Ron Butlin; 'In your mid-thirties, you've painted yourself into a corner. Drink is another layer of paint'

Almost a decade before Trainspotting, novelist and poet Ron Butlin wrote a Scottish classic of addiction and alienation. Irvine Welsh reveres it, and now we can share his enthusiasm. Nicholas Royle brings a well-kept literary secret to light

When Ron Butlin orders a glass of white wine with his lamb shank, I breathe a small, unnoticed sigh of relief. By making one too many glib assumptions about the extent of autobiographical content in The Sound of My Voice, a blistering account of alcoholism, I had fallen into the same trap that claimed every other interviewer the 52-year-old writer has encountered since his novel was first published in 1987. An alcoholic sticks to soft drinks – or orders the whole bottle. Butlin's not a boozer. I can relax.

We're in the rooftop restaurant at Baltic, Gateshead's quayside grain mill-turned-art gallery, and we're toasting The Sound of My Voice, just reissued by Serpent's Tail (£8.99): the fourth edition of a book that, by its author's own admission, has probably sold only a few hundred copies. That is set to change, however, with Serpent's Tail reporting enthusiastic support for the title from the trade.

The Sound of My Voice is the compulsively readable story of 34-year-old biscuit company executive Morris Magellan, who starts necking the brandy bottle at daybreak and doesn't let up until he collapses into bed at night. Morris feels trapped in his work and his life; drink seems to offer a way out. "Other people went to parties and got drunk, you got drunk and went to parties." The use of the second person forces the reader to empathise with Morris. As a child he lacks a good relationship with his father – "Any love you expressed, he crushed utterly" – and he learns of his father's death while at a party. This autobiographical scene recalls the moment when Butlin, aged 21, was informed of the death of his own father.

Born in 1949, Butlin was installed in a children's home in Edinburgh. His mother, her pregnancy kept a secret because of his father's marriage to another woman, visited him every day. After two years she took him back, having persuaded the boy's father to join them. From 1951 to 1966 the family lived in the Borders, with a year in Edinburgh when Butlin was six. The Edinburgh house, belonging to his father's side of the family, was run as a nursing home.

"We lived in this one room in the basement," says Butlin, a sturdy, kind-faced man with a gentle manner. "My mum had to do all the skivvy work and there were all these people dying all the time. I would get to know them – they were all quite nice – and then they'd be dead. A year went by and the next thing I knew, we were parked in a caravan in a lay-by outside Penicuik."

Butlin's relationship with his father was "appalling", dominated by "intolerable mental cruelty", stopping short of physical abuse. "He went for the soul rather than the body. He used to sit around being miserable and would rage at us." Books offered an escape route. "I could withdraw into a world where everything made sense. It was a predictable world. Our world was utterly unpredictable."

This sense of unpredictability is conveyed in many of the short stories in The Tilting Room (1983). "This room is really known only to you and me," begins the title story. "I'm sure that the walls and floors don't quite meet at right angles so that everything seems to tilt this way and that." Rooms tilt, walls buckle and floors slip and slide as the physical world submits to the cruelty of various tyrants, from Nazi soldiers to incestuous abusers.

These mind-expanding Kafkaesque stories were first recommended to me by the playwright Richard Cameron in 1992. I spent four years searching for a copy before finally blagging one off the author himself. It illustrates how Butlin has not exactly been handed success on a plate.

Yet the Scot has enjoyed the tireless support of Hunter Steele, who runs Black Ace Books in Forfar. The Sound of My Voice was originally published by Canongate in 1987. A paperback the following year from Paladin was so badly handled that the publisher wrote to Butlin to apologise. Black Ace published an edition in 1994 and kept it in print for several years. When Irvine Welsh was asked by the New York Village Voice to write about a lost classic, he chose The Sound of My Voice. It was Steele's idea to package this as the introduction to yet another edition, which can't have hurt when approaching Serpent's Tail.

Butlin's love of books developed into an urge to write. "Like most teenagers I wrote poems. You know, the world's so big, I'm so small. That kind of thing." In London he formed a pop group with friends. It was after that fell apart that he started sending things to magazines. In the mid-Seventies he began to write stories. "It wasn't a conscious thing. It was just that things began to reach the right-hand side of the page. The Sound of My Voice started as a short story, which grew and became a novel, albeit a short one."

Although it presents an utterly convincing picture of alcohol addiction, Butlin argues this is not the novel's true subject. "It's about someone in their mid-thirties," he says. "At that age you have a crisis, you've painted yourself into a corner with a job and various other things. In Magellan's case the drinking is just an added layer of paint. It also allowed much more flexibility for time distortions and delusions and playfulness."

While the existential crisis was based on experience, the drinking was not. "A friend of mine worked in the government. He was pissed all the time. By midday he'd had a bottle of vodka. Ministers would ask for questions to be framed and they asked for answers as well and he would find himself doing both, totally out of his head."

The friend, who quit drinking before the book came out, read it and told Butlin he didn't know how he could have got so close without having been there. "Which is why I feel that's not really what it's about. It's about the emotional groundswells that are involved. I was 34, I was living in London with a very strange girl who was heavily into analysis and used to shred me daily. When you're at that age, options are beginning to close down. All around there is a closing and opening, and you just wonder who you are."

Last year, Butlin announced to friends that he was giving up writing novels. His second, Night Visits (1997), a spellbinding and compassionate story of bereavement and horrifying abuse set in an Edinburgh nursing home not unlike the one he lived in as a child, had failed to set the world alight. This was hardly surprising, given that the publisher reportedly saved on postage by not sending out review copies. "I just decided I couldn't take the misery, the rejection, the disappointment any longer. I felt wonderful. It was like taking off a rucksack. And now this has happened and I'm lifting the rucksack back on again, you know." Butlin cracks a characteristically broad smile and, catching the eye of a passing waitress, orders a "wee glass of red".

His work in progress includes a collection of surreal pieces about composers. He is scheduled to appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival later this month. He writes about children particularly well, and for the duration of his career has been involved with a scheme in schools to help youngsters to write creatively. Ron Butlin's not about to take off his rucksack for good, but it's high time he received due recognition. For far too long, he has been one of contemporary British literature's best-kept secrets.

Nicholas Royle's most recent novel is 'The Director's Cut' (Abacus, £6.99)

Biography

Ron Butlin, 52, was born in Edinburgh. Having spent his first two years in a children's home, he was raised in the Borders towns of Hightae and Dumfries. Leaving home at 16, he travelled and worked at a variety of jobs from barnacle-scraping to life-modelling (at the same college as Sean Connery). His writing career kicked off with poetry; since the mid-Seventies, he has published numerous collections, as well as libretti, plays, journalism and fiction. His first short-story collection, The Tilting Room, appeared in 1983 and was followed four years later by the novel The Sound of My Voice. In 1997, he published the novel Night Visits. The winner of several Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, he lives in Edinburgh with his Swiss wife, the writer Regi Claire, and their dog. The Sound of My Voice is re-published this month by Serpent's Tail with a foreword by Irvine Welsh, who calls it "one of the greatest pieces of fiction to come out of Britain in the '80s". Ron Butlin will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August.