Toryspotting

No doubt there are a few people amongst the Leith literati who are choking on their sugar puffs at the report from the Sunday Telegraph that Irvine Welsh has stepped forward as a Tory supporter, but if it happens to be true, and it's not some elaborate wind-up on Welsh's part, I have to admit there is a certain logic in his reasoning:

"I'm a product of Thatcherism in many ways and I've benefited from everything I detested. I've had to come to terms with it. My whole family background was a socialist one. I didn't consciously embrace those changes in the 1980s, but they did help me personally.

"My dislike of Thatcherism is very much a class-based thing. I really had a problem with the middle and upper class. Basically, I thought how can a Tory be nice? Now, some of the nicest people I have met have been middle and upper-middle class and some of them, I suppose, must be Tories."

As the article later goes on to state, Welsh's plans are to buy a home in California so that he can concentrate on his work in more conducive surroundings, which indicates that he must have made a mint from the books and tv/film tie-ins depicting the poverty, violence and drug addiction that blighted the schemes of Edinburgh and its surroundings areas in the eighties and the nineties. Nice of him to acknowledge that he has made a literary killing from the effects of Thatcherism in all its shape and forms.

As you can probably tell from the heavy handed sarcasm, I've not really got the highest opinion of Mr Welsh's fiction. Even if it turns out that the story is some well constructed hoax on Welsh's part to wind up the Torygraph, I'm not shy in admitting that I thought that Trainspotting was overrated when I first read it many moons ago, and I much preferred writers who appeared on the scene at the same time and later, such as Gordon Legge, Duncan McLean and Laura Hird. From reading various interviews of Welsh on the net that date from down the years, he returns again and again to the statement that when he first began to seriously write fiction in the eighties, he wanted to move away from the themes that were prevalent in contemporary Scottish fiction at the time that served to give the blanket impression that Scotland was uniformly male, industrial working class, unionised, sectarian and seemingly always geographically located in the West of Scotland.

I don't knock him for railing against those writers who, in raking over the immediate past and perhaps trying to make sense of what had, in their eyes, gone wrong with the post-war consensus of welfare capitalism, had their heads and their typewriters still rooted in the sixties and seventies. That period has all too often been mythologised then and now by writers who, in wanting to grab hold of a pre-Thatcher golden age, are too quick to skate over the problems that were all too real for the working class during that period, but it's kind of ironic that as someone who started out wanting to challenge the misplaced romanticism of the "Glasgow Mafia"* Welsh has profited so handsomely from playing out the role of a literary tour guide, indulging those who don't live in schemes in Edinburgh and Glasgow and everywhere in between, but who still want to dip their toes into that other misplaced romanticism of drug addiction, casual violence and the fuck you mentality that is always so much more exciting and alluring when it's viewed from the safe distance of a bookshelf or a tv screen.

*Welsh's term for those Scottish writers who, in the late eighties, were all about writing about the "industrial working class experience".