Irvine Welsh and the poetry of the scum

Trainspotting changed my life when it was released in 1996, but in my defense, I was 21 at the time, and a lot of things were changing my life on a regular basis at that age.

At least the things I took from Trainspotting weren't stuff like heroin addiction and fucking over your mates, (I might have been only 21, but even then I knew junkies did not look like Jonny Lee Miller.) I was more influenced by the way Renton could just escape to the big city and start a new life, or the way you could tell such a grim story with such huge energy ('Yes, this is the movie, not a trailer', I tell my little sister, 10 minutes into the film.)

I actually read the book shortly before the movie came out, because I fucking loved Shallow Grave and wanted to see what that crew were doing next, and it turned out that Trainspotting's biggest influence on my life - other than a deep desire for Sick Boy's bots that has never faded - was in the prose of Irvine Welsh, because he was telling stories about the sorts of people I didn't usually read about.

It took Welsh's books to show me how bloody middle-class my literary tastes had been until then, I hadn't read many novels about people on the very lowest levels of society, and it was brilliant to read about the kind of scum I saw down the pub on a Friday night, and find poetry and in their grim desperation. (While this led to extremely pleasant discoveries like the films of Shane Meadows, this also led down the path of writers like Bukowski, but they were always so fucking depressing and self destructive.)

Welsh's books are full of brilliant use of language, and incredible character work. They often contain outrageous coincidences, but that's weirdly more realistic, because we all have outrageous coincidences hitting us all the time. 

And while there is no doubt that Begbie is a complete fucking psycho and that everyone else in the book will rip you off without a second thought, the stories of Welsh's people are told without the usual burdens of judgement these stories usually have. It's just people finding light in the grimy darkness, any way they can, and the death of Tommy isn't a moral failing, it's just shit that happens.

While I did really like the second Trainspotting film for all its sordid slickness and its open discussion of the ache of getting old and past, I actually found the first book sequel more moving, with Renton getting in the ambulance with Begbie, rather than an attempted lynching in the top floor of the pub. 

And now I'm almost a decade behind on my Welsh books, but it's still nice to catch up with his books when I can, especially when he goes back to the Trainspotting cast. I care about Spud bloody Murphy, in all his uselessness, and the voices he and the others contribute to my literary consumption.