LITERARY FICTION
DEAD MEN’S TROUSERS by Irvine Welsh (Cape €18.20) IRVINE WELSH’S books are no longer novels, as such — they’re more a state of mind.
His favoured territory is a peculiarly male, aggro psychopathy that careers between drug-addled braggadocio and a more crippling self-reckoning.
His characters’ casual, ugly contempt for the opposite sex makes Harvey Weinstein look like a celibate priest.
In this characteristically carelessly written novel — apparently the last to revisit the former heroin addicts Welsh so brilliantly introduced in 1993’s Trainspotting — slippery Renton, the dazzling amoral Sick Boy and gormless Spud are all somehow still alive.
Renton is now, implausibly, a prosperous international DJ promoter.
They reconvene at the behest of their former psychotic nemesis Francis Begbie, now a globally famous artist who wants to feature them in a new art project.
Old grudges soon rear their heads, alongside a farcically gruesome subplot featuring a human kidney, but the book is a mess.
At his best, Welsh still burns with a scabrous, ferocious energy, but you have to wonder: is anyone still reading? THE ITALIAN TEACHER by Tom Rachman (Riverrun €23.80) TOM RACHMAN is a relentlessly entertaining writer, mixing high-wire ideas with effervescent prose. This follows Charles, a son destined to live in the oversized shadow of his extravagantly talented father, a famous portrait painter and pathological womaniser who, over his lifetime, sires 17 children.
Charles has artistic talent of his own but, after a vicious knockback by his charmingly monstrous dad, devotes himself to a life of mediocrity. He fails at relationships (including with his mother) almost as determinedly as he does at his career.
His once absolute paternal devotion, however, is curdled into something else by the disappointments of adulthood and he plots one last desperate, even demented, attempt to make his mark.
Sometimes, this novel feels a bit like a Jackson Pollock, with its energy all on the surface, but in making Charles the artist of his own misfortune, Rachman asks interesting questions about the tension between legacy and self-determination. THE TRICK TO TIME by Kit de Waal (Viking €16.99) KIT DE WAAL is fast emerging as a novelist who is not afraid to tell the sorts of stories flashier writers might overlook. Her Costa book awards-nominated debut My Name Is Leon was told in the voice of a mixed-race, eight-year-old child separated from his beloved younger brother after he is taken into care.
This second novel is more harrowing. It’s the story of an Irish girl, Mona, who leaves for Birmingham as a young girl.
When we meet her in late middle-age, she lives alone, designing the clothing for handmade wooden dolls, many of which are used to console the mothers of stillborn children.
The chain of events that have brought her to this point is revealed through a series of flashbacks that flit between rural Wexford in the 1960s and urban Birmingham in the 1970s, at the height of the IRA mainland bombing campaign.
Perhaps de Waal piles on the tragedy a little too heavily. No matter: she is excellent at detailing the quiet, awful currents that a person can carry with them all their life, and the novel’s ending will leave you reeling.