Irvine Welsh

Gritty yet moving. Violent yet tender. Lonely yet loud. Animally human. How can anyone fully explain the phenomenon that is Trainspotting? Once you get the hang of the narrative the characters come alive. All their faults laid bare. They are disgusting and darling all at the same time. Hideous and hilarious. The black humor and absurd situations had me giggling and then glancing around to see if anyone was offended.
In the absence of a plot this is the story of addictions told from the point show more of view of addicts and the people who circle their periphery. To describe the kind of desperation addiction can create - when trying to find a viable vein, one character resorts to injecting their privates. Revenge is brutal. Sex is raw and callous. No one is really all that likeable until you find yourself thinking of them long after you close the book. A certain kind of magnetism...like a train wreck. show less

An engaging story collection by the master of Scottish drugs, sex and four-letter words. In fact, though, only one piece here, the novella Kingdom of Fife, is set in Scotland. The title story (and it is a superb title!) follows the adventures of a womanising English expat in Fuertaventura, whilst "Rattlesnakes", "Dogs of Lincoln Park" and "Miss Arizona" are all set in the US. They are all fun, but I think my favourite of the short pieces was "Dogs of Lincoln Park," where a real-estate show more agent's dog goes missing shortly after a Korean chef moves into the building and Welsh manages to keep us guessing for far longer than anyone would have thought possible. He then reverses the trick in "Miss Arizona", but there didn't seem to be a lot of point in that.
"If You Liked School, You'll Love Work" is a long-short story with a fairly conventional plot -- a man who has lived by evading his responsibilities finds that all the women in his life have ganged up on him -- but it has a lot of enjoyable detail.
The real joy of the collection, though, is Kingdom of Fife, which takes up the second half of the book. It's set in the less-than-delightful former mining town of Cowdenbeath and the narration alternates between two young people, the unemployed former apprentice jockey and serial stalker Jason, who writes in all but impenetrable dialect, and Jenni, the very horsey, middle-class daughter of a thuggish businessman, who uses standard English. Welsh has a lot of fun manoeuvring both of them into places where they are forced to rise above themselves and their no-hope lives in Fife, and feeds the reader some delightful treats of language along the way. show less

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

There is no central story to this novel rather it is a series of short stories centring around a group of drug addicts with the occasional alcoholic and psychopath thrown in for good measure means that the book's structure itself feels like an exercise in futility. Mark Renton, the main focus for the book is a show more habitual drug user who along with his friends are members of a grim sub-culture living in Edinburgh where drug dependency and physical violence is a daily battle. It sounds grim, and it is, yet there is also a great wit and energy from its wasted souls.

I found this a difficult book for several reasons. Firstly, its written in a broad local dialect which meant I spent a lot of time initially trying to rearrange it into standard English, there are still several words even now that I'm unsure of their true meaning but I think I eventually managed to understand the gist of the story. The fact that there are several narrators all with their own idioms only complicates things further. Secondly, the characters' lives are so far removed from my own that I found it difficult at times to see little beyond the simple waste of their dysfunctional lives that I felt little sympathy for any of them.

However, I also found the book horrifying, despairing, witty, compelling and engrossing in equal measures meaning that I found it hard to put down. Like a lot of people I've seen the film adaptations but would recommend that they give this a go as well but be warned its not an easy read. show less

Jaded Edinburgh cop and substance-abuser (probably a redundant descriptor in an Irvine Welsh novel...) Ray Lennox has been granted compassionate leave after a particularly traumatic child-murder case leads to a breakdown, and he is spending some time relaxing in Miami with his fiancée. Within 48 hours of landing in the US, however, he finds himself in a situation where a young girl needs his protection from sexual predators, in circumstances where he can't very well turn to the proper show more authorities for help, and of course all the doubts and questions flying around in his mind from the recent investigation come back to haunt him.

Despite the obviously contrived setup, this turns out to be a very engaging, disturbing book, whose brutal plot somehow manages to deal with the fraught subject of sexual abuse of children in a sensitive and often surprisingly subtle way. Although it is probably a book you will want to read quickly to get it over with... show less