Filth (Irvine Welsh)

I remember quite clearly when this book first came out back in 1998; when I saw it in the window of the Canterbury  branch of Waterstones, the cover image was so blatant that it almost put me off Irvine Welsh altogether. How much mileage could there be in writing about corrupt policing? I didn't even pick it up and read the blurb. Another barrier for me was that I loved 'Trainspotting' so much that I almost didn't want to read another Welsh book in case it wasn't in the same league. Fast forward to 2006 and 'The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs' and my reluctunce to read another Welsh dissipated as soon as I saw the Velvet Underground-esque banana on the cover. Honestly, cover art is so important to my perception of a book. Fast forward again to February 2011 on a bright Sunday; while walking through Kensington Gardens in Brighton, I saw a copy of 'Filth' in the sale rack outside the Oxfam bookshop. I made a mental note to come back and buy it on my way home, but to my horror it had gone- someone had beat me to it! Cursing my luck, I wandered disconslately into Sidney Street where I decided to pop into the Amnesty bookshop on the offchance and- lo and behold- there was a copy of 'Filth' for the bargain price of £1.

Like most Welsh novels, the primary theme of the novel is consumption- despite being a police officer, the protagonist, D.S Bruce Robertson, indulges in heavy drinking, heavy cocaine use, a good deal of saturated fats and an enormous amount of promiscuous sex, both with "hoors" and middle aged women of his acquaintance (including his estranged wife's younger sister). Robertson is a career plain clothes detective who is seemingly successful, yet shows little interest in solving crime if it happens to put him out unduly. Most of his time is spent concocting Machiavellian schemes against his colleagues and friends, both to assure his promotion to Detective Inspector and to amuse himself. As a narrator, Robertson is compellingly vile, a misogynistic, racist, homophobic bigot whose misadventures are entertaining in the extreme, so much so that I'd venture to say that he becomes an anti-hero almost on a par with John Webster's Bosola or Christopher Marlowe's Barabas. Around a quarter of the way through, Robertson's narration is suddenly interrupted by the internal monologue of a tapeworm growing inside him, a literary device that, as it recurs with greater and greater frequency, cunningly mirrors the rapacious consumption of the protagonist with the instictive, primal consumption of a parasite. As the tapeworm gains more awareness and becomes sentient, Robertson lapses into the first person plural "we" as a way of showing they are one and the same being. When it comes, Robertson's downfall is swift and brutal, a descent worthy of the best Greek tragedies, all of his hubristic, triumphant arrogance swept away in a few pages, until the reader realises that from the start, Bruce Robertson was a troubled and depressed man assailed at all times by a truly traumatic past.

Although 'Filth' is certainly not as good a novel as 'Trainspotting', it's a tour de force of aggressively amoral writing, compelling from the brutal murder at its outset to the trio of narrative twists at the end. Not only is it cleverly structured and expertly pitched, the first person narrative is utterly convincing, blackly humorous and completely pitiless. I recommend this book highly, I read it in under a week, which is a testament to how hard it was to put down. I hereby reprimand my eighteen year old self for being so prissy in not reading it all those years ago...but I corrected my mistake, which I suppose is the important thing.