THE “LUSIAN BLAGA” UNIVERSITY OF SIBIU FACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS DISSERTATION PAPER IRVINE WELSH – FROM FICTION TO PHENOMENON PROFESSOR SOORDINATOR… [602262]

THE “LUSIAN BLAGA” UNIVERSITY OF SIBIU
FACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS

DISSERTATION PAPER
IRVINE WELSH – FROM FICTION TO PHENOMENON

PROFESSOR SOORDINATOR : STUDENT: [anonimizat].Univ. Dr. Ovidiu Matiu Mureșan Dana Alexandra

SIBIU
-2019 –

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. …………….. 2
WHO IS IRVINE WELSH? ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. …… 4
IRVINE WELSH AND HIS NOVELS ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………… 13
GENDER ISSUES ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. …………….. 38
FROM FICTION TO PHENOMENON ………………………….. ………………………….. ……………….. 51
CONCLUSION ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………… 58
Bibliography: ………………………….. ………………………….. ………………………….. …………………… 60

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INTRODUCTION

Irvine Welsh is one of the most controversial writers that English literature and the
universal literature ever had. What makes him so different from the rest of the writers is the
fact that he uses irony and black humour to treat serious problems such as: drug addiction,
crime, schemes, violence, sexual abuse and so on. Yet, what makes him famous is actually
the particular language he uses in his writings. Forgetting about Standard English, he uses in
most of his fiction the vernacular language of Leith in habitants, bringing a new colour to
literature, diminishing all language boundaries. Most of the critics were skeptical at the
beginning of his career believing that his writing is not worth a position in the literary canon,
but he proved them wrong, and b ecame one of the most famous Scottish writers. Welsh’s first
novel, Trainspotting, became a bible for the chemical generation, and after being transformed
in, a movie by Danny Boyle, it became an, cultural phenomenon.
This paper’s aim is to present the sta ges of how Irvine Welsh’s fiction turned into a
cultural phenomenon. Starting with a chapter dedicated to the writer’s biographical
references, because there are still people who are wondering who is he, and where he came
from, so I wanted to point out som e key moments of his life, which determined him to create
his entire literary legacy, so I named the first chapter simply, Who is Irvine Welsh?.
Probably, the larger part of the paper is claimed by the chapter Irvine Welsh and his
novels, which contains ob viously an analyze of Welsh’s novels. This chapter was created for

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a better understanding of Welsh’s fiction in order to highlight: main themes and
particularities, characters and their purpose, the evolution of his writing and so on.
Going further, the chapter intitulated Gender Issues, focuses on the relation between the
author and gender. Most of his novels are written from a male narrator perspective,
developing plots with male characters and female characters are usually left in the shadows.
In spit e of all critics, Welsh’s professionalism is proved in the moment when he develops a
plot with two female protagonist. I gave a special attention to the novel The Sex Life of
Siamese twins, because this is the first novel that proved to the critics that th ey were wrong
and the Scottish writer is able to write from a feminine perspective.
The last chapter, From Fiction to Phenomenon, consists of the path Welsh’s fiction
took over the years, creating the phenomenon that is today. It describes the steps he m ade, the
boost that the movie adaptation gave to him and his fiction, and of course the influence he has
on the future generation of writers.

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WHO IS IRVINE WELSH?

I have considered that a biographical chapter about the author is mandatory, because there are
still people who have no clue who Irvine Welsh is. Moreover, I believe that is important to
draw some main lines of the authors life, to see his background and the reasons why he
started writing.
The author was born in 1958, in an area of Edinburgh, Leith, area that was connected
with the rest of the city, due to its industry and its port. He was the child of an ordinary
family with limited possibilities, mother was a waitress and the father worked at the docks
and then changed the job, because of health problems and became a carpet seller. At the time
when he was still an infant, his family moved to Muirhouse, the place where he grew up.
Muirhouse was a housing scheme and part of the Second World War, urban development
programme in Brit ain. This place was filled with working class communities, that were
supposed to develop industry. The only problem was that the places were built at the
peripheries of the main cities, too far away from the urban life, therefore this places were
redevelop ed after in commercial places. The author himself, talk about Muirhouse in a BBC
documentary from 1995, where he presented his work as a writer:
A place like Muirhouse – like fifteen years ago you’d go to Muirhouse and it’d be pretty much the same,
sort of pretty drab housing schemes, not a lot there, but most people would have a bit of work and
there’d be a chance of moving into something different and moving on or whatever. But that’s just been
completely cut off and it’s become much more of a kind of gh etto.

