Filth (edition 1999)

Any book written in the first person has to deal with the problem of getting across to the reader all those things the narrator doesn’t know or isn’t prepared to acknowledge. It takes a special sort of author to think: “I know, let’s use a talking tapeworm”.

And so here is a novel about a bent policeman, a man with so many prejudices they are impossible to count, who treats both his enemies and his friends with breathtaking contempt, who drinks, takes drugs, and refers to all women as “hoors”. The content is often shocking and extreme, and borders on too much information as he attempts to expel the said talking tapeworm from his scab encrusted rear.

I struggled to get into it in its early stages. It was wall-to-wall egregious behaviour, and it made me think how important it is, even in a book about someone utterly amoral, to have some spark of goodness to lighten the way, so there I was like a man dying of thirst in the desert desperately searching for some evidence of humanity in this character’s corrupt soul. Eventually there was that chink of light, and as with all Irvine Welsh novels, this turns out to have depths I didn’t suspect, and by the end I was quite in awe of its complexity, its extensive cast, and the way the action was sustained evenly over so many pages. There was some tremendous dark humour too (I loved the bit with the dog on the farm).

It can be an unsettling read. The Scottish slang talk, the phonetic spelling, the shocking events and the depths it plumbs are just the same as those in Trainspotting, yet it’s harder to laugh at this one. I think that’s because Trainspotting is about junkies and we expect the worst of them, whereas this is about the police and we want to expect the best from them. I had the feeling the author was drawing our attention to the real dangers of freemasonry within the police, and suggesting that all coppers are bent, they all take drugs, they all have 100% contempt for the public. Maybe I am being naive but I don’t want to believe it. ( )

A book of filth - at all levels. At first I thought it was just disgusting and self-indulgent, but as I swam though it to the end, I realised that it was quite clever and somewhat disturbing at a deeper level. Not light reading. ( )

For me, his best work. Take a police detective with more than dubious morals, add Welsh's unique style and voice and a tapeworm and you have a winner. Shocking and not to everyone's taste but compulsive reading. ( )

Appalling and compulsively readable. You find out something in the end that will shock you and throw everything in the preceding x-hundred pages into an entirely different light. If you dislike bad language, this book is not for you. I find Irvine Welsh intriguing, though. He also wrote Trainspotting. Different subject matter, different voice, same flair. ( )

An unremitting tide of unpleasant drivel, chronic in it's want of story-telling balance and worth a single star for the accuracy of it's title alone. There is good advice from the main character early on, page 10 to be precise "... One of my mottoes aboot the job is: better you wasting some cunt else's time than some cunt wasting your time". A waste of time, yup. ( )