:00:00. > :00:00.Now, in Meet the Author, Jim Naughtie talks to Irvine Welsh
:00:00. > :00:11.Irvine Welsh's new novel, The Blade Artist, is as dark
:00:12. > :00:14.as anything he has written, and you will know that that means
:00:15. > :00:17.We are once again in the violent world of Francis Begbie,
:00:18. > :00:22.the psychopathic villain that we met in Trainspotting,
:00:23. > :00:24.who is now a successful and apparently respectable artist
:00:25. > :00:34.But he is easily drawn back by a murder in his family
:00:35. > :00:36.to the unforgiving cynical underworld in Scotland that his wife
:00:37. > :00:40.I'm talking to Irvine Welsh about the violence and hate
:00:41. > :00:43.that he likes to write of, and whether for Begbie and his kind,
:00:44. > :01:08.Irvine, the point about Begbie, who readers first got to know rather
:01:09. > :01:10.unpleasantly perhaps in Trainspotting, is that he can't
:01:11. > :01:21.I think what happens with anybody, it becomes not so much a fundamental
:01:22. > :01:23.change in your personality, it is about generating
:01:24. > :01:31.Behaviourally, we are what we actually do.
:01:32. > :01:34.How we kind of think and feel about things doesn't actually matter
:01:35. > :01:39.that much, it is actually how we behave.
:01:40. > :01:42.How we behave is kind of pursuant with the number of choices
:01:43. > :01:47.What he's done is opened up a different range of choices.
:01:48. > :01:49.He has not fundamentally changed as a person.
:01:50. > :01:53.He is, as I was saying at the beginning, become
:01:54. > :01:59.But a murder in the family, the backstory of his own family,
:02:00. > :02:02.takes him back, and it appears that his propensity for violence,
:02:03. > :02:09.and to slip back into it at the drop of a hat, hasn't changed.
:02:10. > :02:13.I think, you know, we are kind of environmental.
:02:14. > :02:20.He is put back into this environment where he doesn't have the same
:02:21. > :02:26.numberof choices, he does not have the same...
:02:27. > :02:33.He has a desire for revenge, because of the death of someone
:02:34. > :02:36.in his family, I do not want to give too much away.
:02:37. > :02:39.And the first thing he does is stab somebody with a knitting needle
:02:40. > :02:46.Why he stabbed the guy in the back with the knitting needle
:02:47. > :02:55.is because he resents this lack of choice that he has,
:02:56. > :03:06.But I think he is a prisoner of his own reputation.
:03:07. > :03:16.He is pushed back into this environment, and it's not
:03:17. > :03:18.appropriate to the other environment that he is in,
:03:19. > :03:21.but in this environment, it is how he manages
:03:22. > :03:25.Do you think of him primarily as a victim?
:03:26. > :03:35.I think he thinks of himself as a victim in a lot of ways.
:03:36. > :03:39.They are a prisoner of their own drives.
:03:40. > :03:41.They don't feel like they have that own level of choice.
:03:42. > :03:44.It is quite easy to accept that somebody who has violent tendencies,
:03:45. > :03:46.maybe psychopathic tendencies, who then spends time in prison
:03:47. > :03:48.and for one reason or another isn't rehabilitated,
:03:49. > :03:51.is always likely to beat drawn back into this moor of violence,
:03:52. > :03:56.But it is hard not to stand back and say, one of the choices you have
:03:57. > :03:59.got, is to tell these people to politely go away,
:04:00. > :04:02.I am not going to fight again, and that is not going to get
:04:03. > :04:04.involved with murders, and I might save my own
:04:05. > :04:07.I think he is a different character to that.
:04:08. > :04:10.His idea of rehabilitation is basically not getting caught.
:04:11. > :04:11.It is about control of anger management.
:04:12. > :04:14.Instead of becoming a hot-blooded psychopath who is flying off
:04:15. > :04:16.the handle at everybody, he is much more cold and calculating.
:04:17. > :04:20.And also, he is not the classic person who buys into rehabilitation,
:04:21. > :04:23.who believes that it has any kind of presence in his life.