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Welsh was not the type of a diligent student, and left Ainslie Park Secondary School at the
age of sixteen and had various jobs, he trained and worked in electrical engineering, but he
didn’t really like work any more than he did school.Welsh moved to Lond on, where he
became a part of the punk music scene of the late 1970s, here he tried to catch up on with his
education program that he missed so that the jobs got better even though he switched various
jobs before working for Hackney Council, where he met extraordinary people and where
Manpower Services Commission helped him to gain qualification in computing.He started to
have a great success in London and a good financial status, due to his skill in
entrepreneurship. He was buying, reconditioning and sel ling property, because he knew how
to take advantage of the housing boom in 1980. Later on he returned to Edinburg, where he
started to work for the City Council in the mid 1980s. The author was pushed by his new
employers to join a Masters in Business Adm inistration at Heriot -Watt University (1988 –
1990).
During this period of time, Welsh started to write creatively his first lines that would
later form Trainspotting and Acid House, using the memories from a diary and journal made
during a trip across the US in the early 1980s. He was feeling thankful because of his arrival
home, this was the pursuit he needed to create the brilliant novel, Trainspotting, being back
home in the time when Kevin Williamson, Duncan McLean, Barry Graham, Alan Warner,
Paul Reek ie and Rodney Relax were all doing their best. This is also the time when his paths
crossed with the mentioned writers. The author started to publish parts of Trainspotting, from
1990, onwards in DOG(Black Dog Publishing), the West Coast Magazine and New W riting
Scotland. The fact that Welsh used his journals to write his novel, caused a lot of fuss and
controversy among critics. They started to assume that Welsh’s life was similar to his
Trainspotting characters. They wanted to prove that he was an addict and a troublemaker
since he was a child, he got a police record at the age of eight because he played football in

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the streets, or the episode where he inhaled glue from his aeroplane kit.This events were
practically as precursors of his life as an adult wh ich was considered dark and dangerous,
because Irvine Welsh consumed heroin for eighteenth months, he stopped feeding his
addiction in the moment in which it started to hurt his body: What stopped me getting really
bad was having crap veins. Irvine Welsh is no saint, and this was a delight for the cristics, he
had problems with the law, and spent a night in custody, because he was arrested for
consuming too much alcohol and public disorder during a football match between Patrick
Thistle and Hibernian, in G lasgow 1996. This episode determined the author to provoke the
critics to believe that he is a football casual hooligan.
It is said that Irvine Welsh had a luxurious life since his first publication in 1993, but
the truth is that his life was quite modest until Trainspotting became a bestseller. The critics
claimed that he is a Scottish William Burroughs, but the author himself said that he started to
live like and had success only after the novel was a bestseller.
I basically do have the fucking Burroughs’ lifestyle now, cause now I have the money through the writing,
whereas before I would have loved to have had the decadent lifestyle but I just played at it part -time cause I just
didn’t have the money.

At the time he was a training officer for Edinburgh City Council’s Housing Department, he
created HIV/AIDS awareness groups. Most people would say that his works are misogynistic,
but very few know that he wrote a dissertation on Equal Opportunities, specifically for
women in the workplace.
In the 1980’s h e was working for Edinburgh council, Housing Department, the same
council that planned and controlled schemes like Muirhouse, place where he once lived. The
problem was that this housing schemes like Muirhouse, were transformed into ghettos, due to
de-industrialisation and mass -unemployment -facts that characterized the late 1970’s and
1980’s -, on top of that, Scotland was fighting a public enemy, the influx of cheap heroin,
which leaded to consequences such as: drug addiction, crime and the spread of HIV/A IDS.

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Welsh became a management consultant, he enjoyed social mobility and he was looking
forward to set up a property development company in Australia, but he was overwhelmed by
the people that were still living in the housing schemes. He managed to free h imself from that
environment but the others were still trapped in their surroundings. Welsh was familiar with
this people’s situations, because his own background is filled with a series of instructive
social and cultural tensions and overlappings. Many co nsiders that his interest in property
development and entrepreneurship is a result of the social class he had in childhood in
Muirhouse.
He was once a guest editor at a magazine which helped the ones in need, the poor and
homeless, and educated them to s upport themselves. This magazine was The Big Issue, and
the author claimed:
I’m always buying flats. I rent them through a property management agency. Edinburgh is a booming market,
and I don’t like to have too much cash…I get really schizophrenic about it. I didn’t invent capitalism. It’s not the
best way of running things…But I’m not going to be a stupid martyr.

