Interview: Louise Welsh ... the end of the world as she knows it

It prompts you to wonder how many of these tiny symbols of civilisation would be left after the apocalypse. There’d be no-one importing coffee any more, and that glass jug which looks so simple and smooth – would you be able to make another one? And who knows the recipe for those Choco-Leibniz biscuits?

After the apocalypse, we’d not just lose medicines, cars and electricity, we’d lose every little thread which weaves together the fabric of civilisation. Consider the teaspoon by the sugar bowl; how many people were needed to bring that tiny thing to the table in this Glasgow tenement? The workers manufacturing the steel, moulding the metal, transporting the product to the shop, then selling it to us… hundreds of people working together for one little spoon.

This is one aspect of the end of the world which haunts Louise Welsh: seeing how utterly vulnerable we’d be if all those little threads snapped. “In the West we’re incredibly privileged,” she says. “What an age we’re living in. Technology, the internet, it’s almost like magic but I don’t know how anything works, so if it was all to break down I’d be quite lost.” She marvels at how we consider ourselves so advanced, given that we’ve lost so much basic knowledge. “I met an Inuit bloke at a festival in Finland,” she says, “and he said his ancestors knew how to hunt and shoot and make fires.” But this chap was a poet and told her: “I’m supposedly more sophisticated than them, but I can’t do anything really.” A poem won’t keep you warm, stitch a wound or make a teaspoon.

Our advance into easy civilisation has meant we’ve detached ourselves from the grimy basics and so make ourselves vulnerable if society suddenly broke down. But that wouldn’t happen would it? The Cold War is over, so there’s no longer the threat of nuclear war. Perhaps not, says Welsh, but what about an error or accident? She mentions Fukushima, Chernobyl and, of course, the toxic presence of Trident, which lies just a few miles from where we sit with our biscuits. The fear of disaster didn’t end with the Cold War. “It seemed a reality to my parent’s generation who’d lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. They had that moment when it seemed the world could just blow up. It seemed real that the world could just explode and then, of course, we all live so close to Trident and, like many people, not just in this country, you’d prefer not to have that. It’s something I feel quite passionately about.” That’s why she is writing about the end of the world, though her vision of the apocalypse isn’t nuclear devastation, but plague.

HER new novel, Death Is A Welcome Guest, is the second in her Plague Times Trilogy which shows most of the world’s population killed by a pandemic known as “the sweats”. The trilogy takes us from London to the Orkney Islands and are literary thrillers, managing to meld the end of the world with sharp commentary about the state of prisons, drug companies and religion.

The book focuses on Magnus, who finds himself in prison when the plague hits. He’s forced to break out with another convict and flee London which is collapsing into anarchy.

Welsh is a leading figure in a group of female novelists who’ve written recently about the end of days. What unites them is that they haven’t presented a world blasted by bombs and radiation. Their literary vision is of a more gradual, and far more terrifying, devastation. Death by plague is one which creeps up slowly, yet can never be outrun. Is this why she chose to write about a pandemic? “I studied medieval history and was interested in the plague. I chose to make it a pandemic rather than nuclear because I wanted something that would survive, that people could build on, that left the infrastructure largely undamaged.”

SHE was also intrigued by how the plague altered medieval society. “It changed the feudal system, so some people benefited. Some inherited money, and some who’d always been under the laird could think: ‘I’m going to take my skill elsewhere, get a better wage’.” But even with these small benefits, Welsh points out that there could hardly have been a single person in Europe who wasn’t touched by the horror of the Black Death.

But for all this bleakness, and a portrayal of the slow decay of a diseased Britain, the novel has glints of humour in it. In fact, the main character, Magnus, is a Scottish comedian, which seems a direct comment on how humans, in such a desperate situation, would need to laugh or go mad. She agrees on the need for humour in the face of an apocalypse. “Everybody in the book is fucked up, because you would be, wouldn’t you?” And the novel contains plenty of that other natural human reaction: sex. “As a child we’d have these conversations in the playground,” she says, “asking what we’d do if the Three Minute Warning came?” She laughs and admits: “It was usually something obscene! I think people would be laughing like crazy and having it off all the time thinking ‘I may as well!’ We think of ourselves as terribly rational and driven by the mind, but our body has something to say.”

In a ruined world with no pretty teacups or Choco Leibniz biscuits, with no time for the luxury of kindness, sex and humour would be how we retained some kind of life.