Dead Men’s Trousers by Irvine Welsh – a last hurrah for Renton and company

The heroes of Trainspotting keep on giving – albeit in increasingly cartoonish form

Irvine Welsh’s style is so pulpy nowadays that it’s hard to imagine Booker prize judges losing time arguing over his sexual politics, as they are said to have done before ruling out his 1993 debut, Trainspotting, for the misogyny of its heroin-addicted protagonist, Renton, and his fellow Edinburgh low-lifes, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud.

Welsh has since tended to play safer, softening the cynicism of that novel for preachier, more farcical capers that take care to turn the tables on their unreconstructed male leads (while still relying on them for tang). Somewhere along the way, though, the prose has grown uneven: much of Dead Men’s Trousers– a fifth and apparently last hurrah for Renton and company, now in middle age – unfolds in the kind of airport-thriller gush (champagne is a “bubbling elixir”; people don’t wear clothes but “sport” them) that’s now nearly as much a Welsh hallmark as his X-rated Scots (“Ah fuckin hate the way some American cunts call lassies cunts. Fuckin offensive, that shite”).

Related: Irvine Welsh: ‘When you get older, it’s harder to be a bastard’