Recorded live at Latitude Festival, Irvine Welsh sits down with host Rhianna Dhillon to delve into his new novel Men in Love, the eagerly awaited sequel to Trainspotting, which explores the vibrant landscape of youth culture through the decades and the nuances of defining a generation through the arts. Plus, award-winning author and Penguin colleague Derek Owusu joins the panel, providing personalised book recommendations to audience members. We also speak to readers at the festival and ask them: what is the book that defined your youth?
Explore the books mentioned in this episode below:
Alongside the Penguin books mentioned Irvine, Derek and readers at Latitude recommended:
The Penguin Podcast Latitude Special transcript
Rihanna Dhillon:
Hi everybody. Hello, I'm Rihanna Dillon, welcome to Ask Penguin. This is the podcast series from Penguin Books. This episode is coming to you from the Glorious Latitude Festival. We're in their beautiful listening post 10. You can hear our wonderful crowd in the background. Give us a cheer for the listeners at home. Thank you so much for coming out. Welcome to all of you. Whether you've never heard the podcast before, whether you are a regular listener, we are so thrilled to have you with us. You are in for such a treat today because the Penguin podcast is the show that takes you inside books and inside publishing. So every episode we sit down with a different author and find out about their latest work, what or who inspires them and what they love about books. And we also put our listener questions and requests to those writers and some of our team inside Penguin.
So we're sort of like your go-to place for answers for all of your book related questions. Now joining me on stage is a writer whose debut Trainspotting remains an absolute classic and defining cultural seminal piece of work. It sold over a million copies. It was adapted into an era defining film. He's written 14 further novels, many plays, screenplays. I mean just one of the most impressive people I think that I've spoken to yet on the podcast. And he remains the only writer to give us the most vivid description of losing suppositories down an Edinburgh toilet. His latest novel Men in Love, he throws us back into the world of Renton. Sick boy, Spud and Begby. Please join me in welcoming the legendary Irvin Welsh. Thank you so much for being here with us, Irvine. How's it going?
Irvine Welsh:
It's going very, very well. It's been quite a full on week. I dunno, we were in Brighton yesterday. We were in Glasgow the day before, Edinburgh, the day before that. Liverpool, the day before that, Bristol, the day before that, Oxford, the day before that, London, the day before that, Yorkshire the day before that. So it's been quite crazy.
Rihanna Dhillon:
That's so even more impressive that you've managed to join us today. Thank you. So men in Love picks up straight from the events of Trainspotting. We follow the gang in the immediate aftermath of Renton betrayal as they begin to leave heroin behind and they try to find new ways to feel alive in the late eighties. So it has been over 30 years since Trainspotting, and although you have written sequels and prequels since then, this is the one that immediately picks up. So tell us about what interested you in to that really specific era, 88, 89, and now that you've had three decades worth of insight, how did that affect writing that period?
Irvine Welsh:
Well, I mean I think that if you look at the way the world's gone and it, it's increasingly gone in the last 30 years. It seems very, very bleak and there doesn't seem to be a lot of love around. But yet we know from our own experience that people aspire to romance, they aspire to connection, they aspire to community and they love to come to places like this where you find all that kind of thing. And you can almost forget about the sort of ugliness of the world when you go to places like you come to festivals like this. And I wanted to really look at connection and love and what happens to us when we get to that age where our peer groups are no longer the most important thing in our life and our significant other is, and we have to make all these decisions in life or we're used to make all these decisions in our twenties, we don't know, which is one of the good things about the collapse of capitalism in the deficient of labour.
And you get to about mid twenties and you think, we've got to make decisions, should we be together? Should we live together? Should we get married? What about family? What about careers? What about travel? What about one of us going back to college and retraining and all these massive momentous decisions where you're basically a basket case, you're just staggered at the pub or you're staggered at a nightclub kind of full of drugs and then suddenly you have to get it together to plan all these big life decisions. And I was useless at these kind of things back then and I've kind of gradually got better, but it's been a long process and I wanted to look at characters that were even worse than me and I think, where can I find them? Well, I've already got stuff and all these guys because I'm almost writing about them. Let's do a novel about people falling in love at a time in their life when they're not really equipped to deal with the consequences of it.
