Irvine Welsh’s superb latest novel, The Blade Artist, marks the return of one of his most famous characters, the psychotic Francis Begbie. Having set up an idyllic life with his wife and children in California, Begbie appears to be reformed. However, when he returns to Edinburgh for the funeral of a son he barely knew, Begbie’s murky past catches up with him – with gruesome results.
He is a character who has clearly struck a chord with audiences over the years, helped in no small part by Robert Carlyle’s memorable portrayal of him in the film adaptation of Trainspotting.
“Very much,” agrees the friendly Welsh, speaking down the line from Chicago where he’s now based. “I think he’s a man for our times, sadly. It’s all about narcissistic white male entitlement. When Trainspotting started off, it was very much Renton who was the man for our times – the cynical intellectual. Then it was Sick Boy, the manipulator. And now it’s Begbie.”
Although the archetypal football hooligan bad-boy, the novel Trainspotting hints at Begbie’s bruised interior. The book takes its title from an encounter Begbie and co. have with Begbie’s estranged father at a destitute railway station after a night on the town, when Begbie Senior remarks, “I suppose you’re all out trainspotting, lads?”
The Blade Artist finds Welsh delving even deeper into the character’s tormented psyche.
“I wanted to postulate all these reasons why he ended up the way he did,” considers Welsh. “I had him as dyslexic, which feeds into the frustration and the rage. Also, there’s a kind of learned behaviour. His violent grandfather was the only guy who took a real interest in him. In a lot of ways, he didn’t have a great opportunity to be socialised in a non-violent way. Being violent met his immediate needs to give him some kind of status that he didn’t have at school.
“In some ways, there is a phantom pathos about him. But you can’t feel too sorry for him either, because he’s made decisions in his life. And he’s making quite cold and calculating choices now.”
I talk to Welsh the day after the Hillsborough verdict, in which a jury found that 96 Liverpool fans were unlawfully killed at the infamous game, with the police chief in charge guilty of gross negligence. In the aftermath of the day’s events, the attempts by the media and political establishment to pin the blame on Liverpool fans was one of the most shameful episodes of the Thatcher era.
It was a period which Welsh explored in his excellent Trainspotting prequel, Skagboys, which charted the disintegration of an inner city Edinburgh community in the ’80s. As with the Hillsborough saga, it was a period in which persecution of the working class loomed large.
“It’s become so much more apparent now,” says Welsh. “It was always there. These things like Hillsborough, they show the extent of that class oppression in Britain over the last 30 years. It’s always been a feature of British life, that kind of entrenched privilege. But it’s not often they overstep that power and they get held to account – that’s just to do with the perseverance of the families, basically. They made that happen by continuing to fight.
“It’s also symptomatic of the fact that the old dominant neoliberal order is starting to decline. The cracks in that hegemony are starting to show. I think it’s because they’ve run out of party tricks; once you’ve privatised everything, what do you do for an encore? There isn’t really anything left.” Welsh also appeared on Channel 4 News during the Panama Papers controversy, which found the Conservative Party’s elitism again under the microscope, following revelations that David Cameron’s late father had stored money in an offshore account. Despite these continuing travails, the Tories remain a formidable electoral machine.
To what does Welsh attribute their ongoing success?
“There is that deference among the working class in Britain,” he muses, “until the shit really hits the fan, and they turn quite quickly. Right up until the very last minute, there’s always going to be that forelock-tugging – ‘our betters know best’ and all of that. It’s ingrained in the British working class psyche. Or actually, the lower middle class, because the working class have been fucked and destroyed.
“The real attack now is on the middle classes. You have the rich expropriating their wealth through debt; it’s a way of the one percent seizing the assets of everybody else. It’s done through mortgages and so on. When you’ve got a flatlining economy, what we used to call credit just becomes debt, and it’s an instrument for that wealth transference.”
Welsh was similarly on Channel 4 News in the build-up to the referendum on Scottish independence. A supporter of Scotland leaving the UK, he debated the issue with fellow author Martin Amis, who took the opposing view. Was Welsh surprised that certain cultural figures, who one might expect to have a more radical stance, such as Amis – and numerous people in rock, including Mick Jagger – opted to back the conservative No campaign?
“There’s that generation – basically my age and above – and they’re people whose world view of Britain was formed from that post-war period right up to the 1980s,” he responds. “You had a very homogenous country with the welfare state and nationalised industries. It was that whole post-war democratic settlement that included the working class. Those generations, they think that the last 30 years is an aberration and we’ll get back to that.
“That’s never going to happen, that ship has sailed. It’s a misreading of what Britain is, which is an imperialist, elitist state. All of that stuff – the aristocracy, monarchy, public schools, inequality – that’s the nuts and bolts of the country. By denying that essence of it, a lot of the more traditional left in Britain are actually playing into the hands of the right.”
Having lived in Ireland for five years (during which time he became a Bohs supporter; the main characters in Trainspotting are all Hibs fans), Welsh has an abiding fondness for the country.
“Yeah, I miss it very much,” he says. “I’m back over in a month to visit friends and I’m looking forward to it. It was the longest I’ve stayed in one place – I was there for five years. I realised that if I didn’t move, I probably never would again. I could see myself going back. If you’re Scottish, Ireland is a great place. It’s familiar enough to be comfortable, but it’s different enough to be a bit exotic, so you get the best of both worlds. I made a lot of great friends, and it’s always going to be a big part of my life because of that.”
The Blade Artist is out now.