31/03/2016 Meet the Author


31/03/2016

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Now, in Meet the Author, Jim Naughtie talks to Irvine Welsh

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Irvine Welsh's new novel, The Blade Artist, is as dark

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as anything he has written, and you will know that that means

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We are once again in the violent world of Francis Begbie,

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the psychopathic villain that we met in Trainspotting,

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who is now a successful and apparently respectable artist

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But he is easily drawn back by a murder in his family

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to the unforgiving cynical underworld in Scotland that his wife

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I'm talking to Irvine Welsh about the violence and hate

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that he likes to write of, and whether for Begbie and his kind,

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Irvine, the point about Begbie, who readers first got to know rather

:00:44.:01:08.

unpleasantly perhaps in Trainspotting, is that he can't

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I think what happens with anybody, it becomes not so much a fundamental

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change in your personality, it is about generating

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Behaviourally, we are what we actually do.

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How we kind of think and feel about things doesn't actually matter

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that much, it is actually how we behave.

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How we behave is kind of pursuant with the number of choices

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What he's done is opened up a different range of choices.

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He has not fundamentally changed as a person.

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He is, as I was saying at the beginning, become

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But a murder in the family, the backstory of his own family,

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takes him back, and it appears that his propensity for violence,

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and to slip back into it at the drop of a hat, hasn't changed.

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I think, you know, we are kind of environmental.

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He is put back into this environment where he doesn't have the same

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numberof choices, he does not have the same...

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He has a desire for revenge, because of the death of someone

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in his family, I do not want to give too much away.

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And the first thing he does is stab somebody with a knitting needle

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Why he stabbed the guy in the back with the knitting needle

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is because he resents this lack of choice that he has,

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But I think he is a prisoner of his own reputation.

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He is pushed back into this environment, and it's not

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appropriate to the other environment that he is in,

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but in this environment, it is how he manages

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Do you think of him primarily as a victim?

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I think he thinks of himself as a victim in a lot of ways.

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They are a prisoner of their own drives.

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They don't feel like they have that own level of choice.

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It is quite easy to accept that somebody who has violent tendencies,

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maybe psychopathic tendencies, who then spends time in prison

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and for one reason or another isn't rehabilitated,

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is always likely to beat drawn back into this moor of violence,

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But it is hard not to stand back and say, one of the choices you have

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got, is to tell these people to politely go away,

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I am not going to fight again, and that is not going to get

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involved with murders, and I might save my own

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I think he is a different character to that.

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His idea of rehabilitation is basically not getting caught.

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It is about control of anger management.

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Instead of becoming a hot-blooded psychopath who is flying off

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the handle at everybody, he is much more cold and calculating.

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And also, he is not the classic person who buys into rehabilitation,

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who believes that it has any kind of presence in his life.

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Do you believe that rehabilitation, redemption for an evil person,

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in whichever way you want to interpret that,

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He is just beyond being touched by that?

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But I think for most people, just, human experience indicates

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that it is for most people, and I remember reading somewhere

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that there was a survey done that which was a scientific test

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in America, which was kind of hushed up, because it has massive

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ramifications for the criminal justice system, but they basically

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discovered some kind of chemical in the brain that makes people

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violent physically, but by the time they get into their 40s,

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this chemical is gone, it is dissipated.

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Therefore, to blame somebody for something that they are kind

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of preprogrammed to do, they are not dangerous after 40 any

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I don't know whether that is true or not, or whatever,

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but there is an element to it, that people become less

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The book, in the terms that we talking about at the moment,

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Here is this character, a talented artist, who ends up

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burning a rather fine picture at the end of the book in one

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He is, as we discussed, able to just slip back

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with apparently no guilt and no second thoughts into this terrible

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violence that he grew up with, this violent underbelly

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of Edinburgh, which most people, of course, never see.

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And you don't offer any hope that he could be different.

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He is going to carry on, his wife is betrayed

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It is a parable for the narcissism of our times.

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As a character, in some ways, he is scarily more like the rest

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of us, and people who exercise power in general.

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Even if they are not violent, you are saying that it is a pattern

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It is to do with extreme individualism of our culture.

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The way it has become extremely individualised,

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and therefore become really narcissistic,

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and people have that entitlement, that sense of will to power.

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That is how I see it, as more dangerous and more scary.

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It is ubiquitous in the world that we live in.

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Everyone knows ways you have come from, if they have read any

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of your work, and Trainspotting was a film that caught the public

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imagination in quite an extraordinary way,

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about what was going on in your home city.

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But you have lived in Chicago for quite a while now,

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What observations do you take from life in one of America's big

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cities, when you come home and sit in your flat in Edinburgh?

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I don't really think of it in that way.

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People get different, and anybody gets older.

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What do you see the readers, who say it is a scream of rage?

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Yeah, I don't think it is a scream of rage at all.

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Nobody is screaming or raging very much.

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If anything, he is very chillingly cold.

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Hopefully what people get out of it, the way we live and the way

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the world was set up, the society we have set up,

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it is closing down their options, it is making us more narcissistic,

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more entitled, and we have less resources now to exercise that.

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And you are arguing that that brings us closer to the darkness

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I think it is bringing us closer to the darkness.

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He does not necessarily make the right choice...

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He doesn't have the goods to make the right choices.

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I think we have to make choices as a society in general,

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because that is so conditional on how we actually behave.

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