This is not the only magazine, Welsh wrote for, he also gave a regular column for men’s
magazine Loaded . His activities were mostly focuse d on male interests, he had associations
with football casuals and male subcultures, thing that is in contrast with his MBA dissertation
regarding the disadvantages suffered by women in the workplace and his participation in
men’s self help and awareness g roups.
Most of Welsh’s work is best known for the narcotics issue, theme that maintains a
parallel in his writing between drug use and experiences as individualised alienation and
collective resistance. The madness of using drugs in the 1970’s in Britain, created a problem
at the social and cultural level, and in this context the author developed his major themes
such as: the decimation of traditional working -class identities and community; the social
opportunities and exclusions of contemporary society; p aradigm shifts in traditional forms of
masculinity and gender relations due to de -industrialisation and a move away from large,

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heavy industry to an economy of flexible accumulation and service sector employment (a shift
which entails the economy passing o f a larger proportion of women in employment because
they are more poorly paid and more easily hired and fired).
Welsh does not try to set the ambivalences of his own background and his own politics, and
we can observe that in the following text:
You can’ t expect consistency from an individual in a world that’s just full of inconsistency. I’m not into this
personal political purity shite. You’re a mass of contradictions. You just try to work through these as best you
can.
We can see the conflicts of Welsh’ s background among his readers. The readers are
various people with different passions and it begins with literati, academics and continues with
fashion -conscious middle -class professionals, clubbers, people who had never bought books
before, drug addicts, football casuals and students. It is proved in social surveys, that Welsh is
one of their favourite writers. Due to his popularity in the various domains of readers, he has
been resident in bestseller list for almost a decade. Trainspotting, his first nov el, made the
Booker Prize in the ten shortlist and made the top ten of Waterstones 100 Greatest Books of
the 20th Century. His success is obtained because of Trainspotting and it’s way of becoming a
bestseller , and this is why the critics see him as a lite rary and cultural phenomenon, they even
make the reference to the Trainspotting Generation. He was famous and a successful man, and
that is exactly why he was embraced by the contemporary lifestyle and fashion magazines, but
this is only another face of I rvine Welsh, if you look closer to his book covers you can see him
as the poet of the Chemical Generation as Aaron Kelly, named him, a new image of the British
culture that binds music and drugs, that are seen as a reaction against poverty, social exclusio n
and ignorance.
This author was accepted and loved in the literary world, due to his new way of writing
and exceptional topics, but he is not yet accepted in the canon. Some believes that this is the
result of his resisting accounts of a new multi -cultu ral Britain, and the class he describes is a

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pure scottish one, this is the reason why he is not accepted in the canon, not because of sexuality
or ethnicity, it is the class. Welsh said at some point that:
It is more to do with class than ethnicity. They tend to accept ethnic writers as long as they’re middle class. Hanif
Kureishi is writing about middle -class suburban Asians, not Bradford or East London homeboys. Whereas, Carl
Philips is writing about the l egacy of slavery, but is not acceptable because he went to Oxford.
He is often accused of being too political, he wrote a regular column for the Daily
Telegraph , as a part of 2003 relaunch. It is said that he use a little bit his fame to highlight the
oppositional political cause neglected by the media and mainstream politicians. Just like in the
case of Satpal Ram, who was convicted of murder in June 1987 and them proved to be innocent
because he was defending himself of a racist attack, so is Welsh defe nding and supporting the
Liverpool Dockers’ strike, which begun on Monday, 25th September 1995. This event begun
when five workers were sacked at Tortoise Docks, fact that caused a support strike and the
subsequent dismissal of a further four hundred worke rs for refusing to cross the picket line. In
order to help them, Welsh wrote together with Jimmy McGovern and a dockers’ writing group,
a television screenplay about the strike and it was shown on ITV. Soon after this, on an album
release to raise funds fo r the striking dockers and their families, Welsh wrote the following
introduction:
In August 1989 the Tory Government abolished the National Dock Labour Scheme: this effectively ended job
security for the dockers…The dockers remained on strike for twenty -eight months, receiving massive support from
the public and the international community, but were not recognised by their own official trade unions or by the
government. This album is dedicated to the strike and to workers struggling for their rights eve rywhere.

