Irvine Welsh: 'I'm the same kind of writer as I am a drinker. I'm a binger'

When Irvine Welsh began writing 20 years ago, he hadn't much of a clue how to set about a novel. To get himself going, he hammered out 100,000 words, telling himself it was "just my launch pad to get into what I need to write about" – and sure enough the trick worked. The first 100,000 words were duly discarded, and lay forgotten for years, while the debut novel – Trainspotting – turned its author into a literary superstar.

Six more novels later, Welsh had an idea to dig those old words out again. They were stored on floppy disks he couldn't even read, so he found a data recovery expert on the internet, posted the disks off, and wondered what, if anything, would come back. "I was terrified that it would just get lost in the post. But if it was meant to be it was meant to be. I just thought: 'Oh well, I can't even remember what was on them anyway.'"

When the words returned safely, Welsh figured the next step would be straightforward. "Naively, I thought, well, I've got 100,000 words here, this should be all right," and so he sat down to write a prequel to Trainspotting. But immersing himself once again into the violent, darkly comic, chillingly affectless, uproariously chaotic world of his famous fictional junkies, Welsh ended up writing an epic so weighty and sprawling, it leaves Trainspotting looking like a footnote. "I just got into it," Welsh grins cheerfully. "It was fun. It was like meeting a bunch of old pals."

Read the rest here.

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In the morning Robert announced that later he would go down to the lake and drown himself, if he wasn't too tired, or if he wasn't feeling too lazy.

He took comfort and joy in the thought, and the announcement of the thought - he knew, indeed everyone knew, that he would always feel lazy and thus, his proposed suicide was a simple, warm, thought that justified his sadness and made other people uncomfortable and therefore was almost as good as the real thing.

There were three other people in the room that morning. Rosie, his wife, a crumpled ball of a woman. Edna, his mother, whose skin was now the colour of cold breakfast tea with a few drops of condensed milk in it. And Leo, Robert's imaginary friend, who stood in the doorframe of Robert's bedroom with his arms folded across his chest and a rather slow, easy smile that sharply molded his sour-cream face into a study of lines and angles.

Robert, who in that moment lay in a bed wearing a black bathrobe and stained underwear, was a man that had done much in doing very little. He had tried his hand at poetry in college, but struggled terribly in thinking up a rhyme for "when love is lost," and so put down his leather bound notebook somewhere and hadn't looked upon the thing since. In his youth he had read many books, and saw many movies, and scrutinized many paintings, and in all of them he had offered a sort of cold admiration that weighed the banalities and immensities art as "just about the same."

It was with this same cold admiration that he looked at the reality of his family, all stood around the perimeter of his small twin bed, each possessing, in his eyes, a certain bright, cheerful ugliness that both fascinated and disgusted him to such a degree that he found in fact he didn't actually feel anything at all.

Robert gazed at Rosie, with her soft rolls and bulges, the wiry hairs on her chin that looked like a family of flies had drowned in a vat of milk before the cheese was made, the small beads of eyes that should have been hazel but looked almost piss-yellow in the morning light, and he wondered not if he had ever loved her but rather if he had ever liked her. She was lovable in her grotesqueness, her unspeakable devotion to him, her very good pork pies that came to him every Thursday or Friday afternoon on a plastic tray with a gradually peeling photo of their wedding day on it. She was worthy of a very matter-of-fact version of his love that manifested itself in either ambivalence or complete obliviousness. But she was not likable - she was too plain, too good, too simple to be liked and that, Robert thought, was probably the reason Leo was so keen about killing her.

Cock and Bull: A Review

In some ways, Will Self's 1992 novella Cock and Bull "works" before the reader even begins, simply in the development in a cleverly shocking premise - in one story, an unfulfilled woman grows a penis. In another, a man grows a vagina in the back of his left knee. It's just shocking, just crude, just strange enough to peek a reader's interest because both stories hinge on an impossibility that is as seemingly perverse as it is intriguing. There are simple, comic immensities in Self's work, but there is also an intense awareness of those immensities, like a comedian who explains the punchline to a rather good joke. Thus the clever awareness of how clever the set-up is breaks the fourth wall not in an engaging, but an unpleasantly jarring manner.

