Talking Scottish social realism with The Young Team author Graeme Armstrong

It’s 2021, and I’m playing host to a virtual book launch and trying to keep one eye on the Zoom chat box. One question in particular catches my eye: “How do you feel about the recent increase in poverty porn novels being published by Scottish authors?”

Two events, temporally and spatially separate – but connected by a question which underlines the social realism genre: is framing the experience of trauma or poverty as a form of entertainment inherently exploitative – or can it be act of catharsis? Is there a line, and where does it start and end?

Back in the here and now, Armstrong recalls his experience as a student: “I remember in university, one of the gradings on my Masters was, ‘you don’t need to defend Scottish social realism’, and I was like, well, it’s constantly under attack – so I feel obliged to, almost.”

Armstrong’s instinct, to defend the written word of the likes of James Kelman, and indeed, himself, runs deep. And one, it seems, that isn’t wasted. Whoever pitched that question used that phrase with intent – feeling strongly enough to type it out and press send.

“For me,” Armstrong explains, “poverty porn is less the considered written word and more so trashy TV. Like Benefits Street or Jeremy Kyle. It’s a shame it took a death before anyone realised it was a blood sport. That was poverty porn.”

Defending their own work, Armstrong reminds me, is something working-class writers have long had to endure: “The best example of it is Kelman, he’s writing about the have-nots, the people who are the everyday heroes. And he wins a Man Booker, and he stands up and gets heckled by the judges, and the judge walks out – no one else would get treated that way. That’s a class war.”

When I ask Armstrong why he thinks this misconception exists, he says: “It’s interesting, say someone from the middle or upper classes wrote a story like Angela’s Ashes, or Shuggie Bain, or The Young Team, would it still be called poverty porn? It would be ‘an exploration of a world’, you know?”

In its lowest form, imposing a prejudiced view on someone’s own experience is a form of literary gatekeeping. In its most generous, one could view it as a manifestation of several things; of insecurity, guilt, shame; a lack of education; a lack of empathy, cultivated by the rhetoric that poverty and trauma is a choice, rather than a symptom of a broken system.

The conversation turns to higher education – the fact PhD study isn’t covered by student loans. “People who are living in financial serenity and comfort, they are allowed, and free, to pursue their ambitions. Hence why most of the lecturers and professors in universities are middle and upper class.” In short, anyone can write a novel – but to become someone who writes a piece of critical theory that will one day be used to critique it with is much more difficult.

Or as Armstrong himself puts it: “The voices, the gatekeepers of truth and culture are all middle and upper class.”

Why then, does Armstrong write? “I think my story is an honest one. I came from nothing. I was a drug addict and a gang member and I was very lucky to get into university to read books, never mind write one. Young white men in these communities don’t have a voice – they’re the perfect folk devil.”

“All the demonising, all the attacks, what will the children of the young men who’ve killed themselves think? ‘Who looked after my dad? Nobody.’ Well, I’m trying to in my work. Loads of people feed back, by the way. They say, ‘Do you know what, I understand him better now’.”

That concern which Armstrong holds close, for the lives that influenced the words on his page – and for what happens to them after the book is closed – is what lies at the core of his work. In its craft, it’s a work of fiction – but at its heart lies a form of activism, too. “It’s like a window into their life as well as mine,” he adds, “and that’s what people don’t see.”