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An interesting article about what the Scottish-born author will be up to next:
HEAVEN knows what Begbie would have thought. The psychotic character portrayed by Robert Carlyle in the film of Trainspotting has long epitomised the grim subculture for which the novel's author, Irvine Welsh, is famed.
But the writer, whose books are awash with drugs, sex and violence on the streets of Edinburgh, seems determined to shake off his bad boy reputation by trying his hand at romance.
The change will come in Welsh's next book, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, to be published next year. The writer, who earlier this year admitted a passion for the romantic but slightly austere prose of Jane Austen, is penning a story that centres on a character who leaves his native Leith for America to find the father he has never known.
The character, Daniel Skinner, not only discovers that his father is a gay chef working in San Francisco, he also meets an American girl and ends up falling in love.
And Welsh, whose most famous book, Trainspotting, was once criticised by the novelist Alexander McCall Smith as a classic example of Scottish "miserablism", will also largely do away with the sex, drugs and violence that have defined his work to date.
But the humour and swearing, which caused people to walk out when Welsh used the 'C' word in a book reading in Washington four years ago, will remain.
The prominent shift in style, revealed in a rare interview the writer gave to the Leither magazine when he recently returned to Scotland from Dublin, has been welcomed by leading Scottish literary critics.
Willy Maley, professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow, said: "He tried to write romance before, in Ecstasy, but Irvine looks back on that book as a failure. He has travelled much more since then and has fallen in love, so this looks like he is trying to make a sustained attempt at writing romance again. He is a writer who has been around the block, but I am sure he will hold on to the great energy that has dominated characters in his previous books."
The book You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free by former Booker prize-winning Scottish author James Kelman may also have persuaded Welsh to try to reach a different audience.
Maley added: "Irvine reviewed Kelman's book and it was obvious that he loved its portrayal of a character with a strong Scottish accent living in post 9/11 America. He is totally up to the minute with what other writers are doing."
Dr Aaron Kelly, of the department of English at Edinburgh University, recently completed the first complete literary criticism of Welsh's published work.
Kelly, who spent four years on the project, said: "There is probably an element of his personal life being reworked as fiction, but the big shift is that he is moving away from the pre-devolution Scotland environment that has shaped his previous work. He has since lived in America and it sounds like he is trying to rework Ecstasy which he acknowledged was not what he wanted it to be."
Fellow Scottish writers also welcomed Welsh's change in style. Ian Rankin, the author of the Rebus novels,
said: "He cannot keep writing about the dark side of Leith because it does not really have a dark side any more. It definitely sounds like a move away from the type of books people expect from him. A lot of the big-selling male writers, such as Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons, are writing romance into their fiction and those are books that sell in massive numbers. But Irvine Welsh has never had a problem with sales."
Iain Banks, author of The Crow Road and Complicity, said: "It can get boring having to be edgy and hip all the time sometimes you want to do other things. So I think it is good for Irvine Welsh if he wants to do something a bit more mainstream. I wouldn't take it that this is a new direction for perpetuity. It might only last for one book. I would be surprised if Irvine writes himself into a corner, he is too smart for that."
A spokeswoman for Alexander McCall Smith said the author did not comment on unfinished work.
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No. The beard stays. You go.
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