Self's takes a mocking approach to gender roles, presenting a flat, dull character in Carol - a plain, unmotivated college drop out who knows words like "phallocentrism" but cannot apply the word in a real, concrete way. Carol is married to Dan, a walking and sometimes talking metaphor, an impotent, effeminate man who makes Carol feel "less like a woman" when around him. His growing alcoholism, and their withering sex life, lend to Carol's feelings of complete disillusion with a life she has been essentially drifting through since college.

It is when Carol decides to take ownership of her body - through abstaining from his hard partying ways and, later, through masturbation - that she discovers her "frond." As Carol's penis grows, she becomes more assertive and dismissive of Dan, goes out into the world. As her penis grows, so does her freedom, her impatience, and ultimately her violent agression. Her actions become, gradually, more and more "masculine" in the stereotypical sense - culminating in a final, brutal act.

The same supposed reversal in behavior occurs too in "Bull," where John Bull is a journalist who grows a vagina behind his knee, and later finds himself in a strange, abusive affair with his doctor. Bull, once a rugby player, then a sports journalist, then forced to review a cabaret act (the event which leads to his new "growth") gradually becomes more and more feminine, dealing with PMS and other physical and hormonal fixtures of being a woman.

Self's ability to mold his unreal plots into something malleable and almost (almost) familiar is often masterful, as is his ability to anticipate and then in the same movement crush the expectations of the reader (most interestingly executed with his use of three narrators in "Cock"). But despite this ability, and despite his supposed attempt to satirize gender roles in a post-modern culture, there is a disconcerting fog of the misogynistic that hangs over both stories. This fog cheapens a device that could have been elevated to a more clever and even more humorous commentary on sex and gender.

Both stories, instead of shedding an interesting light on gender and sex by mocking sexist stereotypes of both men and women, celebrate and perpetuate them. Men who don't act "manly" enough become, literally, pussies - literally and figuratively emasculated - worthy of only being viewed as sex objects, worthy only of rape - as women, in Self's world, obviously are. By that same term, women who are not in touch with their femininity and cannot (or will not) find men to bring out that femininity by being real men are men themselves. But, because of their stupidity and their weakness, they cannot filter or harness all that precious male testosterone - they become monsters instead.

What's left is really just so many pretty turns of phrase, some interestingly executed experimentation, some shock value, and an all pervading sense of disappointment. The best jokes are ones that, after that initial raucous burst of laughter, leave you thinking - maybe not a lot, maybe not enough to change your day (or your mind), but certainly enough to linger somewhere in the subconscious. But there is a banality, a blankness in the digestion of both stories. Thus, "Cock and Bull" essentially amounts to a joke that ends with the punchline: "To get to the other side."

Ch-Ch-Changes

It's not quite a metamorphosis story, but the 2007 film Teeth came to mind almost instantly while I was reading Will Self's Cock and Bull. In Teeth, a sixteen year old girl's vagina undergoes a transformation of sorts the way Carol's does in Cock. Only, in Teeth, her vagina literally grows teeth.

The characters are similar in that they undergo not only physical but mental and emotionally changes throughout their stories. Carol, initially complacent though bored with her life as the wife of an alcoholic, regains her power through brutal means. in the same way, Dawn O'Keefe finds power in her transformation, by dominating those who would attempt to dominate her sexually.

There is an element of humor in both works, though I believe the humor is a lot more overt in Teeth and plays more on the absurdity but also the horror of a hormonal teenage girl, raging around town, biting guys penises off. Will Self's humor is a lot more subtle and a lot more subversive - and the change that his main character goes through is not a gimmick, and not playing on more obvious themes of male vs. female. In that way, I think the story succeeded. We spend enough time inside Carol's head so that her actions - while shocking - make sense for her character.

I also think that the insertion of a storyteller, someone once removed from Self...himself...was an interesting tool. it creates a dynamic where the author, Self, is both distancing and bringing the reader into the story. By having a narrator narrating someone else narrating the tale, he anticipates but also manipulates our reactions to the final, bizarre climax of the story. I suppose the main reason why Teeth so quickly came to mind for me was that the story had a very cinematic quality - people so often say that about literature just to say it - but I guess what I mean is that it had an atmosphere and a tone that for me matches the visual landscape of Teeth, and would be interesting to see presented in that way.

Here's the trailer for Teeth below: