IRVINE WELSH: REALITY IS NOT ENOUGH

(This has expletives in it, and discusses drugs. And literature. Be careful of that book talk, it's risky and dangerous...)

“He emphasised basic truths: you are not dying yet, you have to live your life until you are. Underpinning them was the belief that the grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. I didn’t believe that at the time, but now I do. By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be."
                                                                  -  Trainspotting

You know, I used to be a big fan of the work of Irvine Welsh. After reading a random review in the Scotland on Sunday, I read The Acid House when it first came out in 1994, then quickly read Trainspotting. I jammed that modern classic under the noses of everybody I knew at the time, raving about it. As a wannabe writer at the time, 24, the same age as Renton in the book, I found the use of the vernacular, and the bleakly, blackly humourous book to be incredibly inspirational, and it still holds up. I had, quite simply, never read a Scottish book like that before, because one had never been written.

I followed the man's work from book to book (the creepy, psychotic Marabou Stork Nightmares came next in 1995, which stopped people I know reading Welsh, citing the book as - quote - "evil", because of the vile gang rape scene in it. I always thought it was odd that it was dedicated to Welsh's first wife from his pre-fame days, Anne. I wouldn't have taken that as a compliment, personally) from 1994 to The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs in 2007. Then my interest simply dropped off. You know how that goes, you get into an artist of some kind - writer, band, filmmaker, actor, whatever - and then just move away from their career as you move through different stages of your life. Happens to us all.

I still read the books connected with the Trainspotting crew, and met Welsh a couple of times over the years; we both ended up living in Chicago for a while, and I was on the same bill as him one night. But by that time, round 2008, I had become a father, and the thought of 'transgressive' druggie literature (which I had found more and more formulaic as the years rolled on in Welsh's work) was less and less interesting. The old spark simply wasn't there for me.

And why would it be? Welsh had gone from young, hungry, angry bombscare to globetrotting multi-millionaire wannabe-musician and sexagenarian DJ. He was clearly quite happy in his life, doing well, and good luck to him with that. I personally never rated him all that much as a writer, to be honest, except for that unbeatable vernacular dialogue, and looked at his prose as kind of serviceable level, with moments of savage swill (often rape) thrown in to spice up proceedings. Ho-hum.

But it's what he's become in recent years that I can't quite get my head round.

Now. I confess to reading every Welsh interview I find. His sociological analyses in them are fascinating - he studied sociology at university - and I genuinely believe he should bring a book of interviews out. He follows the contours of the modern world very well, and his research and erudition shows up in the interviews. Which are, to be honest, far better than the work itself, these days. I maintain a sort of vague ex-fan's interest in the man and his work, and I am sure you know how that goes too. Always interesting to see what somebody you used to like is up to now, even if it appears to be stasis and brick-wall-headbanging.

What do I mean? Well, it's quite simple. I will take a look at two new works: Men in Love, his newest novel about the Trainspotting crew, released a couple of months ago, and the new documentary Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough, which I saw tonight in Glasgow, just to throw down a few gobservations. Cos I just want to sort out a few things in my own head.

First off: Men in Love, which takes place chronologically directly after Trainspotting. The title seems nicked from Old Men in Love, by the legendary Alasdair Gray. Welsh got married a couple of years ago to his third wife Emma (after Anne and some yank bird 20 years his junior whose name I can't recall and can't be bothered looking up) and seems blissfully happy. Again, good luck to him that he's happy.

But Christ does it make his work fucking stink!

I started reading Men in Love and quite literally could not believe what I was reading. The very first line of the book compared the look of an old character to Samuel Beckett. A bizarre way to start a populist book, by referencing a long-dead Irish writer the average person will be clueless about. Then it went on to constantly reference the Romantic Poets, and other 19th century(!) types. All kinds of names were thrown about: Chaucer, Blake, Coleridge, Poe, and on and on. But why? Well, Welsh is now 67 years old, and in love (he'd be 66 writing this book), so all his mid-20s druggie, violent bombscare characters must be in love, and aesthetes, too! It's absolutely incredible.

I have always found this odd about Welsh. Over the series of five books he has written about the Trainspotting crew, he has basically, over the decades, changed them all into himself: he turned the amazing, hilarious, disgusting, evil, pigshit thick Begbie (one of the all-time great literary characters) into Jimmy Boyle mixed with a sniffy sculptor aesthete in The Blade Artist, where he had him listening to stuff like A Clockwork Orange on audio books. It was ludicrous. My timeline gets a bit hazy, but he basically set Spud up as the one writing the stories that ended up as Trainspotting at one point; can't remember which book. In this new abortion, Renton is a wannabe-writer and loves the Romantic Poets.

