Alan Bissett: "It does get harder"

When you finished Boyracers (tenth anniversary edition now available in all good bookshops!) did you have a feeling then that there was more to say about these characters at some point, or did they slowly creep back into view? 

I had no intentions of releasing a sequel, which is possibly why Pack Men doesn’t feel like one. The characters came back after I decided to write about the 2008 UEFA Cup Final riots in Manchester, and realised that I needed a group of mates who’d known each other for a while and were Rangers fans. Wait a minute, I thought, I’ve written those guys already! Hey presto: Boyracers sequel. It then became a creative challenge in itself to develop characters I’d first created ten years ago. But it was also important to me that you could read either book without reading the other.

A first general question: What is the least necessary thing that you enjoy reading? 

I guess that would be David Nicholls. I did enjoy One Day, but immediately followed it up with Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and thought: there’s really no contest here. One Day was great, but had it not been published I don’t think we’d be very much worse off as a culture.

You've said (to me, previously) that Pack Men was a hard one to finish. But then, you've also said (in the intro to new writing anthology The Inside of a Dog) that work on The Incredible Adam Spark was 'crawling along'. Has it been getting harder for you, or is it just the most recent book that's the hardest? And is it necessarily a bad thing that it's hard?

Oh god, it does get harder! Truly the only book that I could say I enjoyed writing was Boyracers, as I was 23 when I started it and there was absolutely no pressure on me. But the more attention you get as a writer, the more it becomes like trying to take a pee with people watching. You think well, I’ve written three novels that all worked out fine, so I must know how to do this, but all you know is how to write those books, not the next one. Each book comes with its own unique creative challenges and problems which you’re not yet equipped for. But even if I no longer enjoy writing novels, I very, very much enjoy having written them. It’s like going to the gym: feels awful at the time, but afterwards in the shower you feel amazing. Wrestling a book for three years and winning is a great experience, as for those three years it was all in doubt. I also read that Ian McEwan said it gets more difficult for him too, so I suppose it means I’m doing the job properly.

How important is Falkirk to your work? The most non-Falkirk book you've done, in setting and characters, is Death of a Ladies Man, but even then Charlie Bain crosses over into The Moira Monologues, whilst Pack Men, mostly set in Manchester, is full of Falkirkiness. Not that that's a bad thing, but would you, could you, ever write a book without a single Falkirk reference?

Hmm I think it’s about time I did. But it’s not really a conscious choice. I’m very sensitive to issues of language and class, so inevitably that’s tied to my upbringing on a housing scheme in Falkirk.

There are so very few working-class novelists that I often feel a responsibility to write about how most people in Britain actually live, and that always brings me back to Falkirk. But Boyracers, Adam Spark, Pack Men, The Shutdown and The Moira Monologues all detail very different Falkirks – which is another part of the project, to show a small place like that in its variety – and it might be the case that I’ll just run out of things to say about the place. Each project suggests its own location. Ladies’ Man had to be Glasgow. So I’ll wait until the next book starts talking to me, and if it does so in Falkirkese then I gotta obey that.

The second general question: Who, if anyone, do you read or what individual book have you read, that no-one else seems to?

I read an absolutely amazing novel recently called Site Works by Robert Davidson, which, due to the corporate, London-centric nature of British literary culture, might not get the attention it deserves. It’s the best book about manual labourers I’ve ever read, and easily holds its own with things like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Zola’s Germinal and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The most obvious question, I think, suggested by Pack Men, is how did you learn about the scene during the rioting in Manchester?

I was down in Manchester that day. I wasn’t involved in any fighting with the police, but I could feel the atmosphere building and starting to turn the drunker everyone got. It really wasn’t much of a leap of the imagination into those violent scenes.

Football supporting is almost certainly the most participated in communal cultural activity in Scotland – but there are relatively few references to it, or scenes of it, in Scottish literature (off the top of my head… there’s some in Irvine Welsh, a great one in Kieron Smith, Boy... and after that I'm struggling...) Why do you think this is?

I’ve been puzzled by this myself. I guess it’s because sport is the opposite of art. The ‘artier’ you are, the less likely you are to ‘get’ football. Also, I think that most novelists believe that football’s binary narrative – win/defeat – is just less interesting than the complexity of emotions surrounding, say, love, war or murder. There’s probably a class element involved too. Football-supporting is a mainly working-class activity and novel-writing is mainly an upper middle-class one. So there’s probably a straightforward gap in empathy there.

Much goes on with Alvin, Dolby and Frannie over the course of this book. But could there be more to come at some point? Are there threads that you'd want to see develop even further? Or basically, could there be a follow-up to this book?

It has occurred to me that, having followed these characters from their teens into their twenties, it might be good to see them in middle-age eventually. That’s likely. But I’ve no concrete ideas for that book. It’ll tell me when the time is right for it be written the same way Pack Men did.

Last general question, a bit like the first: Who's the most complicated (in whichever sense you want) writer you read for pleasure? (e.g: Jonathan Franzen once said he'd maybe manage Proust pleasureably, but Joyce would be a more studious read)

As it happens, it’s probably Jonathan Franzen. Or James Kelman. They are both working at the upper level but I still find reading them both ‘pleasurable’. Their language and characterisation are profound, and neither makes the slightest concession to the marketplace, but I don’t find them difficult or alienating (apart from Kelman’s Translated Accounts, which I couldn’t make head nor tail of).

I get the rough sense of it but not the detail, and I've tried Googling it, but doing so only leads back to Boyracers, so as a last question, educate a Glaswegian: What does 'heddy haw' properly mean?

It’s a phrase me and my mates used when we were young. It roughly translates as ‘a random expression of joy’. Its semantic root is Billy Connolly’s approximation of how drunk Scottish people sing at Hogmanay parties.