Welsh goes back in time as fiction challenges the boundaries of history

Published on Sunday 23 August 2009 20:12

AUGUST seems entirely the wrong time of year for a dose of Christmas spirit, not that there was much of it to be had at Francis Begbie's house. Irvine Welsh was clearly enjoying the prospect of describing Trainspotting's toughest thug opening his Christmas presents. "F***** wrapping presents?" snarls Begbie, who manages to make Scrooge look like the Sugar Plum Fairy. "Wrap some c***'s f***** jaw."

The story comes from his new collection, Reheated Cabbage, which brings together for the first time stories he wrote in the 1990s that were published in anthologies and magazines. "It's exhausting doing Begbie for half an hour," he said, sinking back down into his chair after the reading. "It must be hard work being a nutter."

The return of Begbie brought an air of nostalgia to Welsh's event at the Book Festival. Many of those in audience clearly remember Trainspotting with great affection, and were delighted to hear that Welsh is currently writing the prequel. While Trainspotting all but ignored the politics of the time, the new book promises to deal more directly with the Thatcher years, the rise of unemployment, the breaking of the trade unions and the growth of the underclass which gave rise to Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud.

David Peace unashamedly writes stories which explore political, social and economic contexts, whether in the Yorkshire of the miners' strike or Japan in the wake of the country's defeat in the Second World War. Even the story of Brian Clough's brief tenure at Leeds United, the basis for his novel The Damned United (now also a film), was, he said, a window into the Britain of the time.

The trilogy with which he is currently occupied attempts to get to grips with Tokyo, the city where he lived for 15 years. Walking around it, he couldn't ignore the sense that its skyscrapers, office blocks and resurgent prosperity were built on the ruins of a painful history, both a devastating earthquake in the 1920s and the American air raids which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

He decided to examine that history through the window of three true crimes that happened in the years immediately after the war. The second of the three novels, from which he read at the Book Festival, unfolds the story of the 1948 Teikoku Bank massacre, in which a man posing as a health official from the occupying forces pretended to administer a dysentery vaccine to 16 bank employees, but poisoned them with cyanide, killing 12 instantly.

Hirasawa Sadamichi, a minor artist, was charged with the crime after the biggest manhunt in Japanese history and was held on death row until he died in 1987 of natural causes, but some in the country still believe he was innocent.

In his signature pounding visceral prose, Peace presents competing narratives to represent the different versions of the truth. Peace says he sees no great divide between "truth" and "fiction".

"I think it was Buuel who said there is no imagination without reality, and no reality without imagination. I read a lot of history books, but they aren't the definitive statement on those events. Non-fiction claims an authority, an ownership of the truth which can be arrogant."

Truth is a slippery thing, particularly when there are conflicting perspectives at work. He makes use of multiple narratives again in GB84, his book set in West Yorkshire during the miners' strike, to capture the complexity of the situation, but says that even this is far from definitive, and he may yet return to the subject.

When Peace sat down to write his first novel, 1974, he set out to write "the best crime novel I could", and some still choose to classify his books as crime fiction. Helen Fitzgerald, Glasgow-based author of The Devil's Staircase and My Last Confession, is in a similar position, her books sometimes considered as crime, sometimes as dark psychological novels, and even once as a form of chick-lit.

Fitzgerald, a former criminal justice social worker based at Barlinnie Prison, didn't have to look very far for suitably dark material, and neither did Karen Campbell, a former policewoman who has recently published her second crime novel, After The Fire. Having written from the inside about the camaraderie of the police, in her new novel she tackles what happens when this breaks down and an officer makes a terrible mistake which causes him to be ostracised.

Henning Mankell is known in this country principally as a crime writer, the creator of detective Kurt Wallander, now on British television in an award-winning adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh. In fact, crime represents only 25 per cent of the Swedish writer's prolific output in fiction and plays. Yes, he writes crime, he says, but in the sense Medea is a crime story, and Macbeth is "the best crime story I've ever read".

His latest novel, Italian Shoes, is about love between older people. "We are living in the times of the young, young is good, old is bad. The older I get the more I think the Western world has lost the understanding that older people have something to offer to society, and that passion is not a privilege of the young."

He proved a charming raconteur at the Book Festival. "I was put on this earth to tell stories," he said, and he did, taking us across the world from Stockholm to Mozambique, and to Edinburgh, where he was stuck in a lift for an hour immediately prior to his Book Festival event.

He spoke of his days as a broke young writer staying in a vacant apartment typing on the floor by the light of the oven, and spoke movingly of his lifelong love of Africa and his humanitarian work in Mozambique with the children of people with Aids.

And he described a day in the early 1990s at the time of the Swedish referendum on joining the EU, when he was stopped in the street in Stockholm by an elderly man.

"This is an important question," the man said earnestly. "I would very much like to ask if Wallander would answer yes or not."

Perhaps the great divide between truth and fiction is not as great as we think.