Interview: Louise Welsh
Originally published in Shoreline of Infinity 15 (June 2019)
Welsh is (at the time of the interview) the author of 8 novels, short stories, plays and, with Stuart MacRae, the opera Anthropocene. In The Plague Trilogy – A Lovely Way to Burn, Death is a Welcome Guest and No Dominion – a pandemic colloquially known as ‘the sweats’ decimates the British population, bringing society to its knees and ushering in an era of survival at all costs. The main characters, Stevie and Magnus, flee from the crumbling civilisation for the remote safety of Orkney before events draw them back into the fray. This interview contains mild spoilers.
Iain Maloney: The first thing I wanted to ask was why science fiction? Or, perhaps I should ask, do you think of it as science fiction?
Louise Welsh: I think of it more as speculative, something that crosses genres. Although I’m never sure that writers are the best people to decide what genre we’re in. The publishers asked me for a crime trilogy and I think what I did was cross genre – speculative fiction, apocalyptic fiction with a crime aspect to it. It’s definitely got the crime as part of the motor.
IM: What motivated you to head in that direction, to take the request for a crime trilogy and head off at a 90 degree angle?
LW: You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, haven’t you? You’ve got to tell the stories that are in you and that story was there, in me. I think these things come from what you’ve read, the books that have influenced you. For me it was a childhood brought up in Scotland where you were sure the bomb was going to land on you at any minute. I love John Wyndham, War of the Worlds, Death of Grass, Threats, the 1970s series Survivors, that kind of apocalyptic fiction that is based very much in the world that we inhabit; it’s not a glossy world, it’s a world we recognise. But ultimately I think the story dictated the genre rather than thinking I’d like to write within that genre. It’s more that the genre is where the story would fit.
IM: It’s interesting that you mentioned John Wyndham there because when I was reading it I felt it was very much in that speculative vein: real people in real situations and then one fundamental thing changes.
LW: I love his books and yet when you go back and reread them they’re quite… they’re not comfortable, are they? They’re quite racist, they’re quite sexist, they’re quite othering in terms of class as well. I think that’s the other thing about a lot of speculative fiction of that era – it’s often about what are people really afraid of? In the Wyndham books, or others like War of the Worlds – in Death of Grass especially – what are people afraid of? They’re often afraid of the working class and the removal of constraints, that the working class will descend into beasts, into the animals that they are. Whenever you’re writing within a set genre, you’re kind of having a conversation with those books as well. Because those aren’t my feelings – I don’t feel that the working class are only held in place by the structures of civilisation. So that was interesting to engage with as well.
IM: He’s very much of his time – all speculative fiction is – and it hasn’t all aged well. But his storytelling still stands up.
LW: Yeah, his storytelling is amazing. And it’s also part of the interest that these books hold, because the reflect on the period and they tell us something about the period that straightforward histories don’t. They give us the attitude and the voice of those eras.
IM: You described the trilogy as a crossover, that there’s the crime in there as well as the speculative and apocalyptic. A Lovely Way to Burn definitely has one foot in the crime genre – it has a crime plot in a speculative setting – but by No Dominion the crime element has pretty much gone and it’s straight dystopian/post-apocalyptic…
LW: It’s all crime by that point! No, that’s true, and maybe that’s reflective of the breakdown in the society, that the crime aspect would take a different manifestation. At the beginning I was thinking about Big Pharma and what does Big Pharma do, but you’re right, by the end the book is thinking about ‘what kind of society do we want to live in’. You’re right, there’s not a straightforward villain, there’s not a straightforward crime plot, it’s more of a quest.
IM: I was curious while reading it, was there any conscious decision to start off with the crime aspect front and centre before dialing up the speculative elements? You’ve got a readership you’ve built up over a number of books who know you predominantly as a crime writer – at least that’s how you’re often marketed – so was there a deliberate idea to slide into a new genre this way to bring your readership with you?
LW: No, not at all. I am perceived as a crime writer but all of my books sit unsteadily within the genre. They never quite slotted in evenly, although I’m really happy to be regarded as a crime writer. You just have to go with where the story leads you and hope that people enjoy that journey and that story.
IM: How did the publisher react when you sent in the first one, which wasn’t the start of the crime trilogy they were expecting?
LW: They were fine with it. They just marketed it like a crime novel! There was enough crime in it – at heart it’s about justice and injustice, and in the first novel there’s a straightforward murder plot – the first two books have murders in them and the third book has a different kind of crime, an apparent kidnapping. I’m saying I don’t fit easily within the crime genre, but I do always have somebody getting killed! I’m not sure why that is.