Rihanna Dhillon:
So do all of the characters flow out of you as easily as each other? Or do you have one voice that you particularly love writing in? Because we hear from them from first person and third person often.
Irvine Welsh:
I think that every character you write, every character has got to be some kind of manifestation of yourself, but they're more like a manifestation of, they're based on observation, they're based on the human emotion that we all have. I mean, it's like if just say something like Begsby. Suppose you just get to a situation where you're angry, you've got to meet somebody, you're late for the appointment, you go down to the tube station, the tube door slams in your face and you just think like fuck. And you're bang the tube door and you think to yourself it's very fleeting. That anger's very fleeting. But if you think, how would it be if you couldn't shake off that anger if you had to hold onto it and you had to live with it and deal with it and it imformed all your behaviour, you couldn't see past it. So basically it's like any character, you're taking an emotion and it's a bit like music. It's like you sample that emotion and then you stretch it out basically and you stretch it out to form that character. And I think that that's why all the characters are recognisable to us because they're all archetypes and these archetypal behaviours, the cynical intellectual, the lovable loser, the cynical manipulator, the violent nutter, they're all part of us in a way or they're part of what we observe in other people.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Renton at one point talks about reading chores are allowed. That's the way to enjoy it. That's the best way to read it. Would you say the same about your writing as well? Is it made to be read aloud?
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah, I mean it is, and particularly the vernacular, the heavier vernacular passages because you're just not used to seeing words on a page like that. So you do have to, I'm Scottish and it looks as impenetrable to me, and I've written the thing, as it does to anybody else. That's really good to hear. You get a fright when you've written that you think, fuck, nobody's going to read this. Because the visual representation of it doesn't really, your mind doesn't operate in that way. So you do have to read it for 10, 20 pages until you get the rhythms of the speech.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Football was one that stumped me for a little while because you spell it...
Irvine Welsh:
Alright, football. Yeah. If I went into a pub back home and I said, excuse me, we're going to watch the football. Honestly, I would be denigrated as every kind of ponce under the sun basically. It's just such a poncy thing to say. Even a lot of working class guys here, if they say footy even that sounds really affect and you can't, it just doesn't work.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Tell me about wanting to take the characters in different directions to the ones that audiences might expect. Because for example, Spud in Men in Love finds this interest in philosophy and I loved reading him falling in love with philosophy and I just wasn't expecting it.
Irvine Welsh:
Well, I mean that was the end. When you think about when I grew up, I was kind of growing up in the seventies and through into the eighties. Working class people were very bright and very educated. You had the trade unions, the Workers Educational Association, you had the Open University, you had full grants to go to university, you had your fees were paid, you had access courses for a pound to get into university. You had the whole education system that wasn't based on being a kind of slave to capital, it was based on the idea of education for its own sake. You had all these social sciences that were about finding knowledge and trying to understand the world and society and to develop a critical eye and ear about that. And then it was like basically, Thatcher came in, everything became like a kind of vocational kind of, yeah, you could get an MBA, which I got, or you could do some kind of basket basketweaving degree at some new maid university.
And then the cultural life went from discussion and debate to watching all that shite and TV. Every pub had Sky and Blair football constantly. Now it's continued that dumbing down. We've got our phones basically attached to our face all the time. And what that does is if you're engaged with a screen all the time, it removes your sense of lived reality. Your own lived reality becomes less important to you than the reality that's imposed upon you by the person who has, who's kind of controlling the content of the screen. So I think that he came out of that thing where just towards the end of that, where it was still the embers of that inquiry that working class people had and aspiration wasn't just about making money, aspiration was about education and knowledge and learning things.
So to me, to go back to that time to write about that time and also to write about the energising of Acid House, which seemed to kind of promise the end to Thatcherism and the growth of a new kind of community of like-minded psychoactive souls, basically. Not necessarily people in your neighbourhood, but people dotted across the country, even across the world who were into all this kind of raving and dancing and exploring all these different ideas, that seemed to be one of, again, another high watermark of culture. And since then we've been in decline. Basically because of the internet. It was supposed to be this ticket to freedom, this big library, and now it's this Kafkaesque bureaucracy on behalf of corporations and governments that does things to us. We're always, we're compelled to fill in forums and to enter our data onto this and to follow in this QR code and it's basically their milking all our experiences and feeding back reductive versions of ourselves through its algorithms and its AI and all this stuff. So basically it's turned us from these kind of inquiring, interested people into a bunch of Nazi incels. So thanks for that Bill Gates.
