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Tongue ties
Irvine Welsh's new novel, Glue, demonstrates that he still has plenty to say about his native Edinburgh — even if we're not always sure what it is he’s saying

BY CHRIS WRIGHT


THAT’S US CAP gadge,” remarks Gally, a character in Irvine Welsh’s latest novel. “Three Hibees n a Jambo,” adds his friend, Terry. “Nae sad-case Weedgie impersonators here.” For most of us, it’s a moment that raises an inevitable question: “Huh?” But then, cryptic dialogue, as fans of the 42-year-old author well know, is what makes Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh.

Since he published his debut novel, Trainspotting, in 1993, Welsh’s work has rarely strayed from the thorny vernacular of his hometown, Edinburgh. His writing is phonetic and slang-heavy, a palimpsest of dialect: English, Scottish-English, Edinburgh-Scottish-English, working-class-Edinburgh-Scottish-English, and so on. For some, the language in Welsh’s work poses an insurmountable challenge. American readers in particular often encounter a phrase like “some tarty wee Jambo homestead like Stenhoose” and give up entirely.

If reading Welsh can be tricky, listening to him can be extremely trying indeed. Like the characters in his books, Welsh speaks with a thick Edinburgh accent, one that seems to fall somewhere between stifled yawn and under-the-breath threat. After a reading, an acquaintance of mine remarked that he’d barely been able to understand a word Welsh was saying. And that guy is Scottish.

IT’S THE day of Welsh’s recent reading at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, and we’re having lunch together at Audubon Circle. Never the most effusive of interview subjects, today he seems sickly, maybe even depressed. Occasionally, he’ll grow tired of a sentence, abandoning it midway through: “It’s like, ahm, when you’re nae doin’ it, you’ll ...” All the while, his shaven head bobs over the bar top. His small, intense eyes remain fixed before him. And when lunch arrives, forget about it. If the British military were on the lookout for a truly uncrackable code, they could do a lot worse than Irvine Welsh with a mouth full of grilled chicken. “Yerr myeble prishkit ay un dorboi,” he says in response to one question, adding, “Brumley mwa.”

But things get better. Speaking with Welsh is a bit like reading him, and reading him is a bit like reading Chaucer. The trick is to resist the rising tide of panic as the words you cannot understand — “pagger,” “Jambo,” “nash” — come flying at you, to relax and let context carry you along. Dialogue, after all, is Welsh’s greatest strength, the thing that makes his work shine. After a while, the language seems not only intelligible but irresistible.

This is particularly true of Welsh’s new novel, Glue. The book is, in many ways, a reprise of Trainspotting. Like that book, Glue is set almost exclusively in the scorched-earth slums — or “schemes” — of Edinburgh. It features a similar cast of hard-drinking, oft-swearing reprobates (a few of the original Trainspotting crew — Begbie, Spud, Renton — make walk-on appearances). And it bristles with the same furious dialogue: “Joe Begbie blooters a guy whae wisnae a Hun, or even gaun tae the fitba, jist a punk guy wi a mohawk.” Splendid.

Though Trainspotting enthusiasts (myself included) were delighted to hear a few months back that Welsh was coming out with a sort of sequel, some critics responded to the news with an oh-God-not-again attitude. “I find it hard to write about anywhere else,” Welsh sniffs. And you believe him. The schemes are Welsh’s home turf, its inhabitants his muse. But it’s not just a matter of writing what you know. It’s the ugliness of it all that drives Welsh, the desolation, the cruelty and squalor.

It seems strange to say so, but cruelty and squalor are what give Welsh’s work its spark. He is the poet of the smelly dick, the smack-blistered forearm, the bottle in the face. His four novels to date (he has also published two books of short stories and two plays) have featured a heroin addict who delves around in a shit-filled toilet bowl (Trainspotting), a brutal gang rape (Marabou Stork Nightmares), a talking tapeworm (Filth), and a German shepherd who gets his legs sawed off (Glue). The violence in Welsh’s work is sickening. The sex is often worse. And if you can get through a page without reading the word “cunt” at least once, then you’ve picked up the wrong book.

You have to ask: is there an autobiographical element to all this? In response, Welsh mutters something about having had “counseling and stuff like that” and turns once more to his grilled chicken. Finally he continues: “The benefit of writing fiction, it’s only when you look back that you think, ‘Oh God, there is a lot of personal shit in this.’ You don’t really feel as if you’re dredging your soul up at the time. You don’t realize it at the time. It’s just free flow.”

The flow of profanity, violence, drug use, and sexual depravity in Welsh’s work — not to mention his rather flexible approach to literary English — have led some critics to dismiss him as a mere smut-monger. “Ugly” is a word you hear a lot in relation to Welsh. What his critics apparently fail to grasp, however, is that Welsh’s work is, at its heart, humanitarian. Welsh is a master of slipping the odd kindly deed into the proceedings — the quivering violet on the seething slag heap. More important, Welsh never judges his characters, and always lets them speak for themselves. The people in his pages are alive. You feel for them, even if you don’t understand them — or, for that matter, want to meet them.

In any case, Welsh dismisses the “ugly” argument out of hand. “It’s okay to write about Kensington,” he says, “to write in that English-middle-class voice. There’s a pressure to write like that. But people who write about their own communities are just as legitimate.” Besides, he adds, “I’ve always been more of a sales-figures man than a reviews man.”

On the sales-figures front, anyway, Welsh has little to worry about — he remains one of Britain’s perennial best-sellers, an author who appeals to bus drivers, social workers, soccer hooligans, and highbrows alike. Part of the reason for Welsh’s popularity is that he’s just a cracking storyteller — there’s a forward momentum in his books that makes turning the page seem less an option than a necessity. And he’s funny. His work hums with grim sarcasm and a schoolboy’s love of dirty jokes.

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Issue Date: June 28 - July 5, 2001