After Franz Ferdinand’s amplifiers die down and the live music draws to a close, the highlight of the Literary Arena’s Friday line-up draws an ever-growing and attentive crowd. Irvine Welsh is perhaps the best-known novelist alive today – Ian McEwan the only writer with similar status – and given his staple subject matter of the seedy underbelly of Scottish culture and the vivid, memorable characters who inhabit his novels, it’s hardly surprising.

He reads a captivating half hour extract from his latest novel, Crime, the broad Glaswegian accent you might expect being reserved and sotto voce in person. The book itself is a return to themes of corruption, sex, violence and existential doubt that is by turns thought-provoking and witty whilst also harbouring dark, sinister undertones. Small wonder the critics are already calling it ‘better than Trainspotting’, the classic that catapulted Welsh from talented writer to household name.

After his set, a scaled-down version of Robin Ince’s Book Club returns, minus Ince himself and with the brilliant Asher Treleaven at the helm. Like an Aussie Rick Mayall he contorts and writhes about the stage, delivering hilarious lines from ‘the best Mills and Boon love story ever written’, including some particularly vivid and disturbingly unusual images of a couple in the throes of foreplay. It’s hilarious stuff, but the late night star of the Book Club is Gavin Osborn, an acoustic guitarist who delivers a brilliant song dedicated to a fictional ‘attacking midfielder’ who left his team in the footy video game Championship Manager. ‘I got quite upset by this player leaving’, he explains in his intro, ‘in the way that I realise you should only do over real things’. Good job that in the literary tent, fiction always holds sway over the everyday.     


Ben Wilkinson