Rihanna Dhillon:
As we've talked about, we are here at Latitude. We've had some amazing live music. What do you think the lads from Train Spotting would make of Latitude Festival?
Irvine Welsh:
They probably think it was a bit poncy and you would have to watch your wallets and your bags basically to keep them a little bit closer than you would normally do.
Rihanna Dhillon:
I do feel like a music festival is the perfect place to talk about Men in Love because it is packed with music references and lyrics that bring us back to a specific era. So what were you listening to when you were writing the book?
Irvine Welsh:
I mean listening to everything really. I was listening to a lot of the house music that was coming out at the time and the music that was changing everything really. A lot of what you would expect, Chicago House, Frankie Knuckles, Roger Sanchez, all that sort of stuff.
Rihanna Dhillon:
You've also done a companion album to the book, which was with collaboration with the sci-fi Soul Orchestra. So tell us about how that came about and what it was like working on an album in collab.
Irvine Welsh:
It's like I'm always writing songs and tunes and playing around and getting harmonies and getting little things going on in my head, getting a melody in my head and trying to like, humming kind of things and putting them down. And the guy that I worked with, Steve is a very good producer and a very good musician and he can take all my rough doodling and make them into a proper song, basically. So we usually do Techno, we've got got a little techno act that we take around, but we started writing this disco stuff because it was so uplifting and fun to do and just carried on basically.
Rihanna Dhillon:
It's gorgeous. You're in for a treat. Before we bring on our second guest, there are probably going to be some questions in the audience for Irvine. I've got a penguin somewhere with a roving mic, bless Sarah who is there in the bright orange T- shirts. If you've got a question, stick your hand up, we'll come to you.
Audience:
Hey, is this working okay, just a couple ones for you. Number one, are you sometimes frustrated by the limitations of the conversions of your novels into films? Some of my favourite passages of Train Spotting didn't make it to the movie and secondary, if you could rewind time, would you like to see Transporting, Porno, made into our own separate films as well because porno was a bit of an amalgam of more one of your books anyway.
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah, I mean I don't really get frustrated about it because I don't think of the books as something that should be curated in that way. I think that if they go into film or TV or onto stage, it's interesting to see what the people that are involved in that will do with it. And I wanted to change a bit. I'm always encouraging them to go out there and to use the material and kind of shape their own vision and take it to where they want to take it. Because I've written the book and I'm bored shitless with the book basically by that time. I want, I want to see something different on the screen. And so that's my sort of take on it. And I dunno, I think that I would like to see more TV come off all these things. I think the screen is, the original actors are too old really to come back and play these characters now, but I'd love to see to start with Skag Boys and then just have a series that run right through Train Spotting and Men in Love and Porno and all that. I'm actually working with Bobby Carlyle now on the Blade Artist to do a six parter based on that. So yeah, so that's going to be fun and we've been talking about it for years, but we're finally making it sort of happen now I think.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Fantastic. Thank you. Great. Oh, we've got one there/
Audience:
Then one, hello. Hello. Hi. Hi. I feel I have to give a little preamble before I ask this question.
Irvine Welsh:
They aways do. I'm not taking any offence.
Audience:
I do have to because, I have to say first I'm from Shots, which is a village on the M 8 between us.
Irvine Welsh:
I know it well.
Audience:
So coming from Scotland, I constantly in the world encounter this thing about the homeland and the pride and so on. And I'm sorry to say that coming from a very working class background, being the youngest girl in a big family and a poor family, you were just a piece of shit. And I encounter misogynism, sectarianism, hatred, violence, and a celebrated vulgarity and to dare mention any of those things as seen some sort of dagger into the homeland. But this has been my experience and of course I love and get what you say, but how do these two things equate?
Rihanna Dhillon:
Amazing question.
