Aye, it’s a guid read if y’er into yer patois
Drugs, headbutts, Leith Road lingo: the spirit of Irvine Welsh’s sequel moves Dominic Maxwell.
Ae wis sitting at home, starin oata tha windae, listening to the fitba results, when mae mobile screeched oot. - Dominic? Your editor here. Just wondering where your review of Irvine Welsh’s new Trainspotting sequel is? This is a big one, chum: a million copies sold of the original 1993 novel in Britain alone! One literary sequel in 2002, one prequel in 2012, a Begbie spin-off novel in 2016, two worldbeating Danny Boyle films. What’s the verdict?
- Ah havnae written nothing, ah’ve been on the bevvy, ah muttered.
- Gosh! It sounds like you have been at least ‘‘getting in character’’, said tha editor.
- Aye, ah said. Good book, ah added. - We’re going to need just a smidgin more detail from you on this one. The question our readers need answering is: can the bad boys of 90s Edinburgh - Mark ‘‘Rent Boy’’ Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie - still cut it now they’re in their 50s?
This convo was bringing me doan. Get this heidcase offa ma back, I thought. So ah dropped ma incredibly authentic Leith Rd accent, and told him this, speaking in my best London English:
- Welsh is on compulsively readable, searingly funny form in what has been billed as the final Trainspotting novel. We’re a way from the tenement squalor of the first novel; or three of our boys are, anyway. Welsh puts us into their heads as they fly around the world managing disc jockeys (Renton), are feted as visual artists (Begbie), get themselves into all sorts of sex-fuelled sticky situations (Sick Boy) and end up so skint they have to accept iffy offers to transport a kidney from Istanbul to Berlin (Spud). Less trainspotting, more jetsetting.
- Is it always readable, though?
- Well, it depends who’s telling the tale. All four get a turn, alongside some third-person narration, but mostly the Caledonian patois adds rhythm and bounce. Welsh’s storytelling makes these amoral misadventures so joyfully awful that you have to go with the flow. You don’t so much lose your moral compass as put it in a back pocket for later.
Yet Welsh offers oases of sensible humanity. He flows the plots together – a forced kidney transplant; a podiatrist blackmailed for massageparlour sex; Begbie dealing with a jealous stalker; Renton trying to make amends for the way he burnt his friends on the big drug deal from Trainspotting - with a latent sense of family underlying all this irresponsibility. He shows us the real world, but he also knows what fun his demimonde of sex, violence, betrayal and substances is if you ignore their consequences. –The Times