In Trainspotting, Renton talks about getting a couple of grand from stealing books and selling them. The only writer I can recall him actually reading in the book is HP Lovecraft on the train down to London, because he memorably calls him a "Nazi cunt." At no other point (that I recall) does it ever mention him actually reading books, especially highbrow literature or poetry, and that's not reflected in his vocab or worldview. That comes into Skagboys, the cast-offs from the massive original Trainspotting text, where reading and cult authors are featured much more.

Spud takes writing lessons (guess Welsh realised an illiterate housebreaker like Spud would have difficulty writing books!)(and if Welsh really was a housebreaker in his youth, as eluded to in this film, he needs his cunt kicked to Hell and back - my parents' house got broken into, and I always wished I could catch the miserable wee cunt that did it; as it was my amazing, fearless mother chased the scum out of the house), and Sick Boy is a big fan of the Romantic Poets too. It's fucking mental. Take four schemie characters, then clearly fill them full of your own sexagenarian poetic interests when you are feeling soft and in love and this is the stuff you are reading. And, dear fuck, trying to write, judging by the material in the book, and constant Romantic Poet quotes. I took the book back to the library a quarter of the way through, I just couldn't deal with such poorly-written shite. 

Welsh has totally rewritten the basic characteristics of four classic characters of Scottish literature because, well, he's self-taught and doesn't entirely know how to write...or so it would seem. Maybe he just can't be bothered going back over the previous books and remembering what he wrote before. But, like Stephen King, no editor will edit him, no publisher will tell him it's shite, because he makes a lot of money, so nobody tells the Goose That Laid The Rotten Egg that it cracked open and stinks. I totally cringed my way through what I read of that book, genuinely unable to believe that it had been put out by an ostensible professional writer with over three decades in the game. Trainspotting was a zeitgeist moment. Now it's a shitegeist and needs exorcised and put to bed.

"If I had a time machine, I'd be riding Mary Shelley blind", opines big Romantic Poetry enthusiast Sick Boy at one point. Dear oh fucking dear! Talk about fanboy mooning! Welsh describes a sexual encounter in part as '...her vaginal walls crushing jaws gamely attempting to macerate my intromittent organ.' Seriously. I mean, is he so delusional he thinks that this is actually good writing, or is he so cynical he doesn't care and just pumps it out for cash? Your guess is as good as mine. It's clear this pretentious poetry (the stuff you read to say you read it, or say that you read, not that you actually enjoyed it or it appealed to you) is the Anglo-versifying-centric stuff Welsh is reading now, so he has to shoehorn it into the modern work. Reflected glory? Nope. This also suggests an odd self-loathing in a way, a desire to remake the characters from his youth as being more erudite than rude, a way to show the modern UK literati he's more than just cunt and fitty and heroin and swedging. He's forgotten how to write young, in the vernacular, and it's oddly poignant. But it doesn't really work at all.

Anyway. It's a wee shame, so let's move on to the new documentary. The basic concept of it is that the writer takes DMT (ayahuasca by another name) and then we are treated to contemporary footage of him, in strobing light or with footage projected in front of or on him as he relives seminal (de)formative moments of his life. Supposed life-philosophy-illustrative segments of his work are read out by people like Nick Cave and Liam Neeson, mostly non-Scots, far from the working class machines raging against themselves in the books the material comes from.

When I first heard about the doc I didn't think it sounded too great, to be honest, but I was a wee bit intrigued. With the man being 67 years old, and starting more and more to look mortality in the ugly scarred all-consuming chops, it might be interesting to see what was revealed. And the answer: not much, really, that we don't know. We have the 'Irvine stays grounded by playing fitty with his childhood pals' moment, where he kicks a ball round a field then sits round a table with his wife Emma and two friends, Douglas Webster and Colin Campbell, and they marvel that it has been a mere fifty years since they last played fitty together. Tight as a nun's cunt, those boys! 

Emma Currie Welsh, the writer's "Mrs Irvine Welsh the third" (as she pointedly puts it at one point), is in the film a bit, and it's an...interesting dynamic between her and her famous hubby. They're shot at some chichi fayre at a mansion in Scotland. "This is shite", proclaims Welsh. "This isn't shite, Irvine, this is Scottish aristocracy. I'm going to have to indoctrinate you", she hisses, exasperated. It's a telling view into the dynamic of their marriage, especially for a man who now, obnoxiously, calls himself "upper class" whilst railing against the evils of capitalism. Mind you, he's been a middle class media dahlink for many years now, a safe-go to rebel for people who know nothing at all about literature, so why not take the next and final step up? 