Going back to Welsh’s writing, he actually begin to write creatively out of boredom, in
the late 1980, at first he was writing at work to make his time flow faster, and he never thought
that he will ever be published. Anyway in 1991, his work st arted to get published with The
First Day of Edinburgh Festival chapter of what would become Trainspotting appearing in
Scream, If you want to Go Faster: New Writing Scotland, edited by Janice Galloway and
Hamish Whyte.

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Critics always tried to find an inf luence on Welsh’s works, but he disclaimed any literary
influence on his writing. As John Walsh reports in The not So -Shady Past of Irvine Welsh:
I don’t have any literary heroes at all, he says, I don’t take references from other writers, but from music lyrics,
from videos and soap operas and stuff. I try and keep as far away from the classics (he says the word with faint
distaste, as one might say The Government ) as possible. Otherwise it becomes a self -serving thing and you start
writing as a writer, ra ther than as a person or a cultural activist.

Anyway, the author is pleased to have such various influences on his writing from so many
different fields, it makes his work not so straightforward. He confessed that he didn’t know
what influenced him to write Trainspotting , because it lasted seven years to finish it.
I don’t know what the fuck I was into -I was so fucked up. It was a seven year gestation period writing that novel.

Even if he is somehow against the literary canon and the classics, he admits his
admiration for George Eliot, Jane Austen an d Charlotte Bronte. He said in an interview with
John Walsh, on Channel 4’s television series of The Story of a Novel :
They are still to me the greatest books ever written by English novelists. If you take it almost as a sort of canon,
on the whole they’ve been such a powerful, devastating influence on literature, British literature, European
literature.

He publicly claimed that the producers of the show, wanted him to talk about William
Burroughs and the Scottish addict writer, Alexander Trocchi, but he refused and after when he
was asked about this topic he said:
I think everyone is a big fucking kaleidoscope of feelings and emotions and things and it’s like colouring in -you
get your influences and they colour in and focus a part of you. I mean with Bu rroughs and Trocchi, I only got to
know them after I started writing.

As it concerns Welsh’s writing, he valued the traditional Scottish writing, the multiple
selves, formal fracture and different modes and registers of voice that he involved in his
work .He also claims his admiration for James Hogg’s creations and for influencing James
Kelman and Alasdair Gray:
James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of the best, most brilliant books ever written. In a way,
that’s where it all fucking starts from -all that Kelman, Gray stuff – that’s where it starts from.

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The author remembers the importance of reading Lewis Grassic Gibbon in childhood and also
James Kelman’s 1984 novel, The Bus Conductor Hines, that was for him like a key moment:
Kelman was l ike Year Zero. Furthermore he speaks kindly about William McIlvanney’s
Docherty(1975), pointing out the fact that literature can be written in other ways, and not
necessarily in a standard English and he says about McIlvanney:
this is a fucking great writer using his own voice, and it’s like James Kelman, to me, is doing that but just taking
it one stage further.And Alasdair Gray’s taking it off in another direction. So it’s always been there for me and I
feel really lucky livin g at this time cause I’ve got McIlvanney, Kelman, Gray and Janice Galloway.

What Welsh wanted to highlight mentioning all this authors, was the fact that people should
stop for a moment reading the conventional novels written in a standard English and sho uld
start looking for a new type of literature infused with the cadences and registers of working –
class vernacular.
The critics were harsh with Welsh’s Trainspotting , because of the language and its
structure, so they were refusing to consider it a novel, because it wasn’t a standard one. In this
case, Welsh protects his novel and says:
This medium, literary fiction, is a middle -class plaything, so you’re analysed, dissected and defined by people
who have come from a certain cultural viewpoint. They are l ooking into a world that they don’t have direct first –
hand experience of so they rely on intuitive views and prejudices which may or may not be appropriate.

The author was criticised often regarding his first novel, but he refused to be rejected
by the li terary world, so he continued to write and moved forward to create this world, in which
we the readers can feel what his characters feel and we can understand their struggles and tough
life.
Although in the literary world was accepted very late, he so to say pushed the button of fame
in February 1996, when Trainspotting, was turned into a movie directed by Danny Boyle.
Starting with that year, Welsh became the most controversial figure, whose literary works were
difficult for critics to assimilate, but it could not be ignored anymore. In spite of this, Welsh’s
novels received many good reviews, and his commercial success was unimaginable. After the

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movie adaptation, the author sold 1 million copies worldwide, and became well known in the
whole world, especi ally in the U.S and Canada.
Nowadays, he is involved in the movie area and he is a partner in two film production
companies. He is an active member of Four Ways films, founded by Antonia Bird, Robert
Carlyle and Mark Cousins.
The author keeps his life qui te private, but we know that he married for the second time in
2005, even though he promised himself not to do, same mistake twice, but 2019 finds him,
divorced, rich and full of creativity and energy, always travelling between, US and Scotland.