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah, I mean I think there is, whenever you get any nation or any idea of a nation or nationalism, whether it's British or Scottish or anything, you get custodians who want to promote a sanitised view of it. You get that kind of shortbread sort of vision of Scotland and you get kind of, well the reality of it. The reality of it is all these things you've talked about and in so many ways, a very poor dispossessed, politically marginalised part of the world. And I think that you can celebrate the culture of working class people. You can celebrate the defiance and the resistance and the humour, but you have to acknowledge the backdrop of that. And I think it's very important. I think it's a very good question, a very good point, and thank you for making it.
Rihanna Dhillon:
So as well as our brilliant guests that we've got on the podcast today. I thought it would also be fun to go and speak to some of the punters here at Latitude and ask them what is the book that defined their use,
Speaker:
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I think that was a good coming of age book for me, especially when I was going through uni. It's very emotional and it's a bit of a roller rollercoaster and she obviously is a girl that goes to New York and struggles with her mental health, which I think is really prevalent to nowadays.
Speaker:
Oh God, you know what? When I was growing up, I'm much older than you, but really bizarrely, we were obsessed with Flowers in the Attic.
Speaker:
Well, I was a huge fan of Goodnight, Mr. Tom. I was super into World War ii. It was such an amazing coming of age story, so sweet, what a lovely relationship the two of them have. And it really just ruined me in a way, but in the most gorgeous, I loved it.
Speaker:
The first book that sucked me in completely, utterly with Shanter Ram just to this day. A friend of mine was just saying she's listening to it as an audio book and I think it still seems so relevant and people love it as much today as I must've been 20, 25 years ago it came out that, and I think a little lie for the two books that have completely just blown my mind and I could read over and over again.
Speaker:
Yeah, I'm a child of the seventies, so I read all the famous five books and the Secret Seven and Mallory Towers. Yeah,
Speaker:
I think for me and a lot of people my age, it's got to be Jacqueline Wilson, her books kind of being hard in real life, but also kind of being kind of young appropriate. I think it introduced me to a lot of topics I didn't know and I still am reading with her today. She's now releasing adult versions of a lot of the kids' books. So I dunno how, but it stuck around for a really long time and I still love rereading the old ones I read before. My favourite was probably Queenie, which was about a girl with TB in hospital. I used to be my favourite one, but I'm really looking forward to a new book. I think it's coming out very soon. That's a follow up to the Illustrated Mom. Picture. Imperfect. Yes. That'll be really cool.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Audience, if you are in the mood for a book recommendation, please think of something, get your questions ready because we're going to put them to our panel shortly. But before that, joining us here on stage at Latitude is award-winning author, prolific reader and penguin colleague Derek Owusu. So Derek is the winner of the Desmond Elliot Prize and one of Granta's Best Young Novelist 2023. His new work, Borderline Fiction, is this really gorgeous novel which explores masculinity, love and mental health. Felt like a sort of perfect companion piece to Men in Love. It gives readers an glimpse into the inner world of a young man searching for an authentic way to love and be loved. So Derek, please welcome. Give him a massive round of applause. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing, Derek?
Derek Owusu:
Good, thank you. Very good.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Good. So as I said, similar to Irvine, you are writing from a perspective of what it's like navigating the world as a young person. Is that something that you enjoy reading about as well as writing about?
Derek Owusu:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, whenever it comes to that, I do enjoy it, but I wouldn't say it's something that I seek out as a reader what I tend to do is try and look for experiences that are just completely different to mine. If I want to experience things that my own, I just kind of talk to people around me as opposed to reading about it in novels.
Rihanna Dhillon:
In Men in Love, different chapters are, as you've kind said, kind of written in phonetics Scots when we're with certain characters and you do something similar in Borderline Fiction with multicultural London, English, MLE. So tell us a bit about how you use language in your writing and that sort of stream of consciousness as well.
Derek Owusu:
Yeah, I mean once a character comes to me, I then decide how I want them to speak or how I want them to think. And I've wanted to write in L.M.E for a very long time just because the way I've seen it in media, it's usually associated with kind of crime or what we call road men, a criminality. And a lot of working class people in London are just regular people who speak like that. So I wanted to kind of take back that way of speaking and just put it into a novel where it's just working class people doing day-to-day things. Of course there's crime around as a backdrop, but it's not the main focus of the book and it is just an exciting thing to use as well when writing, it's very entertaining to write in that way. For me as a writer, I feel I need to be entertained myself as I'm writing, otherwise I get bored and just it feels like you're forcing it.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Do you also like to read it aloud in the same way that you might with Train Spotting or Men in Love?
