Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud are back in this wildly farcical story of revenge, sentimentality and psychedelic drugs
At a newspaper I used to work for, the story was told of a foreign correspondent dictating his report down the line to the copytakers. He rolled on, through paragraph after paragraph of purplish prose about the horrors of war, until he was, eventually, interrupted by the woman at the other end of the phone. She asked in a matter-of-fact voice: “Is there much more of this stuff, dear?”
Irvine Welsh is that kind of author. There is a lot of this stuff, and the quality-control lever is wobbly. He has never been a careful writer. At his best, he manages a sort of ragged glory, a life-affirming comic energy combined with a sense of horror or desperation and the ability to place his lowlife shenanigans in a wider thematic or social context. In a different gear, though, he is just a black-hearted farceur.
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