An outing for Irvine Welsh’s cabbie lothario is slow going thanks to half-baked typographical experiments and lifeless description
Given that it features incest, rape, grave desecration, necrophilia and one character filling a terminally ill man’s saline drip with urine and semen, it is curious that the most shocking thing about Irvine Welsh’s new novel, A Decent Ride, is that it was published at all. Perhaps the whole thing should be read as a symptom rather than a story.
The novel returns to “Juice” Terry Lawson, who also appeared in Glue and Porno. An ageing and remarkably successful black-cab lothario, Terry has a portfolio career that now includes “supervising” a sauna for a gangster called “The Poof”, delivering drugs, appearing in low-grade online porn movies for Trainspotting’s Sick Boy and acting as general fixer to an American businessman and TV personality whose golf course developments in Scotland are a cover for his attempts to acquire a fantastically rare whisky. (The whisky is called Bowcullen Trinity, but McGuffin would suffice.) Lawson’s picaresque peregrinations bring him in contact with Jonty McKay, a kind of Forrest Gump from Penicuik, whose girlfriend has gone missing, and who has a large penis. As has Terry. But did Terry’s Dad? That is just one of the questions I couldn’t care less about. Terry’s penis not only gets plenty of use, even helping a young playwright forget about killing herself, but also its own voice, in chapters laid out typographically to look like an ejaculating penis. It is as if Welsh was so bored he decided to carve a willy on his desk.
Related: Guardian Live: Irvine Welsh and Jesse Armstrong on how to write comedy
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