AM: Well, there was huge opposition to the Iraq war, which is something which appears in your book [‘The Incredible Adam Spark’] as well, Alan, and also in ‘Saturday’ by Ian McEwan. But there hasn’t really been much, just as normal life folded over all the protests and we didn’t follow up on the demonstrations and organise. Part of the reason I wrote the book is a feeling that lots of people of my generation who’d been involved in politics in the past were thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do now.’ We’d ostensibly ‘got our own in’ [in 1997]. Not that I was ever involved with the Labour party, but for a long time you were told you couldn’t say anything against Labour because it meant we would get the Tories – who were in for 17 years – back again. That stifled a lot of political activity. So protest politics went into animal rights, environmental activism and anti-globalisation.

AB: I think the book reflects that. One of the things it’s about is the difference between the Old Left and the New Left, between the industrial socialism that Glasgow was associated with, and the newer anti-globalisation movement. In your book Danny and his father represent these different views. Do you have sympathies either way?

AM: Well communism as practised in Russia and China has been comprehensively discredited. So I already had disillusions about that. Which is difficult if you’re trying to oppose capitalism. We want the world to be black and white, so that we can say: ‘this is bad and that is good’. That is some of what ‘Demo’ is about. Danny’s father is a good man but he’s espousing an outdated version of socialism. Labour became the party of the establishment in Scotland, and the Scottish Socialist Party grew out of the left of the Labour party, the fringes of politics, then you get it all falling apart in this recent debacle over alleged sexual activity.

AB: I was going to ask about that. The character of Julian, who genuinely values equality for the world’s poor, sexually manipulates young women in the book. Do you think socialism and feminism are incompatible?

AM: No. But I think what happens – and this was my experience in the early days with socialist groups – is that there’s a lot of sexism around. There was an inability to see that the women’s struggle was worthy of being supported. Feminists can be guilty of this too, of saying, ‘We are on the side of righteousness and progress, therefore anything that we do is okay.’ So feminists who went through the 70s and 80s and 90s, quickly got disillusioned that way, because there was this honeymoon period where the slogans were things like, ‘Sisterhood is powerful’. But they soon came into conflict with other women. So I suppose my position is that espousing the ‘correct’ politics is never enough, you’ve got to look at your psychology as well. When people get together in a group there is always someone trying to get power, someone opposing it, and they might think their aims are the same, but there’s always something more local and hidden going on.

AB: When you read about the rise of the likes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, much of it was about personality and their various psychologies and the way they reacted to their environments, in a way that was almost nothing to do with politics. It became about personal power struggles between people and factions at the top, and the masses were completely ignored.

AM: That’s right. And the paranoia that goes along with having to protect your power and having to eradicate any opposition to it. It’s done anywhere that you have concentrations of power. I think we have to understand the psychological as well as the political, because there is a tendency for people to think that they are on the side of good, but they can be just as nasty as people on the side of what they are opposing. War creates the conditions for it. Look at Nazi Germany, look at Abu Ghraib, look at Guantanamo. War throws up people who will perform that psychopathic function. It’s dangerous to think that once we’ve decided what view we take on the world, and that it’s the right view, that we then think that everything we do after that is right. My book contains a lot of the frustrations that I’ve felt about politics in the last ten or twenty years, and a lot of that frustration is to do with feminism as much as it’s to do with socialism.

AB: How so?

AM: Well, I heard the poet Adrienne Rich being asked on the radio, ‘So what you’re saying is that women have to get into power?’ And she said, ‘No. Look at Thatcher.” One of the most terrible things that I think has ever been said was by Madeleine Albright [former US Secretary of State] about the sanctions on Iraq and the suffering of Iraqi children. She said: “It’s worth it and it’s necessary.”’ So as a woman and a feminist I completely agree with Rich’s position. It’s not about who’s saying it...

AB: ...it’s about what they’re saying.

AM: Exactly.

AB: Condoleeza Rice is a black woman contributing to the massacre of other women of colour.

AM: Totally. Totally.

AB: I was reading something recently about a soldier who was interviewed after the massacre by American troops of civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War. And they asked him, ‘Are you a father?’ and he said, ‘Yes I have two children.’ And they said, ‘Well how can you possibly go into this village and slaughter babies?’ And he said, ‘I’m doing what I’m told is necessary to win the war.’ People – whether soldiers or the employees of large corporations – unthinkingly align themselves with the views of the establishment because it absolves them of blame. They can say, ‘If you have a moral problem with this, speak to the people who’ve issued me my orders.’ And secondly, the system rewards them for it.

AM: Yes. There’s a huge amount of hypocrisy that goes on with, say, the whole Abu Ghraib thing and Lynndie England [US soldier accused of abuse of Iraqi prisoners]. These people from poor backgrounds, that the army actively seek, are put there, told they’re doing wonderful things, are above the law and that the people they are fighting are beneath them and barely human. And the authorities are completely complicit in that.

AB: Then what happens when allegations do emerge? The soldiers responsible are excised and we are told they were ‘bad apples’, as if they are wholly at fault rather than the system which has put them in place.

AM: Not only that, but when they get home, what happens? You get soldiers doing things that they later think are terrible. You get soldiers doing things that they even think are terrible at the time, but they did it anyway. When they get home, many of them are permanently traumatised, many commit suicide, large numbers have serious mental health problems.

AB: A lot of literature deals with these issues. A book like ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, for example, clearly is in dialogue with Soviet communism, but in the main it’s a book about the way power operates. ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is not simply about the Depression, it’s about how the weakest members of society are continually abused. ‘Demo’ is the same.

