"Porno" is the latest book by Irvine Welsh.
It is a sequel to "Trainspotting", featuring the same characters, ten years down the line.
(Edited highlights of the panel's review)
KIRSTY WARK:
Jude Kelly, did you welcome back the old characters?
JUDE KELLY:
I had the same feeling as I would have done if I had gone into a shop and looked at a Jack Higgins book or a Joanne Trollope book or an Irvine Welsh book.
He knows exactly who his readers are and how to write for them. They will welcome back those characters, because, boy, does he know those characters.
I thought that the psychology of them, their language, where they had got to in their lives, was all fascinating and interesting.
KIRSTY WARK:
Everyone talks about it being a different era, but you felt that Begbie and Spud, particularly these two characters who he draws very clearly in the Edinburgh patwa, are the same as they were in 1989?
JUDE KELLY:
I thought what he was drawing attention to was what happens when age, disappointment and despondency hits the mid-term man. The big problem really is with the rest of the characters who he doesn't know so well.
KIRSTY WARK:
With Trainspotting, of course, he was establishing a new genre, in a way, and he was bringing a new audience to his books and it was edgy. Do you feel there is any danger in this book?
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Huge danger, Trainspotting was very exciting, but if you are doing a sequel, you are playing for high stakes because people want something more.
You can't welcome back characters if they are no longer alive. These guys are really dead. This is a repetitive strain syndrome in print.
There is a kind of sogginess to the writing and to the vision, and there is no emotional journey. I feel that this is, if not a cynical exercise, a mistaken one, because we are not getting further, and you needs to go further if you are going to do a sequel.
KIRSTY WARK:
Is that because there is a problem with range here. Your debut novel is so strong and powerful that you are kind of enmeshed in it. Particularly for Welsh, who came to be seen as this icon of a particular generation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
It's hugely difficult for him, but he needs to do something else. If you can't develop as a writer, it may be time to get another job.
RICHARD HOLLOWAY:
Didn't he say somewhere recently that he had 500 pages left over from Trainspotting that he hadn't used and he simply reworked it. I hated it. I hated every mangy page of this book.
I have been asking myself why. I think it's because there is a deep inauthenticity in it. There was a dark nihilism in the previous outing, but I don't think these guys have moved on, grown up or even destroyed themselves.
I couldn't find what his voice was, what he was wanting us to hear. I don't mind having my nose rubbed in stuff, but I just felt there wasn't an authorial direction in the book at all. It was porn itself, in a sense. It was sensation without meaning.
JUDE KELLY:
What was interesting was that, whereas you felt he really identified originally with the characters in Trainspotting, he now is observing them from afar.
KIRSTY WARK:
Very much from afar. He makes the joke himself about people living in Islington. By all accounts, he lives there now.
JUDE KELLY:
You have to say that the book is highly readable. If you want to pick up a novel and go on a long train journey,. that will be one of the ones that gets picked.
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
There is a problem with the voice because the voices are not differentiated any more.
JUDE KELLY:
The big problem I thought was one of the main characters is a woman, Nicky, who is student cum porn artist.
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
She is a cardboard toilet.
JUDE KELLY:
There is no psychology about that at all. In a sense, that is the most potentially interesting thing, which is where do women stand in the porn industry. He doesn't know how to explore that.
KIRSTY WARK:
He has a trouble I think with the female characters in this book. I don't think they are very well drawn. He has serious problems also with how he dresses them, never mind anything else!
He doesn't get their position at all, either they are students or workers or what are they? He doesn't work out what they are meant to be doing in the book?
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
One of the things that's always been said is, this is realism, society as it is. But it's not.
Everybody in the world is not a sex worker or a junkie, and we are not all spending our lives trying to dump on each other. There is out there forgiveness, kindness and love.
KIRSTY WARK:
Spud does try to be kind. Those characters are incredibly well drawn, partly because those are such memorable characters in the film. But often a film can destroy what you think about a book?
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
It was a great film.
KIRSTY WARK:
He has to prothesise sometimes as well. He has to make judgements about the way the world is going and he talks about porn in the mainstream as a kind of way of having a conversation about it?
JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I feel sorry for him, because he himself has become a consumer icon. He rails against consumerism and he has become the thing that he fears. That's hard for any writer.
JUDE KELLY:
The reason I mentioned Joanna Trollope and Jack Higgins is because...
RICHARD HOLLOWAY:
They are going to love you for that!
JUDE KELLY:
What I mean is that actually it's a very conventional book if you are expecting an Irvine Welsh. If you thought, "It's by Irvine. I know what he will write."
He has written it. It's drugs, sex, money, Leith. He has done all that again. Some of his readership will be so pleased.
RICHARD HOLLOWAY:
There is a lot of cod philosophy. A bit like guys who sprinkle pepper in your Caesar salad. There is a wee sprinkling of that.
KIRSTY WARK:
You said it is a readable novel. I thought it was laugh-out-loud hilarious in parts. There is a very funny thing where he starts at the beginning and runs it through, which is that Sick Boy anonymously sends Begbie gay porn which sends him mad.
RICHARD HOLLOWAY:
Begbie is still good. He is still a mad, ranting psycho, and yet he's the most subtle. There is even a suggestion of a possible sexual ambiguity there, which never gets far but might be the key to the man's paranoia.
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