31/03/2016 Meet the Author

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

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

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

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

the psychopathic villain that we met in Trainspotting,

who is now a successful and apparently respectable artist

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

to the unforgiving cynical underworld in Scotland that his wife

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

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

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

unpleasantly perhaps in Trainspotting, is that he can't

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

change in your personality, it is about generating

Behaviourally, we are what we actually do.

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

that much, it is actually how we behave.

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

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

He has not fundamentally changed as a person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

appropriate to the other environment that he is in,

but in this environment, it is how he manages

Do you think of him primarily as a victim?

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

They are a prisoner of their own drives.

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

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

maybe psychopathic tendencies, who then spends time in prison

and for one reason or another isn't rehabilitated,

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

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

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

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

involved with murders, and I might save my own

I think he is a different character to that.

His idea of rehabilitation is basically not getting caught.

It is about control of anger management.

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

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

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

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

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

in whichever way you want to interpret that,

He is just beyond being touched by that?

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

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

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

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

ramifications for the criminal justice system, but they basically

discovered some kind of chemical in the brain that makes people

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

this chemical is gone, it is dissipated.

Therefore, to blame somebody for something that they are kind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with apparently no guilt and no second thoughts into this terrible

violence that he grew up with, this violent underbelly

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

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

He is going to carry on, his wife is betrayed

It is a parable for the narcissism of our times.

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

of us, and people who exercise power in general.

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

It is to do with extreme individualism of our culture.

The way it has become extremely individualised,

and therefore become really narcissistic,

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

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

It is ubiquitous in the world that we live in.

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

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

imagination in quite an extraordinary way,

about what was going on in your home city.

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

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

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

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

People get different, and anybody gets older.

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

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

Nobody is screaming or raging very much.

If anything, he is very chillingly cold.

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

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

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

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

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

I think it is bringing us closer to the darkness.

He does not necessarily make the right choice...

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

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

because that is so conditional on how we actually behave.