Irvine Welsh - Up from the Scottish underground

By MARY BRAID

There was a time when Irvine Welsh was another hip, druggy outsider who could poke fun at middle-class stuffiness. But that was before the success of Trainspotting and the pressures of being a leading literary figure.

It is all more serious now. Welsh's latest novel, Glue - his sixth book and his first for three years - is out and there are those who say his entire reputation as a writer is riding on it, and that Glue will decide whether he is a one-hit wonder or a writer of note and stamina.

In 1957, when Welsh was born, he hardly seemed destined to join the literati. Welsh has always been fiercely jealous of his private life - refusing even to divulge whether he is, as thought, married and childless - but it is fairly certain that his father was a docker and his mother a waitress. He left Leith when he was 4 to be rehoused on Edinburgh's soulless Muirhouse housing "scheme," which he later described as providing "one pub, a few shops and hardly anything to do."

Welsh says he only ever liked English and art at school and left at 16 with few qualifications to do what working-class boys did, get a trade. He got an apprenticeship, back in Leith, in a television-repair shop. It may, of course, be myth - for Welsh likes to toy with interviewers - but he apparently packed in the job after six months, having been almost electrocuted.

There followed the drifting years, and they lasted for much of his 20s. In the late 1970s, Welsh decided to become a rock musician. By 1978, he had gravitated south to London's punk scene - apparently he just boarded a bus, drunk, one night. In London, he slept rough, shared a succession of squats and bedsits, and joined bands with names such as Pubic Lice and Stairway 13 that, somehow, never made it. He popped pills and supported himself at times by washing dishes. Every six months or so he would move between Edinburgh and London.

And somewhere during those floating years, Welsh returned to Muirhouse to find it awash with heroin. Accounts vary about how long his own using lasted, and how serious it was, but he has told at least one interviewer that it went on for 18 months. You did not have to know anything about Welsh when Trainspotting arrived in 1993 to guess the author knew intimately the scene he was writing about. And it was just as obvious, says the critic Jenny Turner, from the end of the book, that Welsh had put heroin, at least, behind him. That did not stop his adoption as prophet by the Ecstasy rave scene.

It is Irvine, the hip, directionless, druggy outsider that many of his younger fans, many of who may have never read another book, adored. That view of him ignores the alter ego - smarter, more focused, and more materialistic - that appeared in Welsh's late 20s when he resumed his studies, took a job as a clerical worker with Hackney Council and began an ascent of local government that would eventually lead to him becoming head of training for Edinburgh District Council.

It also ignores his metamorphosis to property speculator during the mid-1980s when he began buying up bedsits in Hackney, Islington and Camden, doing them up and selling them on for profit. He has claimed that he made £50,000 ($163,000) buying and selling.

He explained the contradiction two years ago: "I didn't invent capitalism. It's not the best way of running things, but I'm not going to be a stupid martyr."

Irvine was training supremo at Edinburgh Council when he was creating Trainspotting. He is said to have been astonished that anyone wanted to publish the book. The dialect he insisted on writing in would, it was thought, put it beyond the understanding of anyone outside Leith, and particularly bar it from London publishing houses. And the subject matter - nihilistic, downright ugly, heavy drug using - was not exactly mainstream.

These days, few critics would disagree that Trainspotting is a good, and even great, book. Division sets in only over what Welsh has done since. The post-Trainspotting "diversions" - guest-DJing in Ibiza as king of the rave scene, getting arrested while drunk, writing columns for style magazines and endless partying - annoy some. The latest plan - well publicised, of course - is for Welsh to pen a few songs for an ex-Bay City Roller. It's all been too much froth, critics say.

But there have also been four subsequent books (The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy and Filth), a screenplay (of The Acid House) and a drama (You'll Have Had Your Hole). But most of them have had more attention for shocking, nasty violence and profanity than their artistic merit. In fact, the views of some literary commentators about the body of work between Trainspotting and Glue are so violently negative that they prefer not to be named. "I thought Trainspotting was fantastically innovative and I loved the whole swagger," says one. "But everything since has been a repetition. I think he believed all the hype and got silly and cynical." One disgruntled literary insider says that if Welsh ever was a fully blown "radge" Leith junkie, it's been a long time, and it's time for something fresh.

Robin Robertson, Welsh's publisher at Jonathan Cape, claims that Filth restored Welsh's reputation. Not so, according to another critic who dismisses it as "juvenile and gratuitous," saying, "It's time Welsh started to write for grown-ups, to get away from the scatological."

In Scotland, the division over Welsh is perhaps even sharper, for Trainspotting set a trend that many young writers felt obliged to follow. Scottish writers offering dark, gritty themes found publishers more receptive. There's some resentment that good writers who resisted the tide suffered while others, offering inferior imitations of Welsh's great work, flourished.

Heralding what he believes is a move by Scottish writers away from downbeat themes, Professor Douglas Gifford, of Glasgow University, recently said that Welsh had "taken negativity to the end of the cul-de-sac."

Perhaps Welsh has been listening, just a little. In interviews he has seemed, well, more grown up. He told one interviewer that he has not touched any drugs since the New Year. Instead of partying, the Ecstasy crowd's hero is holed up in his London home, watching newly installed cable TV, or out ... wait for it ... jogging.

In the past, Welsh has played down the importance of being a successful writer, and played up his wild, free spirit; just as he has played down his knowledge of literature, though friends say he is incredibly well read. He may, of course, simply be playing with journalists again, presenting a new, suitable image, but he has admitted that the writing matters. That's pretty courageous if the nonchalance he has so far displayed was really a mechanism designed to cushion him from possible failure.

After seven books, he says, it's time to stop saying that he's "playing at it."

And interestingly, Welsh allows Renton and Begbie, stars of Trainspotting, to make fleeting appearances in Glue, while promising that they and the rest of the Trainspotting gang will be the central characters in Porno, a new novel he will publish next year. His admirers will see this perhaps as a sign of a return to quality, his critics as the act of a desperate man.

Former publisher Peter Kravitz, an early champion of new Scottish writing, believes that Irvine is suffering a backlash born out of envy. Those who built him up, he says, are now pulling him down. Kravitz wagers that Welsh has 40 years' good writing left in him. And he argues that Welsh has already produced a better book than Trainspotting. It is Marabou Stork Nightmares, never made into a play or a film, which will stand the test of time.

As we watch the more reflective Welsh, the serious writer, we should remember Welsh the property speculator, Welsh the successful council official and Welsh the drug addict.

He seems to want to woo both the more conservative and the wild when he warns that the discipline and abstinence would inevitably give way to binge.

Even the title of his book suggests a straddle. Glue in fact refers to the bonds between the four main characters. But its title might so easily be misunderstood.

- INDEPENDENT

*