AM: I’ve just been reading Chomsky on this, on how power operates, and I really think exposing that is one of the things that novelists can do. I think the thing to remember is that when you first get published you think, ‘Great, my whole world has expanded!’ but you’re one tiny little voice in the middle of a sea of voices. And what you want is for more voices to be heard, and more marginalised voices to be heard, and I think that’s also one of the things that literature can do. But the publishing world doesn’t always necessarily allow it.

AB: Well the publishing world operates on the same principles. Books are selected on the basis of whether or not they will make profit, not on their artistic worth or on how much they challenge social wrongs.

AM: Sometimes books simply challenge the publishers or editors themselves. One of the things that happens in my novel is Laetitia, who has been at Cambridge, considers her range of career options and thinks she may as well go into publishing. A huge, huge percentage of people who work in the publishing industry went to Cambridge, apparently.

AB: And obviously they are going to be more inclined to literature which reinforces their world-view.

AM: Well they might be partial to things that challenge them. But they might not. The point is, to have a huge bloc like that of people with the same background working in the same industry, that’s going to mean something.

AB: Do you think art helps us to ‘humanise’, then, helps us recognise the humanity of other people, and pulls us away from solipsism or from identifying unconsciously with centres of power?

AM: Yes. The only problem is that the way the whole publishing world is structured is that the voices of the people who are oppressed are the ones we are least likely to hear. I come from a working-class background. My notion that I might one day become a writer seemed like pie-in-the-sky stuff. And then I was published. But to someone from the Third World, the fact of my writing will seem obvious: I’m part of the dominant group’s right to be heard. That doesn’t make me not want to write. It just makes me want to write as truthfully as I can.

AB: One of the things I also wanted to ask was about Glasgow and its literature. ‘Demo’ is as much a book about Glasgow as it is about politics. Do you want to talk about that?

AM: Well first of all I felt I had some temerity even writing about Glasgow, or in its dialect, because I’m not Glaswegian. But I love Glasgow and part of that is because of its left-wing tradition. Which can also be a pain in the arse, because it can be very macho. But I came to Glasgow in the 1980s and seeing writers like James Kelman, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead read was very inspiring and exciting. Their message was wider than Glasgow, but also made Glasgow vibrant. I couldn’t have written Clare’s voice in ‘Demo’, for example, without Kelman and Leonard doing those linguistic experiments first. They made it possible for me to wrestle with the politics of dialect. Before them, narrative tended to be written in standard English and dialect restricted to dialogue. That immediately set up a power differential within the text, and often the effect was comic, even when it wasn’t intended to be. Kelman showed that it is perfectly legitimate for his narrator to address the world in dialect. And he showed how it is much more the rhythm of the speech that characterises local dialect, and he created a more serious literary orthography of Glasgow dialect. In ‘Demo’ I’m trying to use similar techniques, but from a female perspective. And it was writers like Liz Lochhead, Janice Galloway, Jackie Kay who first showed that, yes, you can write as a Scottish working class woman and make women characters central to your writing!

AB: Let me pick up on that. A feminist critique of the likes of James Kelman’s work as being ‘macho’ – a word you used earlier to describe the Scottish left – often seems to me too simplistic a way of discrediting it.

AM: Well, there’s probably some truth in that. Some of this will be knee-jerk reactions by women, but some of it is justifiable. I mean, James Kelman doesn’t explore female perspectives. Take a book like ‘You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free’. Now I thought that was brilliant, I really enjoyed it. But the female characters are shady, shadowy and absent. The unconscious assumption, I think, is that the male perspective is the important one and is representative of human experience; whereas the female perspective is exclusively female and therefore narrower, limited.

AB: But isn’t the central consciousness in Kelman so dominant that it relegates ALL other characters, whether male or female, to shadowy figures?

Yes that’s true, but because it is always a male consciousness, it is undoubtedly a male 'take' on the world we're being presented with. There's less sense of relatedness to other individuals, and more to the state and to the existential crisis of the main character. In theory, it is within the scope of literature to present central consciousnesses arising from all sections of society, with other characters being less well drawn, as reflected in the experience of the central character. In practice, if the consciousness articulated doesn't bear some resemblance to that of the mainstream reviewer – and Kelman has suffered from this for class reasons and for use of dialect, for Scottishness – often the work will be criticised for its 'neglect' of the characters important to that mainstream. It’s my impression that perceived shortcomings in the female characters of male authors are not seen as so critical to the overall value of the work as perceived shortcomings of the male characters of female authors.

Do you believe there to be a disparity between the way that men and women’s writing is reviewed?

Well, statistics show that the majority of reviewers are still men, and the majority of books reviewed are by men. This can't help but have a bearing on the ways in which men's and women's work is judged. And then, a recent study [Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins] of the reading preferences of men and women found that of the top twenty women's favourite books, six were by men, while only one by a woman appeared in the top twenty men's favourites and that was ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The researchers commented: 'Is it churlish to suspect that some men didn't realise Harper Lee was a woman?'

Alan Bissett was born in 1975 in Falkirk and now lives in Glasgow. He is the author of two novels: ‘Boyracers’, and ‘The Incredible Adam Spark’. He was shortlisted or longlisted for the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition every year between 1999 and 2002. He currently teaches on Glasgow University's MA course in creative writing, and is working on his third novel, ‘Death Of A Ladies' Man’. To read a selection of Alan’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here.

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.