Irvine Welsh is now a multi-millionaire pumping out crime shite (a genre I despise, whose success in Scotland shows nothing but out national lack of imagination and morbid disposition, to me)(not that what I think matters in the fuck-tartan-noir-pish slightest, mind you - all those husband-murdering-fantasising Val McDermid fans can't be wrong!) for a bored audience with way too many entertainment options. If the quality level is not high, so what? The era of good culture is over, serious artists are being ground down and destroyed by hostile societal forces just like everybody else, and there's no escaping the encuntification of culture (now a risible entity) round the globe.

(Random tangent: I about shat myself, though, right at the start. The horrendous Michael Pedersen was interviewing Welsh, and appeared backstage talking to him. I groaned loudly, thinking that if I had known that village idiot was going to be in the film I wouldn't even have turned up. I hoped he wouldn't appear through the whole running time, or I would have to walk out. I cannot stand that putrid purple prose-and-poetry-producing, strawberry-wrecking-ball-riding, 80s Jesus and Marychain-hair-having shit factory. He's one of the most effete fucking pishy-words-spewing wankstains I have ever encountered. The man's a sick joke being played on Scottish literature and poetry, symptomatic of everything wrong with this culturally moribund, America-copying spent dead receding country. Think I lie? Check the self-obsessed drivel below out. No doubt his friend Scott Hutchison's tragic, painful death did have a heavy negative effect on Pedersen, as suicide does on anybody around the self-murdered person, buttttt...

Love the wee smug self-satisfied smile at the end, after such a 'painful' passage. How many hours did he take to learn all that by rote? Bet that cunt is a big fan of the Romantic Poets. Anyway, enough of that. Sorry, that was a long time coming, I apologise. Let's move swiftly and thankfully and happily on)

This documentary is hilarious, and revealing, for what its mere existence says about its subject. It's an act of pure ego, thinking - albeit correctly - that he has an audience who will be interested enough in his life and work to pay to see it, as I did. And that also means we will find it, and the material in it, to be as fascinating as he does. Eh...naw, big man, nae danger, likes. What we have here is a film in which Welsh has made himself his own one-man Trainspotting, and we are inside the drug trip of his existence. Which is now that of a self-described upper-middle-class dilettante, who says he retired three decades ago and now can live off his "hobby." 

But that seeming laissez-faire, "dinnae gie a fuck, likes" attitude towards life and his work, is undermined by a couple of things. He mentions being in a couple of no-hoper bands, but wasn't really into it because he could never be as good, or better, than his heroes, folk like Iggy Pop and David Bowie, but he could do a decent job of getting someplace writing. A very competitive mindset, as evidenced by the amount of work  - which he sadly and poignantly attributes to his father's death as being a galvinising force for - he has produced over the years, and still continues to: films, novels, plays, records (he released a disco album to accompany Men in Love, not his first released foray into music), film and telly scripts, short stories.

So that's one aspect of things. He's driven to succeed, because of mortality, He's leaving an artistic legacy, because he's not having children, and thus hasn't had to grow up, in some ways. Another aspect of things is the irrefutable fact that he is a late 20th century writer, but not a 21st century one, at all. He was born too early for the net age, and the work of his that I have seen barely touches on the net era at all. For somebody who was already 37 when the film of Trainspotting blew him up, and somebody who has based his reputation and brand on being a youth writer, being 67 and knowing fuck all about the net is a definite drawback. So he does what he does best, writes about crime and heroin and, eh, the Romantic Poets. It's what the arty sniffy Trainspotting boys would want, dahlink.

Welsh has also recently been glued at the hip to the obsessive, self-mining writer Ewan Morrison, who is a decade younger than the documentary subject and a lot more clued up about 21st century technology. Though as he's 57 years old, the youth element eludes him, too. Welsh seems to think, as Morrison himself does, that Morrison is JG Ballard Jr, judging by recent interviews I have read with him for his novel, For Emma, which I have out of the library to read - never read a word of his, except a few interviews. And, of course, Morrison would love Welsh-level book sales. Morrison (a blind-me-with-science-baffle-bullshit type) spews an endless amount of Rab C Nesbitt-alike "Ah will tell you this!" information he has clearly gleaned from online research about AI and such tedious shite. 

What he does not seem to realise is that Ballard forged his own unique deep-dish worldview from his own life and thoughts and extrapolations, not net reading and assimilation and conjecture. But the close association of these two ageing Scottish writers would suggest that Irvine Welsh wants desperately to be taken seriously as a modern Scottish Thinker and Artist. And he's certainly a damned intelligent man, that much is clear. Watching him talking, where he seems either punch-drunk or stoned, he reminds me of Hunter S Thompson, who wrote because his outer inarticulacy did not do justice to the depth of the roiling thought cauldron within.