Derek Owusu:
No, I don't read my things aloud. No. No, I never do that because I write it for the page. It is meant for the page if people want to read it aloud and that's fine. I mean, I get enough of that with my little brother talking to me and not really understanding what he's saying most of the time. So it's fine on the page for me
Rihanna Dhillon:
When you were last on the podcast, we talked a bit about your writing process. Has it changed at all since the first couple of your novels?
Derek Owusu:
No, it hasn't. Unfortunately. I wish it had.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Why?
Derek Owusu:
I just can't, can't force myself to write. I just have to, and my ex-girlfriend used to say to me, you are being a dickhead about this. Just you are a writer to sit down and write. But I can't force myself to do it, so I literally just have to kind of wait for, I don't know, it's just a moment where you're just kind of like, oh, I can write this idea now. It's almost like an idea's being marinated in the back of your mind, in your subconscious, and then it's finally ready to be put on the page and then I can do it like that. But that hasn't changed unfortunately. So there's still two years before I start writing something else.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Do you agree with Irvine about your characters might have to be a little bit of an extension of your brain or are you able to come completely separate them from yourself?
Derek Owusu:
I don't think any writer can separate. I think any writer who says they can separate is lying
Rihanna Dhillon:
Really.
Derek Owusu:
I think it's impossible to do. You are always going to bleed into the characters, whether it's like 10%, 20% or whatever. Consciously or unconsciously is always going to happen. It's just whether you decide to be honest about it in interviews and say, yes, this is based on so and so. But most writers will say, no, this person, this character has nothing to do with me. I don't believe them. They're not telling the truth.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Does that become, for both of you, does that become a bit of an issue? Does that get quite boring to always be like, so how autobiographical is your book? Have you got an answer for that now?
Derek Owusu:
Yeah, it's just some of it is, I won't tell you which bits are, but some it is, of course. Yeah, it's impossible to avoid.
Irvine Welsh:
I think there's two things that happen at once really, because I think that the characters are, obviously, they're filtered through your consciousness. They're going to be a part of you whether you like it or not. But if you spend a lot of time in the construction of a character and they're kind of hearing from your subconscious and all your observations that you've had in your life and it's an active composition, the idea that you have to try to get out the way and let them tell the story in a way, and that's the difficult part. I think if you don't do that, you kind of leave too much of yourself and rather than not enough of yourself.
Derek Owusu
Agreed. Yeah, agree.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Derek, I can't remember. Do you listen to music when you're writing?
Derek Owusu:
I do, yeah. I normally anchor myself to one emotionally intense song for the process of writing the book. So for example, my fourth book, I was just listening to Zombie by the Cranberries on Repeat over and over again.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Amazing.
Derek Owusu:
And that was kind of my teather so whenever I would need to write, I'll listen to that again and just get back into the mode and start writing again.
Rihanna Dhillon:
What about Borderline Fiction?
Derek Owusu:
Borderline Fiction, it was, oh God, it was a song called The Night We Met by Lord Heron, which I just actually stumbled across. I think somebody sent me a video and it was playing in the background and it just kind of resonated with me a bit. It's kind of just really emo music and I needed that. The character in my book is like that, so that worked for me.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Thinking Beyond Music, were there books or authors that you were going back to who inspired you when you were planning Borderline Fiction?
Derek Owusu:
Yeah, so a novelist Courttia Newland, he inspired me a lot. He wrote a book in the two thousands called The Scholar. White Teeth by Zadie Smith was another book that I went back to. It was difficult. There was a book called Who They Was by a new author called Gabriel Kraus that I went back to because writing in multicultural London English, I realised that it's not about the slang, it's not about the words, it's about the rhythm and the cadences that you put into it. So I could write a sentence without any slang in it, but you still know that this character is speaking in this way. And because slang evolves so quickly, the rhythm stays the same, it remains the same. So if you're talking about cockney rhyming slang, things like that, there's always like, what I find as well when I'm listening to working class people speak, especially the ones who like to tell stories, they get into a rhythm and they just keep going. Do you know what I mean? It's like music as they find their flow.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Love that. Because all of your characters are seeking love in some form or they find it in some form. How easy or hard is it to write about love, which is so universal, but people have been trying to capture it forever and also experience it in such different ways.
