Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)

Anyone that knows me well knows that I am a chronic re-reader. I am one of those readers who knows their favourite books intimately; I can turn to a favoured passage at will, I'm able to quote a killer line to an assembled throng in the pub or staff room in the blink of an eye. Every time you approach a work of literature anew, you find something different to love or to think about, and this, I think, is the primary reason I so often peruse my bookshelves and choose an old friend to read. Sometimes these repeat reads are motivated by a reminder of those books that pops up on television or by a memory of a choice scene that suddenly springs to mind. Sometimes I just don't fancy making the effort to read something new. As my teaching career has gone on, the latter reason has come into play more and more. It's a mentally exhausting and insanely busy profession, and I don't have the time I used to have. In fact, part of the reason for starting this book review blog was to force myself to read books I hadn't read before. I suppose I've done quite well, five previous entries, all on books I was reading for the first time. This is my first re-read review since I started No Trick Dispels. So I guess that with the preamble over I should get on with the review proper.

I wanted to re-read 'Trainspotting' because I'd recently read two other Welsh books, one good ('Filth') and one disappointing ('Ecstasy') so it felt logical to revisit his masterpiece to see what makes it tick. There's been so much written about this book (and the attendant, box-office busting film adaptation) that in a way it's difficult to add anything, other than my own observations. I worried about this for all of thirty seconds, but then I remembered that that's the point of a blog anyway, and I stopped worrying.

It's important to point out, of course, that 'Trainspotting' the novel is a very different beast from the film that made it so famous. While the film is a linear narrative focused around Renton, the novel is narrated by many characters, as well as a filtered third person voice from time to time. There are many characters in the novel, who, sadly, did not end up in the film, including Rab "Second Prize" McLaughlin, Begbie's wife June, escapee Stevie who has managed to successfully get out of Leith, and teenage goth Nina. The character of Matty got fused with Tommy for the purposes of the film (although Tommy gets HIV in the novel, he is still alive in his council flat by the time the books ends- it is Matty who is the victim of Toxoplasmosis). Renton is a considerably less attractive figure, completely alienated from any kind of emotion beyond disgust (one particularly infamous moment that didn't make the film has him screw his pregnant, recently-widowed sister-in-law in the toilets of a hotel after the funeral of his brother). The genius of the fractured narrative is that it forms a kaleidoscopic, dissonant choir of dysfunction. Sometimes the individual stories seem to bear little relation to each other, but each one contributes something to our knowledge of life in Leith. What Welsh was able to do, which nobody had been able to do previously, was give a voice to the disenfranchised of Leith, a generation of working class youth who were offered nothing and responded with self-destruction. The anger and resentment at the chattering middle classes of Edinburgh and the swathes of tourists in town for the festival seeps through the narrative like a weeping sore. This isn't exploitative or pornographic literature, it's social realism that feels almost Dickensian at times.

It's a common misonception that 'Trainspotting' is "about" heroin. In fact, it encompasses so many aspects of the human condition, from births to deaths, from joy to despair, from comedy to tragedy. Heroin use is certainly a key plot marker and structural device (the novel's parts are entitled Kicking, Relapsing, Kicking Again, Blowing It, Exile, Home and Exit) and in a kind of homage to William Burroughs, there are short sections called Junk Dilemmas (#63 to #67) describing some of the realities of heroin use. There's also the fact that the final act of the novel sees the gang selling drugs rather than buying them. Renton's final betrayal of his friends is expertly done, much better than the film, which I felt overdramatised this part. It's Renton's understated opportunism that nakes that section work so well.

Another tired cliché about this book is that the dialect sections are "difficult" to follow. Only if you're a moron. The rhythms of Leith-speak are beautifully rendered and add another layer to Welsh's portrayal of the everyday realities of life amongst what the Victorians called the "submerged tenth" of society. Reading the novel again, I think it's the dialect that truly makes the book the punch to the solar plexus it is. In particular, Renton's observation about Begbie gets me every time: "He really is a cunt ay the first order. Nae doubt about that. The problem is, he's a mate an aw. What kin ye dae?" The characters' idiosyncracies are beautifully observed throughout, with Mark's pseudo-philosophising and anti-Scotland diatribes, Spud's describing himself and everyone else as "cats", Sick Boy's imagined conversations with an approving Sean Connery and Stevie's discomfort at returning home all rendered with a sure and memorable touch.

Welsh has often been hailed as the writer who best transferred to page the spirit of the punk generation, and this is evident in Renton's contempt for those who invent a positive national identity, with his famous observation that Scotland is the lowest of the low because it is "colonised by wankers". The cultural and historical references are spot on here, in a way that they aren't in his later works: they are seamlessly worked into the fabric of the plot rather than shoved in your face. An Iggy Pop gig attended by Tommy, Hibs and Hearts struggling against the Old Firm throughout the 1980s, Thatcher's criminally anti-working class policies, the yuppie boom in London, Edinburgh's transformation to respectable tourist destination, all are flawlessly observed. This novel is a seriously important historical document, in a similar way to Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' or Waugh's 'Vile Bodies'.

In concluding this review, I would like to recommend that everybody re-reads a favourite book from time to time. I've often taken this habit to extremes, but it's well worth the effort when a book is this good. It took me only two days to re-read this book, and my respect for it has only increased as a result. 'Trainspotting' is one of the best books of the Twentieth Century, of this I have no doubt. If you've only ever seen the film, you seriously need to read the book. The parts you remember from the film are rendered in stunning, visceral prose and the parts that didn't make the film are hidden gems. Throughout the three hundred and fifty or so pages, there's not a single bum note played. With all this considered, it's perhaps not surprising that Welsh has found it hard to match this towering achievement of a debut novel. Classics never get old. I'm certain I'll be re-reading this again before very long.