:04:24. > :04:26.Do you believe that rehabilitation, redemption for an evil person,
:04:27. > :04:28.in whichever way you want to interpret that,
:04:29. > :04:35.He is just beyond being touched by that?
:04:36. > :04:40.But I think for most people, just, human experience indicates
:04:41. > :04:42.that it is for most people, and I remember reading somewhere
:04:43. > :04:45.that there was a survey done that which was a scientific test
:04:46. > :04:48.in America, which was kind of hushed up, because it has massive
:04:49. > :04:50.ramifications for the criminal justice system, but they basically
:04:51. > :04:53.discovered some kind of chemical in the brain that makes people
:04:54. > :04:56.violent physically, but by the time they get into their 40s,
:04:57. > :04:57.this chemical is gone, it is dissipated.
:04:58. > :05:00.Therefore, to blame somebody for something that they are kind
:05:01. > :05:02.of preprogrammed to do, they are not dangerous after 40 any
:05:03. > :05:07.I don't know whether that is true or not, or whatever,
:05:08. > :05:09.but there is an element to it, that people become less
:05:10. > :05:13.The book, in the terms that we talking about at the moment,
:05:14. > :05:18.Here is this character, a talented artist, who ends up
:05:19. > :05:21.burning a rather fine picture at the end of the book in one
:05:22. > :05:25.He is, as we discussed, able to just slip back
:05:26. > :05:30.with apparently no guilt and no second thoughts into this terrible
:05:31. > :05:33.violence that he grew up with, this violent underbelly
:05:34. > :05:35.of Edinburgh, which most people, of course, never see.
:05:36. > :05:37.And you don't offer any hope that he could be different.
:05:38. > :05:40.He is going to carry on, his wife is betrayed
:05:41. > :05:43.It is a parable for the narcissism of our times.
:05:44. > :05:48.As a character, in some ways, he is scarily more like the rest
:05:49. > :05:50.of us, and people who exercise power in general.
:05:51. > :05:54.Even if they are not violent, you are saying that it is a pattern
:05:55. > :05:57.It is to do with extreme individualism of our culture.
:05:58. > :05:59.The way it has become extremely individualised,
:06:00. > :06:00.and therefore become really narcissistic,
:06:01. > :06:03.and people have that entitlement, that sense of will to power.
:06:04. > :06:06.That is how I see it, as more dangerous and more scary.
:06:07. > :06:08.It is ubiquitous in the world that we live in.
:06:09. > :06:11.Everyone knows ways you have come from, if they have read any
:06:12. > :06:14.of your work, and Trainspotting was a film that caught the public
:06:15. > :06:15.imagination in quite an extraordinary way,
:06:16. > :06:18.about what was going on in your home city.
:06:19. > :06:29.But you have lived in Chicago for quite a while now,
:06:30. > :06:35.What observations do you take from life in one of America's big
:06:36. > :06:39.cities, when you come home and sit in your flat in Edinburgh?
:06:40. > :07:05.I don't really think of it in that way.
:07:06. > :07:21.People get different, and anybody gets older.
:07:22. > :07:34.What do you see the readers, who say it is a scream of rage?
:07:35. > :07:37.Yeah, I don't think it is a scream of rage at all.
:07:38. > :07:39.Nobody is screaming or raging very much.
:07:40. > :07:40.If anything, he is very chillingly cold.
:07:41. > :07:46.Hopefully what people get out of it, the way we live and the way
:07:47. > :07:49.the world was set up, the society we have set up,
:07:50. > :07:51.it is closing down their options, it is making us more narcissistic,
:07:52. > :07:58.more entitled, and we have less resources now to exercise that.
:07:59. > :08:01.And you are arguing that that brings us closer to the darkness
:08:02. > :08:06.I think it is bringing us closer to the darkness.
:08:07. > :08:11.He does not necessarily make the right choice...
:08:12. > :08:18.He doesn't have the goods to make the right choices.
:08:19. > :08:25.I think we have to make choices as a society in general,
:08:26. > :08:29.because that is so conditional on how we actually behave.