentences. Welsh, 44, burst onto the literary scene in 1993 with his first novel, "Trainspotting." This initial snippet of fleshy dialogue is true to Welsh's form: the voices of working-class Scottish youth belying a deeper discourse.

"Glue" follows four friends, as they grow up in the schemes (housing projects) of Edinburgh from 1970 to 2000. Their coming of age bears witness to an era of transition in Scotland, from the economic decay of declining union industries to the gentrification of city centers for tourism and shopping.

Or, as Welsh puts it:

"["Glue" developed] from the foreskin to a whole milieu of socio-economic changes in Scottish working classes."

Moses of the streets

The four central characters inherit from their parents a Scottish working-class morality codified into an alternative 10 Commandments. The novel centers around the difficulties the boys have upholding this Decalogue in the face of rapidly changing social mores.

"[These ten commandments were] a collectivist morality ... formed by two things that have been in decline since the '80s because of rampant individualism:... Christianity [and]... Industrial Socialism," Welsh said.

When asked whether he personally subscribed to these Commandments, he displayed the same ambivalence to them as his characters. He admitted that he found the code hard to live up to — meaning, he has tried. Yet the clear thrust of his comments — and of "Glue" — is that these traditional values are not relevant in a Scotland imbued with Thatcher's values of capitalism, materialism, and every man for himself.

"It's almost like the 11th Commandment is that I've got a right to break any of these commandments if it suits my purpose," he said. "I think people subscribe to moral codes at a sort of abstract level, but [not] in terms of practical living."

Many other details of Welsh's autobiography take form in "Glue's" foursome. Welsh dropped out of high school at 16 and took up television repair. Like his character Juice Terry, Welsh dropped work quickly and spent some years unemployed and drifting. He then tried to make it as a rock musician, but unlike Carl Ewart, he never achieved notoriety. At some point amidst this shaky curriculum vitae, Welsh added heroin junky to the list, and appeared to be headed for the same brink as Andy Galloway. But instead, Welsh went back to school and made a tidy sum buying, restoring, and selling properties — cashing in on the gentrification of Edinburgh much like Billy Business.

"I've been close to [each of the four characters] at different times of my life. At different times and different cycles as well. Which is quite an uncomfortable thing to admit, to tell you the truth," Welsh said.

While writing came late to Welsh, his appeal lies in street savvy accumulated over the years. And his varied lives have left him with some unusual hobbies for a writer. He's active in the rave scene, working as a DJ and still recording music. In fact, his connection to music remains so strong that he has said in the past that he primarily sees himself as a failed musician.

One-hit wonder?

Welsh's extra-curricular interests, as well as a series of novels that failed to recapture the meteoric attention of "Trainspotting," have caused some critics to wonder if Welsh will be an enduring writer or a one-hit wonder.

Welsh brushed aside the idea that he has anything to prove. "I've had three No. 1 bestsellers in the U.K., so I mean, I can't really see myself as a one-hit wonder," he said. "I think that the thing about 'Trainspotting' was because it was made into a successful film it became a big cultural thing, kind of a statement of our time (but not really). I don't think that I'm ever going to get that twice really."

Still, Welsh's reliance on bestseller charts to gauge his works is not altogether convincing. He should know from his appreciation of Scottish underground music that best-selling media is often shite — driven more by persona and marketing than by merit.

A Scottish Beatnik

Whatever his final legacy will be, Welsh will always be best understood as a Scottish beatnik. His success lies in his rejection of the established rules of his day.

His emergence from a burgeoning Edinburgh literary scene in the early 1990s challenged the dominant Scottish literary circles centered in Glasgow.

"There were a kind of a Glasgow mafia," Welsh said, referring to the writers in the other Scottish city. Those writers' subjects were limiting to him. "You've got the shipyards and the mines and all that kind of stuff. Everything was like stuck in the '70s. Time warp. Everyone was a trade unionist, [and] there was full employment."

According to Welsh, the Glasgow school was primarily concerned with advancing the cause of socialism in an age when it was no longer realistic.

Eschewing overtly political fiction, Welsh describes his transgression against the Glasgow mafia as "just writing about people, what they do, like hanging out, going to pubs, doing drugs and that sort of stuff. And it was almost like blasphemy to [them]."

While he is generally unconcerned about the political process ("I just stay at home; it's not my scene") and the recent U.K. elections ("I've missed my chance to vote which is not that big of a [loss] or anything"), it is not accurate to call Welsh apolitical – especially in his use of dialect and setting.

The phonetic Scottish that Welsh writes in is intentionally challenging. (Though the challenge pales in comparison to deciphering his spoken words on a cheap dictaphone. Rrzizzizziz. What did he say?! Rrzizzizziz.)

"There's a big fuss about the language in some of my books," Welsh said. "But it's like the book is the only cultural artifact now that has all these walls. ... Why is it only in the novel — the English novel — that everyone's got the same narrative voice? They're still stuck in these kind of standard poems. Every other medium has exorcised it. People just don't talk like that anymore. They don't talk in standard English anymore. So why present [novel dialogue] in it?"

He goes on to answer his own question:

"Because if you're a novelist in Britain, you're almost seen as a custodian or something, like a curator, and that's just stupid. Then you get all this angst about death of the novel, and why people aren't reading the novel. Well, no duh. You know, right? It's like the standard English, the Queen's English, is an imperialist language set for us to control our knowledge. Therefore, it's not very interesting. It's an administrative language. It's not got many beats, it's not got any rhythm. It's terrible to write with."

Welsh's settings are also provocative. Several of his works, including "Glue", have passages set during the Edinburgh Festival — an annual summer festival attracting crowds of middle class Londoners.

"The Edinburgh Festival is great because no one in Edinburgh has anything to do with it... It's basically just London ... the arts and culture of London in Edinburgh," Welsh said.

Welsh takes particular delight in pointing out the "social apartheid" exposed during these festivals:

"The center [of Edinburgh] has been recolonized for tourists and shoppers, and the schemes out in the periphery — you keep them down the road. The center's just a playground for quite wealthy people. They're all at the pubs that have been done up and tidied up."

But just in case you think Irvine Welsh, erstwhile junky and "prophet of the chemical generation," has become a strict moralist: Rest assured he breaks his own rules.

"I like the dodgy old pubs that have been the same since the '70s ... [but] I also like — and I think this is horrible, fucking carcinogenic — a nice Ikea-type bar."

E-mail Benjamin Arnoldy at benjamin@csmonitor.com