Scotched

These three men have fought to overcome cultural stereotypes and reclaim their literary tradition -- first as underground writers and now, with the success of Trainspotting, as bestselling authors. But along with all the celebrity comes a lot of senseless hype. On a recent visit to Boston, the `Great Scots' say they've had enough.

by Chris Wright

"They wanted me to tour America last year when Trainspotting came out, but I couldn't be bothered," says Irvine Welsh wearily, contemplating the portobello-mushroom sandwich before him. "I couldn't be bothered with this one either. I'm kind of sick of it, but . . . "

But Welsh is here nonetheless, in Boston, at the Audubon Circle restaurant on Beacon Street -- touring. Along with fellow Scottish authors James Kelman and Duncan McLean, Welsh makes up one-third of the so-called "Great Scots" trio visiting five cities in the US at the behest of their publisher, W.W. Norton.

Welsh's apathy, though, is infinitely preferable to what I'd been getting minutes earlier. Ordering from the menu, I'd noticed that Welsh was looking at me -- not just looking at me, but looking at me. Was he thinking about hitting me? Irvine Welsh has a shaven head, a crinkly line of a mouth, and a pair of small, watery eyes that seem to peer out of the center of a bulbous, intensely serious face. He looks hard.

That, however, is exactly the kind of facile observation that Kelman, Welsh, and McLean -- and other contemporary Scottish authors -- have had to endure from the popular media both here and in Britain. According to articles like one that appeared in the New York Times Magazine last year, contemporary Scottish authors are all part of some shadowy, unified subculture, a ragtag army of "Edinburgh Beats" who drink at the same pubs, smoke the same brand of roll-yer-own tobacco, and write stories about the knife-dodging lowlifes of the teeming Scottish slums.

McLean sarcastically calls this the "Disneyized" version of Scottish culture. Welsh agrees, admitting he wasn't particularly keen on himself, Kelman, and McLean being lumped together under the "Great Scots" tag, precisely because this type of identification perpetuates the myth of a Scottish clique. "That's why I was reluctant to come," he says. "This misconception of what we're about." Gesturing to his compatriots at the table, Welsh continues: "We've all been railing against a sanitized Scottish culture, the tartan-and-heather kind of bollocks, but we don't represent a single culture, either."

In a way, though, the "Great Scots" label is apt. James Kelman, for one, is destined to become a part of the canon: he has been compared to Kafka, to Beckett, to Brecht. His 13 books have won him legions of admirers, both in literary circles and on construction sites, and the critical acclaim was rubber-stamped in 1994 when he won the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award.

Welsh's record speaks for itself. His 1993 novel Trainspotting quickly became a cult favorite, then a bestseller, then a hit movie, then a play, then a symbol of post-Thatcher social dilapidation, and finally a benchmark for modern British fiction. His three other books haven't fared as well, but Welsh is still the hottest literary property in Britain at the moment.

Duncan McLean is comparatively obscure, but is nevertheless highly respected in his homeland. As founder of the small publishing company Clocktower Press, he is credited with having published Kelman, Welsh, and other Scottish authors when they were having difficulty getting published elsewhere. He won the 1993 Somerset Maugham Award for his collection of short stories, A Bucket of Tongues, and he has just published a well-received (so far) novel, Bunker Man. Despite his age (32), he has long been active in Scottish literature, and is at the center of the "Scottish Renaissance" that is having a huge impact on audiences both here and back in Britain.

Kelman, in his early 50s, is the eldest of the three and certainly the most politically sensitive. He doesn't like this pigeonholing of Scottish authors at all. He is a slight, kindly looking man, but his features suddenly harden, and in a cigarette-hoarse voice that rattles with consonants, he cuts into the conversation: "They need to confine you in some way so they can deal with you. There's a lot of young Scottish writers around. There's a diversity, a real range."

Indeed, that diversity is on display at this table. Despite their similar working-class backgrounds (Kelman was a bus driver, Welsh a TV repairman, McLean a janitor) and the fact that their work ostensibly falls within the same gritty milieu, the three authors' stories are as distinct as -- well -- the jobs of a bus driver, a TV repairman, and a janitor. Kelman, who is here to promote his latest collection of short fiction, Busted Scotch, writes of Scottish malaise with meticulous precision. His turf is the betting shops, pubs, snooker halls, and menacing brick-brown streets of Glasgow. His stories are fraught with existential unease; his protagonists invariably find themselves thrust by history and circumstance into a single, uncomfortable moment.

Kelman's characters don't enjoy the luxury of being able to plan for the future. Accordingly, he catches them in the act of choosing how to act -- think Hamlet in a cloth cap. Kelman's internal monologues are flawless, sticking to Glaswegian vernacular down to the stops and starts, the inconsistencies, the blind alleys, the repetitions and obscenities. He makes a raw poetry of ordinary lives, pinpointing the human condition in the hunt for a cigarette. There is, of course, an irony inherent in such incongruity, and Kelman's stories are steeped in mordant wit.

Kelman's fearless and innovative style, and his confrontation of Scottish working-class people on (and in) their own terms -- with neither patronization nor scorn -- has certainly influenced young writers like Welsh. Welsh, however, focuses his attention mainly on "schemies," denizens of the squalid projects that pock the Edinburgh landscape. Welsh's characters also speak in vernacular. But, as Kelman's dialogue strains to capture thought patterns and the natural rhythms of Scottish speech, Welsh concentrates more on how language is used on others -- to cudgel, to tickle, to dupe and seduce. Though no less authentic than Kelman's, the voices of Welsh's characters pop with audacious affectation.

Compare Kelman's desperately worried parent: " . . . The things that were happening down there, down in London, to young lassies and boys, it wasn't fucking fair, it was just fucking terrible, it was so fucking terrible . . ." to Welsh's jonesing young junkie:

Some auld cunt, they're always on the buses at this time, is fartin and shitein at the driver; firing a volley ay irrelevant questions about numbers, routes and times. Get the fuck oan or fuck off and die ya footsie auld cunt.

The distinction between these two voices points to a major divergence: whereas Kelman's characters often lead lives of quiet desperation, Welsh's are life's looters, smashing their way through convention and grabbing whatever they can. Welsh is writing about a different generation, one that's reacting against the fatal passivity that Kelman chronicles. His yobs are the ones robbing and beating Kelman's characters up.

McLean's work represents a further link in the chain. The novel he's here to promote, Bunker Man, is true to its Scottish working-class roots in a less explicit way. Bunker Man, like the work of Glaswegian author William McIlvanney, is less "working-class literature" than genre fiction -- in this case, the psychological thriller. It is a masterpiece of suspense and mood-making. Set in rural Scotland (McLean lives in Orkney), the novel rings with the Aberdeenshire idiom McLean says he learned from his grandmother -- and with Welshian vulgarity and horror. In the end, though, the slow drift into madness that the book examines is more reminiscent of Irish writer Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy than anything Kelman or Welsh has put out.

Part 2

Chris Wright is on staff at the Boston Phoenix.