REFERENDUM ADDENDUM

Irvine Welsh delves into a Scotland conflicted about change in A Decent Ride

Around three quarters of the way through his 10th and most recent novel, A Decent Ride, Scottish writer Irvine Welsh switches to an entirely new narrative perspective. Writing as the, yes, penis of protagonist Juice Terry — a debauched Edinburgh cab driver who is, to borrow Welsh’s euphemistic description, “a bit of a shagger” — he threatens to secede: “You hudyir chance with this union,” he writes, “n ye f--ked it up!”

“You broke the contract, mate,” he goes on, “so it’s numero uno fae now on in ... independence ... independence ... freedom ... freedom.”

It’s impossible not to see the underlying metaphor: A Decent Ride was written during a period of great tumult in Scotland, and the novel hits shelves here and abroad just 10 months after a landmark referendum that saw 44.7% of the country voting for independence from the United Kingdom (the effects of that referendum were also reflected somewhat in Britain’s general election last month, when all but three constituencies in Scotland voted for the Scottish National Party). Even so, Welsh prefers his writing not to be explicitly political — “I think when people write overtly about politics it’s sort of dull,” Welsh explains. He had to find an apt stand-in for sociopolitical turmoil in Scotland. He chose two: Hurricane Bawbag, the real-life tropical storm that battered (but barely bruised) Scotland in 2011, and Juice Terry.

“I was over for the referendum, and people were talking about it everywhere,” says Welsh, who has now lived outside of Scotland for 20 years, and outside of the United Kingdom for a decade. “I thought that it might be nice to almost reference it by its absence.”

Over coffee in the lobby of the Le Germain hotel in Toronto, Welsh describes Terry — a character who first appeared in his 2001 novel Glue — as a man set in his ways, immovable in his worldview and paralyzed by the mere thought of newness, never mind the inevitable reality of it. “He’s unbending,” Welsh says. “The reason I was interested in writing about Scotland now is because it’s undergoing these major changes, and I wanted to get somebody who was really against the atmosphere of change to tell the story of what was happening around him.”

Welsh moves on to the topic of Scottish independence, suggesting that, because “we’ve had no history for 300 years, everything’s very dramatic.

“It’s a terrible defeat or a fistpumping victory,” he says. “If we get an independent Scotland, we’re either going to waltz into the land of milk and honey or it’s going to be this kind of terror and horror and murder in the streets. So I wanted to use this Hurricane Bawbag, which came to Scotland and didn’t do much damage at all, as a kind of metaphor for people’s reactions to things.”

A Decent Ride opens on the eve of Bawbag, as Terry picks up American TV presenter Ronnie Checker at the Edinburgh airport. Terry and Ronnie are joined by good-hearted but slowwitted Jonty MacKay, the secretive Jinty Magdalen and, of course, Terry’s “auld faithful,” in Edinburgh, where their paths cross in unexpected, wholly lascivious, suitably Welshian ways.

“I’m interested in writing about how we’re kind of at war with ourselves,” Welsh says of his propensity for scraping the underbelly, writing about characters tied up in patterns of self-sabotage and debauchery, on full display in the whisky-soaked, sexaddled Decent Ride. “We as people have these sort of very basic, animal drives, and then this cerebral, conceptual thing going on as well, and these two are in permanent conflict with one another. I like to get that tension.”

Welsh has been poet laureate of Scotland’s underbelly since 1993, when he published his hit debut novel, Trainspotting. That book brought him success at home and abroad, and was adapted into a film of the same name which earned the distinction of being named the greatest British film of all time by The Observer in 2014 — a fact that Welsh laughs at now. “I probably called it that first,” he says.

“I didn’t aim to do it originally,” Welsh explains of his particular writing style, where he often uses a phonetic raw Scots dialect that makes reading him feels like learning a new language. “I tried to write Trainspotting in good, standard English, and it just had no soul at all. It’s not so much the vernacular as the rhythm of it that’s important to me. I was really big into the acid house scene at the time, DJing and taking loads of ecstasy and dancing in warehouses, and I got this idea that the language should have this four-four beat to it. I looked at some of the dialects that can do that. It’s performative, like Celtic choral traditions.”

Welsh says that the distance — actual, physical distance — he’s put between himself and his homeland didn’t affect his ability to write A Decent Ride, the first book he’s penned about contemporary Scotland since 2008’s Crime (Skagboys, the Edinburgh-set novel Welsh released in 2012, was a prequel to the 1993-set Trainspotting; The Secret Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, out in 2012, was set in Miami). He still has friends and a home there, he says, and spends three months out of the year in the U.K. “Emotionally,” he says, “I never really left Scotland. I feel like the guy who went out for a pint of milk to the supermarket and just kind of got lost.”

Welsh is a different man than he was in his Edinburgh days: married for a second time in 2005, he lives a sober life in Chicago — a far cry from the acid-house days (not that acid house made it to 2015, anyway). But he’s still very fond of his origins with Trainspotting — one character from that book, Sick Boy, factors into A Decent Ride — and will gamely discuss the long-rumoured film adaptation of that book’s sequel, Porno.

“The main players have all said consistently that there’s no point in doing this for money,” he says. “We’re really proud of what we did, so we want something that’s going to add to it rather than trash that legacy. It could end up being sort of like watching your uncle dance at a wedding. It would be great fun to do it, but that’s no reason to do it — because you’re all having a good time.”

And besides: “I think we’d have to go back and mine the coffers for a soundtrack,” he says. “Music’s pretty shite now.”

We have basic, animal drives, and a cerebral, conceptual thing in permanent conflict