I was born in the great port of Leith. Stories are in my blood; listening to them, telling them. My family were typical of many in the area, moving from tenement to council scheme, increasingly further down the Forth estuary. I was brought up in a close community. I left school with practically no qualifications. I tended towards the interesting kids, the troublemakers. All my own fault. I was always encouraged to be more scholarly by my parents, who valued education. But I left school and became an apprentice technician, doing a City & Guilds course. I hated it. I was always a writer: I just didn’t know it. I cite being crap at everything else in evidence.
It’s why I’ve never stopped writing stories about my youth and my go-to gang of characters from Trainspotting. Their reaction to events and changes in the world helps inform my own. They’ve been given substance by people I’ve met down the decades, from Leith pubs to Ibiza clubs.
But I have never seen myself as an author. If I wrote purely for publication, and let it become a franchise, it would just be another job, albeit an enjoyable one, and better than digging coal. But I never wanted it to be that. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer. I de facto retired from the world of work over 30 years ago, packing in my day job at the council to pursue my hobbies of writing and music. If I had the inclination for franchise building, I would have released my books sequentially, in a temporal order, following the characters’ lives. If I wanted to chase literary prizes, I’d have written the kind of novels expected to appeal to the people who judge such affairs.
Basically, I wait until something inspiring emerges – theme, event, character or storyline – to act as a catalyst and pique my interest in finally writing up my notes, sketches and stories to publishable standard. Skagboys was the first thing I wrote, appearing on my Amstrad word processor as the opening sections of Trainspotting. The resulting book was way too long, so I threw away that first part, opting to take the reader right into the drug-addled world of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and co, all the way back in 1993.
When I got older and more reflective, I thought I’d revisit how the protagonists got into the state they did before Trainspotting: I’d write about the Thatcherite destruction of the traditional working class. So Skagboys (2012) revisited old territory. But in the meantime, I had leapt ahead almost a decade into those characters’ lives with Porno (2002). I saw that book as being about the increasing commodification of sex, as we moved into the internet age. Way further down the line, Dead Men’s Trousers (2018) was inspired by my experiments with the drug DMT, and the even more astonishing phenomenon of Hibs winning the Scottish Cup.
And now I’m back with those characters again. Men in Love, taking place directly after Trainspotting, opens on a junk-sick Renton sweating in an Amsterdam hotel room with his bag of cash, with Sick Boy ferreting around London on the perma-hustle, Spud and Second Prize back in Leith, trying to avoid heroin and alcohol – the drugs that chose them – and Begbie a guest of HMP Saughton. As the title suggests, Men in Love is mainly about that time in life when men (generally in their mid-20s) start taking the quest for romance more seriously.
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Novels, no matter how well researched, composed or projected, are always – whether you like it or not – at least tangentially about you. Writing Men in Love made me realise that, when I stop running away from it, I’ve usually enjoyed love unquestioningly, without feeling the need to analyse or even understand it. The checklists of dating apps, articles, self-help books, the inventories of salient points of attraction, ideal types and red flags always seemed to me a boring, algorithmic and reductive response to a very human, mystical phenomenon. Much of what I’ve learned about love has been experiential, not observational, about not being gun-shy and diving in when the opportunity presented itself. And yes, some romantic sensibilities have been augmented by the imagination and insight of various novelists, from Jane Austen to James Kelman.
Looking back now, it strikes me that your mid-20s is a strange time to be embarking on serious romance. Linked to traditional modes of commerce, procreation and survival, we remain culturally bound by such influences, driven to “settle down”. Once ossified in our social structure, such imperatives are now fading, and perhaps it’s about time.
For men in their mid-20s, the influence of your partner suddenly becomes greater than that of your peers. It also seems that, in an atomised, narcissistic society, we are left less equipped than ever to meet our bonding needs. The nurturing “village” of old is replaced by the shouty swamp of the online experience, where people are compelled to create ludicrous personas that they can’t live up to in reality. No wonder so many people can no longer be bothered with the whole business. I’m often astounded that any relationships take place at all.
Men in Love is my attempt to look at where men go wrong (and maybe sometimes right) in our efforts to subjugate our own pulsating needs to do daft, fabulous things like watch sport, get drunk and obsess about obscure musical offerings, for the greater good of romance, commerce, status, procreation, sex, and yes, L-O-V-E; whatever the motives for joining together with someone are.
I think it is as much – probably more – a book for women, who acutely understand the nutters they went out with in their “bad boy phase”, as it is for such men (and I still count myself as only a semi-reformed version of that breed) to understand themselves. It’s a crazy, romantic, joyous journey through our higher aspirations, and the inherently ridiculous mortal stupidity and selfishness that constantly undermines them.
Things have changed since I wrote Trainspotting. The working class (like the middle class and the government) no longer have any money, trades or careers; just a patchwork quilt of precarious, low-paid jobs waiting to be destroyed by AI. Some deal drugs. This is usually not really for profit, but youths – like the preening oligarchs who dominate the world – need compelling drama. They engage in meaningless turf wars, constantly in search of their own dopamine hits to distract from the uselessness society has pushed them into; an existence of eating rubbish and watching crap on screens, bloating into obesity as their mental health crumbles. The working class are no longer represented by any political party. They have no voice: nobody will write about them, make films about them, far less advocate for them. They are expected to die quietly.
Why publish Men in Love at this time? I think we need love more than ever. Loads of it. Orwell wrote: “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.” I think now, if there is hope, it lies with the lovers.