Irvine Welsh:
I think everybody's seeking love basically in some way. They're rather trying to hold onto it, they're trying to acquire it. Basically, we're creatures of love basically. So you don't really need to, I don't think you need to explain it. I think what I try to do is I like to look at how people fuck up basically, because that's where the drama is. If everybody's doing what they should be doing with who they should be doing it with, nothing really happens. But the big drama, the big changes in life, and they're usually generated by love. They're usually about falling in love with somebody or falling out of love with somebody, splitting up and divorcing or they're about bereavement, losing somebody that you love and that you're really close to. And so these are the big seismic shifts in our life that give us the opportunity to change because despite all the rhetoric and all the bullshit about, oh, we're flexible, you have to be flexible in this day and age, we're not flexible. We're not flexible creatures, basically. We tend to sort of fall into a a place to make ourselves safe. And the seismic things that shift us, that give us these opportunities for growth are usually generated by love or by the failure of love or the breakdown of love
Rihanna Dhillon:
Derek?
New Speaker:
Yeah, I mean I try and explore love through the lens of mental health as well. I feel like there is a very close link between being in love and suffering from a mental health condition.
Rihanna Dhillon:
I think a lot of people that would agree with that.
Derek Owusu:
So I try to filter it through that and see how you approach it, how you can effectively hold onto it without losing parts of who you are or suppressing parts of who you are because you are now infatuated with this person. But I agree with the dramas where it is, where you find the drama, that's where you find places for love to kind of develop itself. And if it can develop itself through the struggle, then I think then you have something real on the page
Irvine Welsh:
And there's these two sides of love. There's a kind of romantic side, when a couple get together and all that, and you usually kind for about a month or two months, you just smash each other always, basically. And then you get, and it's usually the women are really good at finding, really good at kind of grounding you from this nutty side, basically. And they'll say something like, right, this is great, but there's another side of love. It's about being reliable, showing up for the person, being engaged with them, showing your vulnerability, letting them show their vulnerability to you being there for each other, that kind of side of it too. And both these sides need to operate together. And one side is the kind of crazy side, basically, another side is the kind of more grounded side that's going to sort of going to propel the shipper, you can't lose the romance, but you can't run it alone.
Rihanna Dhillon:
And also everybody has different codes and rules when it comes to love. Like sick boy, when he's in love, he thinks that it's not cheating if he has sex in one way rather than another way. I'm trying to make, there might be kids in here, so I'm being careful, but he's got his own code and for him, that's not cheating if you do it there.
Irvine Welsh:
Well, I mean, Sick Boy and Renton are cursed at the start of the book by this ancient Mariner figure, the kind of merchant sea man, the kind of un uncle figure is young guys that go into the pub and he asked him, he said, you've got to decide in life whether you're a lover or a shagger. And Renton instinctively goes lover and Sick Boy instinctively goes shagger. And the thing is that Renton, he becomes an asset house promoter and he was meeting all these women that are just up for a shag and he is kind of inappropriately falling in love with them, making a bit of a fool of himself as a result. Whereas Sick Boy thinks that he wants to a big romance to fall in love with this rich woman and get the social status he feels he deserves, but he just can't stop shagging around. He loves the game too much. So they're both the initial contact with this old libertine sea man defines them as characters.
Rihanna Dhillon:
There's a scene in Borderline Fiction, Derek, where your characters go speed dating. And obviously we are hearing about all of the pros and cons of dating apps now and in Men in Love, as you say, people are just meeting in real life the eighties. How has the change in the way that we date affected the way that you write about it?
Derek Owusu:
I don't think about the way we date now when I'm writing about it, because it would just be so cynical. On the page. And speed dating is essentially date what dating apps do. That is what it is. It's like speed, speed dating, you know what I mean? It is a lot faster. Sometimes you just say hello and they're like, no, I'm not interested in you
Rihanna Dhillon:
What to your face?
