Trainspotting is 25 years old. Did you have any idea when you were writing it that it would become such a phenomenon, culturally and commercially?
Not really. The initial buzz it generated was among a certain section of the London cultural cognoscenti, the ex-punk crowd. They got it immediately. Because of the subject matter, which involved hard drugs, I thought it would become a cult book but not generation-defining, which is what other people have called it since. It’s strange, but it has taken on such a life of its own that when I see it on a shelf in a bookshop, it almost feels like someone else wrote it.
You’ve since written four novels with those same characters, including this year’s Dead Men’s Trousers, and there have been two films: Danny Boyle’s much-lauded Trainspotting (1996) and his reboot, T2 Trainspotting (2017). Renton, Begbie and the crew obviously still mean a lot to you.
Well, to be honest, I don’t think about them at all unless I’m writing about them. What I will say is that they were making choices that many more people are having to make now. They were facing a kind of existential crisis – what is the point of us if we are redundant? Back then, they were mocked – all those lost men without jobs, or community, or a shared sense of purpose. Now, that’s become very much a middle-class problem, too.
Related: Dead Men’s Trousers by Irvine Welsh – a last hurrah for Renton and company
Related: Irvine Welsh: ‘When you get older, it’s harder to be a bastard’
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