‘The Blade Artist’, by Irvine Welsh
What would be an appropriate TW rating for this novel? In case you happen to be unfamiliar with this particular abbreviation, let me explain it stands for ‘Trigger Warning’. And what does it mean? Here is a recent dictionary definition. The term is used ‘to alert people when an internet post, book, article, picture, video clip, or some other media could potentially cause extremely negative reactions (such as post-traumatic flashbacks or self-harm) due to its content’.
Surprisingly a body of opinion has arisen across university campuses in Britain and America that contends that today’s students need to be protected from unexpected exposure to attitudes, values, opinions, on social or political issues, that they do not share. Thus we now are living in a world (despite or because it’s a world in which organisations such as ISIS or Boko Haram see nothing wrong in making young children into killers or suicide bombers) in which ‘The Great Gatsby’ – would you believe – earns a TW for its depiction of ‘suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence’.
I think we can take it for granted that the author of ‘Trainspotting’ (1993) and ‘Filth’ (1998) would be deeply offended if the TW rating for his books was anything other than totally off any scale meant to assess their offensiveness. After all, that was what they were about. Here is how Welsh puts it in one of his more successful rants in ‘Trainspotting’: ‘Choose us. [His group of young doped-up characters.] Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life’.
Some readers – and I’m one of them – may be inclined to feel that the ‘selfish, fucked-up brats’ mentioned here include the speaker and his pals, and that ‘choosing life’ is not exactly what they seem to be doing – but in this context that is not the relevant point.
Welsh’s early novels only work if they offer a convincing onslaught on conventional orthodoxies of every kind – social, moral, political, religious. If they are not offending they are not succeeding. ‘Trainspotting’ does the job pretty well.
Here for example is Renton – the novel’s main narrative voice – on Anglo-Scottish politics: ‘Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes… Ah don’t hate the English. They just get oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots’.
There’s no denying that ‘Trainspotting’s’ diatribe against the status quo is delivered with a kind of frantic verbal energy that is often successfully offensive. Whether the novel really merited the critical enthusiasm with which it was received in the 1990s is another matter. Its explosiveness seems now to have succeeded in disguising its flaws. It’s much too long and boringly repetitive. One vividly disturbing and brutally detailed account of a beating-up turns out to be all too similar to the next one. Welsh obviously enjoys writing such scenes, but readers tire of reading them.
Then there is something seriously flawed about the demotic language which on the face of it is the book’s major success. Renton turns out to have been a history student at Aberdeen University for two years before dropping out. Hence his use of the demotic is a choice, a ploy; he can revert to orthodox English on demand. The point is underlined if ‘Trainspotting’ is set against James Kelman’s prize-winning ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ published just a year later in 1994. The dense Scottish vernacular language of Kelman’s protagonist Sammy – initially just as deeply offensive to some readers as Welsh’s expletive-laden prose – is in the end not only authentically vivid but humanly true to the world in which he lives. Kelman’s novel explores and illuminates the human condition and its moral universe in a manner that is well beyond Welsh’s reach.
To be fair, the Welsh of ‘Filth’ would no doubt retort that even the idea of the human condition – not to mention a moral universe – is just another sentimental delusion. This is a work of such negativity and cynicism that it makes ‘Trainspotting’ seem like light entertainment. All the first novel’s sexism, misogyny, racism, homophobia – and of course extreme violence and cruelty – are here in spades. And this time there is no relief. Renton, Begbie and the rest in ‘Trainspotting’ seem to celebrate the lifestyle they have chosen – and occasionally at least they reveal a flicker or two of normal human feelings. The corrupt policeman who is the protagonist of ‘Filth’ is utterly alien – beyond redemption. ‘Filth’ is an entirely appropriate title. D H Lawrence would have described this book as doing dirt on life.