IM: In the first book it’s very much there’s been a murder and Stevie’s going to find out who did it whereas in No Dominion, there is a murder – the murder of the foster parents – but by that book there’s so much death and destruction going on everywhere that another murder is lost in the background. By then the kidnapping seems much more shocking.
LW: That’s part of the question people have to ask in war zones and places where everything is going to shit in that way, when there are so many deaths: does another death matter? And within the crime novel the answer is yes. The individual death does and should matter. But that level of death and destruction… it was a difficult canvas to work on. When you come to write those moments you pull the camera in real close on that particular moment to say ‘look, it is still a person.’
IM: It’s interesting you say that about the canvas: within the dystopian/post-apocalyptic genre, most writers dodge that. They either write up to the ‘event’, the moment of apocalypse, or they start their story in the aftermath amongst people who have no idea what happened. But you take us right through the heart of it and out the other side. Why did you decide to tackle it head on?
LW: I guess I just have a linear mind! I was very influenced by the 1970s’ TV show Survivors. As a child I liked to stay up late and watch that, and they began with this pandemic, they began with just a few characters and I think that really influenced me. But in the beginning I was thinking more about capitalism and I wanted to start in the heart of a great world city – I chose London – where there’s this terrible contrast between the rich and the poor: who can survive and who can’t. Just the rapaciousness of capitalism. But also the brilliance of that city where everything is happening – if you can access it, it’s an amazing place. I wanted to start off with the image of this brilliant, cruel city. It’s often the case that these stories about the end of civilisation is often a love-letter to the civilisation. We have this amazing civilisation that we are in, but it’s a shame it’s not a kinder place. There’s a lot that we stand to lose and do we really want to lose that through casual, greedy over-reaching. But the history of humankind is always over-reaching. We always blow it in the end.
IM: Is that why you made Stevie work for a shopping channel?
LW: Yeah. I’ve always been interested in that world, in sales. My dad was a salesman and I always found salespeople really interesting. I think the skills that you need to be able to sell stuff are similar to what makes you entertaining or fun to be with, so I kind of like the idea that her ability to sell is also what helps her survive. The skills that make her a good operator within capitalism help her survive afterwards. She’s a survivor.
IM: It’s a nice balance because in No Dominion Magnus is the classic survivor: he’s angry, he’s drinking a lot, he’s violent and withdrawn. He’s how you expect someone in that situation to be, whereas Stevie is so different – just as logical but a different spin, that her skill set developed under capitalism allows her, in a sense, to thrive post-apocalypse. How much of the trilogy did you have planned out in advance?
LW: The overall arc, the physical journeys were all planned... the details weren’t so planned. The most difficult thing was the ending because I had a more optimistic ending in mind but over the five years that I was writing these books the world changed. The world took some crazy turns. It’s difficult – it’s difficult for us as human beings but also for us as writers, to write fiction in a world where you have Trump, the stupidity of Brexit, we’ve got all these strange things happening. When I started President Obama was in the White House and when I finished Trump had just got in. So I guess that idea of things being more cyclical developed and that affected the structure of the final book and the outcome. You respond to the things going on around you.
IM: I think it’s really interesting that you knew from the start that it was a trilogy because in many ways it’s an unconventional trilogy. Stevie is the main character in book one but she’s completely absent in book two and only returns in book three. While I was reading them I assumed you’d written A Lovely Way to Burn as a stand-alone novel, decided to write another book in the same universe – Death is a Welcome Guest – and then afterwards thought “Hey! I can tie these together!” But it sounds like you knew from the start that we’d lose sight of Stevie for a while.
LW: I’d always planned it that way, to shift from Stevie to Magnus and then bring them together. I wanted to start off with Big Pharma but I also wanted to look at what happens if you’re incarcerated when something like this occurs, so I wanted overlapping timelines. I wanted a different point of view… I guess it’s a very loose trilogy in a way. It’s more the world and the circumstance that links them… it is a strange way to do it but that was always my plan, to do the trilogy like this and then stop and not do anything else in that world. And I’m going to stick to that although I really enjoyed being in that world – it took about five years which is a considerable chunk of your life so there was something quite tempting about staying in it.
IM: It’s such a deep, rich world and I’d be very happy if you returned to it in the future. So much of the trilogy is them travelling through Scotland and there are all these other stories going on, so many paths you could go down.
LW: I can understand – you know when Michel Faber did The Crimson Petal and the White and then he came back and did a collection of short stories using the same characters – I could really understand how you might be tempted to do that after living in that world, and making it in your head and having so much left over – because there’s always stuff left over – but I’m not going to do anything like that. It was fun to do but you need to move on to something else, to stretch different muscles and try different skills. You have to write the book you need to write because who knows how many books we have.