Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, June 10, 2001

“Glue” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Irvine Welsh is best known to the mainstream as the man who wrote the novel that the movie “Trainspotting” was based on.

In the “rave” culture, he is revered as the man who wrote “Ecstasy” and “The Acid House,” collections of stories that depicted raver clubs and electronic music with the same sort of giddy, literary energy Jack Kerouac brought to road trips and jazz.

“Glue” is Welsh’s version of an epic – a fat, multigenerational novel that intercuts the lives of four friends. Terry, Carl, Billy and Andrew are working-class fellows from Edinburgh who drink, drug, talk and generally mess things up in the pursuit of sex, money and other highs.

Welsh relies on voice and set pieces for momentum, rather than plot, which can be problematic in a 469-page book told from alternating points of view. Because of the repetitive nature of the action and the lack of forward motion, there are times when you could swear you already read this chapter.

Another possible put-off is Welsh’s Scottish vernacular. Here’s a typical sentence: “Jist when ah think aboot shoutin oot the windae or gaun doon fir a blether, ah see thit eh’s talkin tae Maggie Orr n this other lassie.”

Well, a typical sentence except that it lacks profanity, the preferred form of self-expression for all four of the protagonists.

That said, the book nonetheless succeeds on its own terms. The men flail along, tossing off brilliant one-liners and finding moments of transcendence and dignity in a world seemingly designed to sabotage, beat and emasculate them. There are shades of Hemingway in passages where the men buck up and carry on.

However, unlike Hemingway’s stories, where men go toe-to-toe against other men or nature or fate, Welsh’s characters mostly battle self-created stumbling blocks – and these lads are not quick learners. This may be one of the reasons the book doesn’t so much resolve as fade out.

In the final chapter, a character laments, “Life had to be more than a series of unsolvable mysteries.” Welsh seems to disagree.

Entertainment & the Arts, October 17, 2002

“Porno” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Irvine Welsh’s first novel, “Trainspotting,” was an international best seller and a cult-classic movie. His witty twisted take on the youth culture of Edinburgh was daring and original.

Sales have been downhill for Welsh ever since.

His five subsequent books have been successful to varying degrees, but none has tapped into the motherlode of zeitgeist: “Trainspotting” nailed it. This is understandable, of course, as it’s a strange and rare confluence of circumstances that make a pop culture touchstone possible.

What’s a pop-lit author to do?

Well, Welsh has written a sequel. The “Trainspotting” boys are back: Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, Mark “Rents” Renton, Danny “Spud” Murphy and psycho Frank Begpie. They’re 10 years older, not much wiser, still frantic and depraved.

Sick Boy returns to Edinburgh, where he buys a bar and begins plotting to produce a pornographic movie, not just a “grainy wank-boy’s cheapo vid, but a proper pornographic movie with a great script, a decent budget and really sound production values. One that’ll enter the canon of great films of the genre.”

The other boys get into the mix, each with scams and schemes of his own. The surprise is a fresh female character, Nikki Fuller-Smith, a massage-parlor worker who dreams of grander things. “A flash of elation rises and settles as it dawns on me. I want to be a porn star. I want to have men masturbating to images of me, all over the world, men whom I don’t even know exist!”

The book is narrated in alternating first person chapters by the various characters.

This is not a necessary sequel — if there is such a thing — but it is a worthy sequel. Welsh’s understanding and abiding affection for these characters once again redeems them.

August 18, 2006

“Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Drunks have long been a comedy staple, and Irvine Welsh, the Scottish author of “Trainspotting,” spices up their drunkenness with drugs for an extra comic kick. With his eighth book, “The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs” (Norton, 391 pp., $24.95), he sticks to his tried-and-true territory of drink, drugs, sex and general vulgarity.

Danny Skinner, a restaurant inspector in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a heavy-drinking, drug-abusing skirt-chaser — about what you would expect from an Irvine Welsh hero. Skinner’s mother is a former punk rocker who loved the Clash — as did we all — and slept with three men the night of a Clash show in 1980. One of the men spawned Skinner. She jokingly tells Skinner his father was guitarist Joe Strummer, and he is beaten up at school for claiming his dad was in the Clash.

At 23, Skinner decides to search for his unknown father, thinking this might move his stalled life forward. “He desperately wanted to know about his own father before … becoming one himself.” Potential candidates include Alan De Fretais, a celebrated chef and author of “The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs,” an “aphrodisiac cookbook.”

A Master Chef, De Fretais writes, is “more than just a chemist: he is an alchemist, a sorcerer, an artist, as his concoctions are not designed to remedy maladies of body or mind, but attend to the far more wondrous task of uplifting the soul.”

Skinner’s soul is definitely in need of heavy lifting, weighed down as it is by various compulsions he’s unable to control or even understand, including an acute hatred of a tee-totaling co-worker, Brian Kirby.

“I can’t explain this rage against him,” Skinner admits to himself, “the impulse to precipitate and savour his annihilation, and part of me is horribly ashamed of it: the pathetic nature of it all, the raw, searing illicit pleasure this hatred of him gives me.”

Skinner’s super-intense loathing transports this novel from naturalistic moorings into the realm of magic realism. Skinner unwittingly casts a curse on Kirby, which causes Kirby to suffer the consequences of Skinner’s hard living. When Skinner drinks too much, Kirby suffers the hangover. When Skinner brawls, Kirby suffers the bruises. The two of them become mysteriously and inextricably linked.

However, this does not play out like John Donne’s famous meditation, “No man is an island,” but rather more like the Clash’s fatalistic rant, “London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down.”

The narrative frequently switches back and forth from third person to first person, and sometimes into a Scottish patois that can be difficult to decipher in the early going, but it’s compelling nonetheless. All the characters in this book, even the minor ones, are drawn with scary accuracy in Welsh’s unique voice.

Welsh stumbles only when he strains to tie together Kirby’s victimization and geopolitics, blaming the powerful for everything. The political lectures are as hackneyed and simplistic as the character portraits are original and complex. Besides, the proselytizing undermines the power of the story. As Joe Strummer said, “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing.”