Mistress of Illusions: Interview with Louise Welsh

by anna battista

A writer, you could argue, is a bit like a magician who conjures up words on the blank page rather than the proverbial white bunny out of the magic hat. A writer, you could add, is, in a way, also an illusionist. After all, writers and illusionists achieve greatness when they master perfectly the art of entertaining their audiences, the former through their stories, the latter by performing illusions that bewilder and amaze. If these comparisons stand, then Louise Welsh has definitely proved with her second novel that she is one of the most accomplished writers and illusionists around.

The Bullet Trick narrates the vicissitudes of William Wilson, a London-based down-at-heel master of theatrical magic who accepts an offer to perform in a Berlin cabaret, hoping to run away from his bad luck for a while and find a bit of money and fame in Germany. Once in Berlin, William realises that the theatre where he is supposed to perform, the “Schall und Rauch”, meaning “Smoke and Noise”, offers its audience a very special form of entertainment, an “erotic cabaret”. Finding himself out of his depth among circus acts, super-fit and sexy acrobats and sensually glamorous dancers, William enlists the help of the mysterious and beautiful Sylvie, restructuring his act in a kinky burlesque-meets-illusionism kind of show, winning the heart of the audience, also thanks to the performance of a special bullet trick. But, right when things start going well for William, a mystery hidden in an envelope he has left behind in Scotland, summons him back to his native Glasgow, where murder and crime will mix together with memories of a bullet trick performed in Berlin that might have left behind a victim.

The final result is an amazing book, a thrilling story of magic, illusion and death that takes the reader through the streets of London and Glasgow and the cabaret scene of Berlin, weaving a web of fear and suspense through a smooth prose dotted with dialogues tinged with dark humour. ”I think it is always hard to know where an idea for a book comes from,” Louise Welsh recounts, “for a while I had in my head a central image of a man, the performer of the bullet trick, a woman and a gun, and this novel grew out of that. I wanted to know how they got together and how they got to that point.”

Welsh’s first novel, The Cutting Room (Canongate, 2002), won the 2002 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and the British Crime Dagger Award, and was also nominated for Best First Book of 2002 by the Guardian; the book was followed in 2004 by a novella, Tamburlaine Must Die (Canongate). According to Welsh, there aren’t many differences between writing her debut novel and her second work. “When I was writing The Cutting Room I had this idea that, once I would have finished it, I wouldn’t have known how to write another book,” she reveals, “but of course that’s not the case because each book is different. I think while I was writing this book I concentrated more on the rhythm of the story.”

Just like each book is different, also her main character William, is different from Rilke, the anti-hero of The Cutting Room. “Rilke isn’t necessarily happy with his life, but he has come to terms with a lot and he knows who he is,” Welsh explains, “William is younger than him and probably doesn’t yet know who he is, and he is also hard on himself, but by the end of the book he has given himself a bit of a break and he will like himself a bit better.”

Being the world of cabaret and magic the main setting for The Bullet Trick, Welsh was able to use her imagination in the descriptions of the special effects, props, scenery and costumes, though there was also a bit of research for her to do. “I read a few books, met a magician, revisited the cabaret scene in Berlin trying to get the atmosphere, and went to The Panopticon in Glasgow, an old music hall where a short part of the story takes place,” she states, “besides, I also walked a lot in Glasgow, London and Berlin, looking at places and thinking about William and where he might go or what he might do.”

The Bullet Trick is in a way a composite story made of different elements: it has the thrills and the perils of crime stories and the sensuality and glamour of decadent literature, all spiced up by the burlesque irreverence of retro cabarets. Welsh explains the novel wasn’t influenced by a single book or author, but by a sort of “amalgam.” “I think it’s difficult to describe The Bullet Trick, to me the book is the book, but hopefully it is entertaining and it is a good read,” she states, “with this novel I wanted to do something different from The Cutting Room, indeed the structure of this book is a move forward for me, and it also resembles a journey: in the parts William walks around Glasgow, he moves out of the dark and into the light; in the Berlin sections, he moves out of the light and into the dark and when the two parts come together there is some kind of explosion.”

Welsh has been living in Hamburg for a few months now and is at present working on a play. The Cutting Room did quite well in Germany, and there are great expectations for her second book that is already being translated in German and will probably be out in a couple of month’s time. Though Welsh reads the reviews of her books, she claims she doesn’t pay too much attention to what they say. “Reading the nice things people say about you might be good for your confidence, but you might get a big head; on the other hand, the negative things said about you can really bring you down and you don’t want this to happen when you’re trying to write,” she says, “normally you don’t think about people’s expectations while you’re writing because it’s not relevant to your work, it will be relevant afterwards what people think. For this book, I just got on with the story and I didn’t think about the reader too much, but I just hoped that it would work out in the end.”

A few years ago, Welsh told me during an interview that she didn’t consider herself as a novelist, but as someone who had written one book and needed to write another. I wonder if she now feels like a novelist. “I do now, it’s taken a long time, but I do, and it’s quite a breakthrough for me.” Judging from The Bullet Trick, Louise Welsh will definitely live up to this new title.

The Bullet Trick is published by Canongate (www.canongate.net) in July. Louise Welsh will be reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 27th August. For a full programme of the Edinburgh Book Festival, please check the site www.edbookfest.co.uk.