Derek Owusu:
No, on dating apps, I mean. Speed dating, they might want to move away but you've got 60 seconds. They have to sit with you for a little while. But yeah, I think the way that I approach dating is just the old fashioned way. I think we are going to fall back to that eventually. And I think that trying to write about dating and incorporate, I find it very difficult to incorporate technology into fiction in the sense of texting and emails and all of those kinds of things. It really jars. It just doesn't really work. So I just tend to think back to the better times basically.
Rihanna Dhillon:
What do you think, Irvine?
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah, agree. I mean the mobile phone, it's killed so much culture and it's killed drama and suspense as well, and it's killed romance and all. So I'm glad that, that's one of the reasons that I went back to the eighties because the last books I wrote were kind of contemporary and it was like you had to make anything interesting, you had to find ways that they lost her mobile phone or she didn't charge her phone properly before she came out. He dropped his phone, it fell down the drain or it's like, or his sim car packed in, all this, or he couldn't get a signal. We were at a festival. All this fucking convoluted nonsense. That's what it does. It actually stops us getting on with the life and you see that infection more than ever.
Rihanna Dhillon:
I just love the idea that renting, losing his phone down the toilet instead of his drugs, that would've been a completely different story. So Borderline Fiction is released in November, but you can pre-order it now at the link in the show notes of the podcast, Men in Love and all of Ivine's other novels are available now wherever you buy your books. And as we said at the top of this, our podcast is called Ask Penguin because it is the place that you can come with all of your book recommendation requests and questions. So before we wrap up, do any of the audience here want to put a book's question to the panel? Does anybody want a recommendation from Irvine and Derek?
New Speaker:
Hi I Was wondering what would be your number one book recommendation for a writer to read
Derek Owusu:
For nonfiction, I would say unconventionally a book called On Directing by David Mamet, which is really good because he kind of takes you through what a director does and it applies so well to fiction in terms of creating images and how images relate to each other. I found that book really, really helpful. And then of course there's On Writing by Stephen King, which is kind of like the go-to, although I don't agree with everything in that book. I think he goes a bit overboard with some of his recommendations, but I would say those two are really good.
Rihanna Dhillon:
That's great. Irvine, do you have any,
Irvine Welsh:
Basically, no, I think that just write, basically that's what I would say to anybody. There is no, I don't think there is a how to guide for that kind of thing. I mean, as you say, Derek, On Writing by Stephen King is seen as the kind of bible of writers, and I think Martin Amis is quite quoted as well, but I would never read either of these books. I'd never read any book that told me how to write. I would just read novels that I thought were good, basically.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Was there somebody there had the hand up? Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Speaker:
Hi, I'm an English teacher and I wondered what book you think should go on the GCSE syllabus on the off chance that it ever gets changed.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Great question. Irvine, what kind of books do you think 16-year-old should be reading in school?
Irvine Welsh:
I would say Men in Love, basically, but obviously I'm going to say that. But yeah, I mean I dunno. I mean it's quite a strange thing when you think about the idea that certain books are being on syllabuses and who decides and why do they decide and all that. I mean, I would offer as wide a variety as possible and I would get kids at school into groups and let them read some synopsis of books and let them pick in terms of peer education, what they would think would be the best ones to go for.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Derek
Derek Owusu:
As a gateway to get young people reading probably The Alchemist.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Oh, okay.
Derek Owusu:
Just because it is easy to read. They'll fly through it. It's got some life lessons for people and although it is basically self-help packaged as fiction, it can get people in the rhythm of reading fiction. So I think as a gateway, I would probably say The Alchemist.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Is it Natives?
New Speaker:
Oh, Natives, by Akala.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Yeah. I love that because I feel like it's getting young people to really question everything around them and getting them talking about why things are the way they are and why our history is the way it is. And I think just kind of being a bit more introspective. I think when we were at school, you just kind of took what was on there and you moaned about it and that was it. Whereas actually if you're questioning why it's on there, then you can challenge it a bit more. I think that's quite a good one to read. Anybody else got anymore questions?
Audience:
What book would you recommend for somebody whose reading muscles have gone flabby?