So really what Reality Is Not Enough boils down to is this: do you want to watch a multi-millionaire feeling increasingly stabbed in the frightened avoidant back by the jabbing tiktok hands of all-murdering time take DMT, or not? What is bizarre about this film is just how conventional it all is: I mean, people have been looking for near-life-death-in-between experiences through drug (ab)use all through human history. William S Burroughs, another drug literature icon (who was a total basket case) wrote about going down to South America to get wiped and wired on ayahuasca in the early 50s. A book about his experiences called The Yage Letters came out in 1963.

It's exactly the same, very American, drugs-explain-all sort of worldview that those voidheads have been pimping since the late 60s and the hippie era...and it's total shite.  Thinking that we can learn anything about our lives and deaths through taking a paid-for drug - a capitalist concept - for something so ostensibly spiritual is erroneous and hilarious and betrays nothing more than an absolute terminal imagination failure. Welsh thought he would take the 'ultimate trip'. What else could he do after the dilettante drug musings and abusings in his books? But ultimately, this (yawn) 'transgressive' experience amounts to less than zero, at least for the viewer.

Welsh says "I was an atheist, but I now believe there's some cosmic..." and I genuinely didn't catch the next word, because I laughed out loud in the cinema. The people behind me would not have been pleased. His trip made him say "cosmic" a lot and mibbes-aye-mibbes-naw believe in god. Really, aye? Magic! How unusual! Never heard that angle before! My own fault for paying to see this, really. I don't know what I was expecting, but a hardly-idle-rich, once-interesting man going to Canada to pay no doubt a pretty penny to lie under a blanket with his eyes covered saying heady stuff like "Ah dinnae know if ah like it or not" or "It's quite emotional"...wasn't it. I remember going to a reading years ago Welsh did in Chicago where he called himself a "space cadet." This is Ground Control to Major Tom! I don't know what rarified hierarchies this man is hanging about in, but he's now coming off just like every other minted wackjob who wanted to explore 'spirituality' and found...nothing much. Least the others don't charge to see it.

"It's a Mister Death or something, he's coming about the reaping...?"

You know, I genuinely bear Irvine Welsh no ill will. Isn't that mighty magnanimous of little old nobody me? He might not feel the same way about me, now, mind you. Laughing here. What comes across quite strongly in watching this is that early pains and injuries, plus the death of his father, scarred him deeply. He comes across as a bit fractured, a bit damaged, a bit brilliant, insolubly dichotomous, a rich socialist-cum-anarchist, searching for something that is not there: a definitive-or-simulacrum Meaning Of Life. More than any other writer I have ever read, Welsh's work is an ongoing dialogue with himself about strife, the looneyverse, and neverything: stappit fu ay philosophy and pain and dark humour, whether it entirely fits the character or not. It's always Irvine Welsh you are reading, for better or worse.

He's an Exploited barmy army wur crazy wur mental wur off wur fucking heids ex-punk gifted fame and wealth beyond anything he could ever have dreamed of...and he has no idea whatsoever what to do with any of it. No wonder he is searching, no wonder he is devoid of meaning, no wonder he has expensive 'revealing' drugs habits. Just like every halfwit wannabe-psyche-traveller Guardian reader roaster in middle England who travels to South America to reap the dubious existential benefits of trying to buy into indigenous druggie transcendental culture, but ends up getting drugged and robbed and raped by unscrupulous sham shamans.

You know the type, the ones who hate Scotland but love funny-accent poverty porn jaunts into Welsh's work. The ones his views about supporting Scottish independence would never work for. The ones unaware of their role in the oppression of this country and, by extension, Welsh's screaming, fractured, self-destructive, fiction-dreaming psyche. But, bottom line, I get the feeling he's a sound cunt, if just a bit confused and needy and injured psychically. Good luck to him, though I know I will never read a book of his again. But we all have damage and we all have dreams and the terminus of those dreams never reveals itself to us getting drug-dosed in an expensive Canadian clinic by two dubious clueless shavehead New Age 'guide' quacks.

Anyway. Gibberjibberjabber wafflebafflebabble. Said too much, and can't be bothered writing anymore, you'll be pleased to hear. If you're looking for any real insight into Irvine Welsh's writing or influences or anything in this vanity press film, you won't get it. If you like strobe lights, you'll love it. See it if you want. I'm not going to yay-or-nay-say one way or the other. My opinion doesn't matter at all, except to me. Next move's yours.

THE END