With his latest novel, however, Welsh has made the interesting decision to move back to the world of ‘Trainspotting’. The central character in ‘The Blade Artist’ is an older, as it were, ‘grown-up’ version of ‘Trainspotting’s’ Francis Begbie. Remember him? The most unreconstructed, threatening, dangerously violent of all of Welsh’s characters. ‘That Begbie, man, it’s likesay…that’s a fuckin jungle cat. We’re just ordinary funky feline types. Domestic cats, likesay…. Keep these claws in catboy. Show the world some soft pads. This is a bad cat, a big, bad panther.’ But keeping his claws in, in 1993, is exactly what Begbie – an expert at kicking faces in or going crazy ‘wi the bladework’ – chooses not to do.
All has changed in 2016. Francis Begbie is now Jim Francis. Married to Melanie – young, good-looking, intelligent, from a wealthy family – a former art therapist in his jail, he now lives in California with his wife and two young daughters. More than that, he has turned his life around, becoming a successful sculptor, planning his next exhibition which he hopes Rod Stewart will attend. His violent past? Well, as he tells his wife, he used to be ‘addicted to violence’. ‘But I’ve got that nonsense under control now, cause it doesn’t take me anywhere interesting. Just jail. Done too much of that.’
But this is an Irvine Welsh novel, not an essay on how art can therapeutically transform the life of violent prisoners. The death of a son he hardly knew in Edinburgh brings the apparently reformed Jim back to Scotland on a trip to find out what had really happened. Of course what he has returned to is his old Begbie life. Sunny California is replaced by a dank and dismal Edinburgh. And soon he is encountering all his old friends and – more ominously – old enemies. With all of them he maintains that he has changed utterly. The bad cat has apparently been declawed.
As long as the reader even half-believes this, the novel remains reasonably interesting. And Welsh encourages us to take Begbie’s transformation seriously. ‘Increasingly’, the character tells us, ‘his life seems fractured, as if his past had been lived by somebody else. It isn’t just that the place he now resides in [California] and the people around him [in Edinburgh] are poles apart, it’s like he himself is an entirely different person. The overriding obsessions and foibles of the man he’d once been now feel utterly ludicrous to the current resident of his mind and body. The only bridge is rage; when angered he can taste his old self. But in California, the way he is currently living his life, few things can vex him to that extent. But that’s over there’.
It’s all a lie. Jim may talk Californian but Begbie acts Edinburghian. And despite what Welsh extraordinarily tells us in this passage, it is even a lie in California. Only days before returning to Edinburgh, ‘Jim’ – or rather Begbie – has secretly battered to death two ne’er-do-wells who had made the mistake of threatening his wife and daughters on their Californian beach. It emerges that he believes in vengeance as he has always done. So the rest of the novel follows an all too predictable pattern. Back in Scotland, Begbie returns to his violent roots and eventually sees off his range of enemies in what readers should be warned is horrifyingly graphic Irvine Welsh style.
It was in 1991, a couple of years before the publication of ‘Trainspotting’, that the so-called Young British Artists made their initial mark on the cultural scene with such deliberately controversial works as Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, Marc Quinn’s head made from frozen pints of his own blood, and Tracey Emin’s disorderly bed. But 25 years on, the artistic rebels of the 1990s have become something very different – not just members of the cultural establishment but vastly rich cultural celebrities. Has not something similar happened to the rebellious rejectionist Irvine Welsh?
Today we are expected to listen respectfully while in interviews and articles he gives us his views on literature and society like any other establishment figure. This is why it is worth asking whether there is a bizarre link between Begbie the creative artist living in California and Welsh the controversial Scottish writer now living in Chicago. Near the end of ‘The Blade Artist’, Melanie suggests that her husband lives ‘in a parallel moral universe to the rest of us’. Begbie agrees, but says he wants to get out of it. Does Irvine Welsh? Given the disturbing ambiguity that readers will discover in the title of his latest novel, the answer in the end is no.
By Andrew Hook | 4 May 2016