Rihanna Dhillon:
Oh yeah. If you're in a bit of a reading slump and you need something to get you out of that,
Derek Owusu:
I would say Washington Square by Henry James, just because it is easy enough to get through, but it also trains you to read more of his novels. And I think once you start reading in that way, so for example, in my view, if you conquer get Henry James, you can read anything else because of the way he writes, because of the difficulty of his sentences and his syntax and things like that. And it's just a straightforward story as well. It's not very complicated. It's not complicated plot. I mean there is really no plot.
Rihanna Dhillon:
You are really making me not want to read this book.
Derek Owusu:
But I would definitely say that just because it sets you up to be able to then read so much more afterwards.
Rihanna Dhillon:
I like that.
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah. It depends how dodgy these muscles are, how atrophied are, how flabby basically. But I mean, I think that for me, if I felt my brain was getting a bit mushy and I wanted to get back into reading, I would start off with something quite simple kind of genre that's quite exciting is going to get me turning the pages and it's going to get me used to thinking again before Id took a deep dive into something a bit more complex and a bit more challenging. So I'd jump into any airport novel to start off with.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Yeah. We also had some questions from listeners. So one person has said that Train Spotting came out in the nineties and I think was kind of era defining for so many people. But for you, what is a book Irvin that defines your youth?
Irvine Welsh:
Oh, I think probably one of the books that did was there's a book called, Not, Not While the Giro, by James Kelman. It was a collection of short stories and it was written in a Scottish vernacular. It was working class Scottish, so it spoke to me, but accessed it through the NME. It was like when NME used to have quite these pretensions about being a sort of intellectual journal when everybody, all anybody wanted was the gig listings. That's why they wrote it. They wrote it, but it has some great writers writing for it and I thought that this must be quite cool. It sounds great and it was really interesting to see fiction coming from Glasgow, so that was really interesting for me.
Rihanna Dhillon:
That's great. What about you, Derek? What's a book that defined your youth?
Derek Owusu:
I mean, I never read a book until I was about 24, but so I would say the book that defined my twenties was The Great Gatsby. I read it and it just blew my mind. It really opened up language on the page for me. I would say the book that defined my teenage years, I never read it, but it was very popular in the council estate that I was living in. There's a book called The 48 Laws of Power. A lot of the younger people were just obsessed with the book. I'm not sure why actually, to be honest with you, but I know that was the book that really defined the working class generation on the estates that I grew up on.
Rihanna Dhillon:
And somebody else has asked, can you recommend any Scottish novelists working today to check out?
Irvine Welsh:
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of really great ones, which, I mean, there's guys like Graham Armstrong and Kirsten Ennis. There's a lot of really good novelists in Scotland now, yeah.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Great. Derek?
Derek Owusu:
I really like Jenni Fagan. I really like her novels. I like her short stories and her poetry. Great Armstrong as well. The young team is a great novel, so I would second that as well. Also, although she's not Scottish, but she lives in Scotland now. Camilla Grudova. She's amazing. I think she's going to do a lot of amazing things.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Brilliant. Thank you. One final question. Are there any classic books that explored youth culture that might still resonate with today's youth? And the first one that came to mind for me was Lord of the Flies, depressingly.
Derek Owusu:
The first thing that came to mind for me was the Catcher in the Rye. And I know a lot of people dislike the book.
Rihanna Dhillon:
I dislike the book.
Derek Owusu:
But I would say a different book by Salinger called Franny and Zoey, which I think is much better. I think it really sums up the kind of the malaise that can attack teenagers, especially for me as well. When I turned 17 it's like suddenly I just fell into an existential crisis out of nowhere. And I think that that book, it deals with it in a very subtle way. It describes it very well as well. I think that you can learn a lot from it and it doesn't feel didactic. It just feels kind of natural. So I would say yeah, Franny and Zoey by J.D. Salinger.
Rihanna Dhillon:
Brilliant. Thank you. Irvine?
Irvine Welsh:
I'll go for a Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
Rihanna Dhillon:
What else else could it be? Brilliant suggestions. Thank you so much to our guests, Irvine Welsh and Derek Owusu, and to everyone here at Latitude Festival. Today has been the perfect combination of books and music, and I hope wherever you are listening from, you're inspired to have a read or a dance or both. We are going to be back with more authors, books and reader requests very soon. Thank you for listening and in the meantime, happy reading. Thank you everybody.