Irvine Welsh: A Walk on the Wilde Side

When Irvine Welsh orders a cup of green tea, the antioxidant-rich brew so beloved of the health-conscious, it's a disconcerting moment.

This is, after all, the author of Trainspotting, Ecstasy and Filth, tales of drug and drink-fueled excess taken to extreme and life-ravaging limits, whose new novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chef?to be released in August in both the U.K. (Jonathan Cape) and the U.S. (Norton)?also features a young man bent on indulging his appetites for alcohol and drugs to the utmost. And, to be fair, Welsh himself used to have a reputation as a far from unenthusiastic carouser.

But the wholesome green tea is, it seems, a sign of changed times. "Basically, I used to write in the winter and take the summer off and enjoy myself, but this is really the busiest year I've had ever, because I've got involved in a lot of projects through a film company," explains Welsh, in his thick Leith tones. He is currently trying to get a film of fellow Scotsman Alan Warner's The Man Who Walks off the ground, having adapted the screenplay himself.

"I can't drink and carouse and party, and get up at six in the morning to work the next day, so I've just really got to take it easy. Green tea, long walks in the country, all that sort of stuff."

Since marrying for the second time last year?his younger, American wife Elizabeth is currently studying history at University College Dublin?Welsh appears to have mellowed. "It's given me a whole different focus and outlook," he admits. "I think I was at a time of life when I was more receptive to try out new things as well. If anybody had told me I'd go horse-riding every week?horses for me were always something you appreciated from the bookies!" But now, come the autumn, Welsh will be off on a horseback trek across Mongolia.

"I think you get to a point where you have to make certain decisions for sheer self-preservation," he muses. "The direction I was heading in was the crematorium. Yoga's the one thing I've drawn the line at?I do my boxing and I don't know if yoga and boxing can go together."

Contrary to expectation, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs does not contain a huge amount about celebrity cookery?although it does feature some plausibly pompous extracts from a memoir of the same title, supposedly the autobiography of a celebrated Scots chef who plays a part in the plot.

But the real focus is the relationship between two restless young Edinburgh lads who work in the same office: Danny Skinner, an alcohol-sodden, cocaine-high womanizer, who can't get over the fact that he has no clue to his own paternity; and Brian Kibby, a hapless young virgin and model railway enthusiast, whose own father has recently passed away.

Skinner can't stand Kibby. He gets a chance to take out his resentments towards his fellow worker when a curious thing happens: It turns out that reckless Skinner can abuse his own body with drink and drugs as much as he likes?but the only person to feel the pain is blameless Kibby, onto whom, in the manner of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the unpleasant after-effects of his colleague's sins are transferred.

'That whole duality thing'

Welsh says The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs has far more literary influence than most of his novels?Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "There are probably half a dozen books that have influenced me?whereas if I'd said that about any other books I'd done, I'd be a liar." (Kirkus, the U.S. book-review sister publication of The Bookseller and The Book Standard, said that, although Welsh's recent books have been "frustratingly uneven," this one is "his best since Trainspotting.")

Usually he operates on a mood created by music, thinking about his characters and creating a playlist for them, then getting a feel for them by listening to the tracks. But a temporary problem with his hearing meant he was immersing himself in literature instead: "The romantic poets, Byron and Shelley and all that?because I was lacking music, I was getting so much from that kind of stuff."

The novel's about "all that duality stuff": "It's a massive theme in Scottish literature anyway?all that identity thing. Are we Scots? Are we British? Right down to that good/bad thing about the human condition."

He tried to work out two characters who were polar opposites, he explains. "One of them seems like quite a nasty piece of work; the other a really nice bloke. But you kind of see they are both at that age where they are prisoners of their fears. The first guy realizes that if he doesn't clean up his act, he's going to be dead or down-and-out in five or 10 years. The other guy thinks if he doesn't get a girlfriend and get laid he'll live with his mother his whole life, like.

"So Skinner, this swaggering, confident guy, is driven by fear, fear that he's going to turn out like his father who he doesn't know. Whereas Kibby is driven by this fear that there's something wrong with him, that nerdy self-conscious thing where you actually make yourself almost autistic because you don't want to engage with the world because it's got too many sharp edges.

"It's the same reason so-called cool people do drugs, actually?because a lot of times they are frightened to engage with the world as it is, with all its sharp edges and contradictions."

Welsh has not abandoned his taste for the grotesque; The Bedroom Secrets offers its fair share of stomach-churning, not least with a truly awful sex scene toward the end of the novel. He insists there is no deliberate intention to shock: "I was talking about this with Chuck [Palahniuk]; he gets accused of the same thing. What we're both agreed on is, you're not trying to elicit an exploitative reaction from anyone else, it's more what's going on within yourself.

"If you're drawn to characters who are at an extreme time in their life, such as Renton on heroin, it's interesting to get them while they're like that, because they are in a situation where they're having some kind of social or mental or emotional breakdown, and people like that get involved in all sorts of extreme things and make the wrong decisions, and that's where the drama is at.

"I'm writing about characters a lot younger than myself now. You still make mistakes when you're older, but they tend to be the same mistakes. I like to get people while they're still young, when everything is at stake and their life is still being formed."

From Acid House to Unicef

In the old days, Welsh used to refer to himself as a "cultural activist" instead of a writer. He thinks using the same term now would be "probably pushing it a wee bit, to be honest. When I started writing, I was very active in the rave scene, I was organizing club nights, I was putting on events, it was the whole new movement of acid house. That scene now doesn't really exist."

These days he is busy as a Unicef ambassador in Afghanistan and Darfur?"I was the first Western journalist in Darfur to cover it, for the Daily Telegraph; I beat the New York Times by a day"?and working for the OneCity Trust, which raises money for arts and culture in the poorer parts of Edinburgh. "They're a great organization."

"I still feel that I want to do good things, but I don't feel like I'm on the cutting edge of that at all. It is weird to be invited to the Queen's garden party?although I never went because I was going to Afghanistan at the time. I'm glad I went [to Afghanistan] because otherwise I'd have had a dilemma. Would I have the bottle to snub the Queen? Would I have the bottle not to?"