Irvine Welsh’s life and literary works developed in such a fantastic way, even though the
beginning was on the edge, he succeeded to gain his audience and today is one of the most
loved authors because of his direct, sincere and ironic way of writing. He i s loved by readers
due to his diversity of fields he successfully managed to bind and the fact that he wasn’t focused
to conquer only a type of readers, he thought on a larger scale and this is why he is loved by
the people of different social classes.
For a better understanding of his work, the next chapter will focus less on his life and more on
his novels and their content.

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IRVINE WELSH AND HIS NOVELS

Since the publication of Trainspotting in 1993, Irvine Welsh has produced twelve
novels, four collections of short stories and a variety of works for stage and screen. This range
of creative outputs, coupled with a prolific level of commercial success, has transformed Welsh
from a mere novelist into what the critic Robert Morace terms ‘a cultural phenomenon’. The
major publications on Welsh to date, Kelly (2005) and Morace (2007), ask us to examine the
author’s work within this wider critical context. The current chapter then is an attempt to
paddle against the current of recent criti cism and focus on the author’s fictional development.
It seeks to chart the enduring preoccupations of all seven Welsh novels: Trainspotting (1993),
Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Filth (1998), Glue (2001), Porno (2002), The Bedroom
Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006) Crime (2008) Skagboys (2012) The Sex life of Siamese
Twins (2014) A Decent Ride (2015) The Blade Artist (2016 )and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018)
This chapter will highlight key issues within Welsh’s work. These include representations of
class an d the author’s own contribution to the evolution of the working -class novel. The
treatment of gender and the depiction of drugs, violence and criminality will also be examined.
As will the formal experimentalism of Welsh’s writing. His evolution, from t he fragmented
and episodic narratives of Trainspotting to the more predictable plots of later novels, will be
placed within a broader discussion of the novel as a literary form. Welsh’s interest in genre,
particularly those associated with mass market fic tions like the romance novel and the detective
story, will also be addressed. We will consider to what degree the author’s work might itself
be regarded as a genre in its own right. After the huge success of Trainspotting is Welsh merely
writing to order , reproducing his own highly stylised form of pulp fiction?

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Trainspotting is a book that barely needs an introduction. Nevertheless, it is ironic to examine
Welsh’s fiction by beginning with a text that early critics were reluctant to describe as a novel .
For Michael Brockington it was ‘hard to call it a novel, more a ragged accretion of short
stories’; Sarah Hemming referred to ‘a series of unrelated episodes’; and Lucy Hughes -Hallett
described a work ‘broken up into fragments.’ Such statements accord with Welsh’s own views
about the anti -literary qualities of his work: ‘I don’t have any literary heroes at all […] I don’t
take references from other writers, but from lyrics, from videos and soap operas and stuff. I
try and keep as far away from “the cl assics” […] as possible.’ This anti -literary pose will be
picked up in due course. For now we can agree that the episodic and fragmented nature of
Trainspotting is crucial to the type of experience it is attempting to depict. The junkies, misfits
and s chemers that populate the novel live a highly chaotic and
unpredictable existence. Unlike the film, where Ewan McGregor’s voice over provides a sense
of narrative continuity, the novel eschews such fixed anchor points. Less than half of the forty
four, largely unrelated, episodes are told from Renton’s point of view. The rest are narrated by
Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie, Tommy, Renton’s brother, Nina and Kelly. Instead of the narrative
progress of an individual character the novel presents us with a community of voices. Notions
of community would of course come unde r acute attack with the rise of Thatcherism in the
1980s, the period in which the book itself is set. The decimation of heavy industry, the
privatisation of public services and the liberalisation of the free -market were regarded by many
as a specific atta ck on working -class communities throughout Britain. As an ideology
Thatcherism sought to discredit notions of class, arguing that the goal of society was to
maximise economic efficiency. This was achieved by individuals being free to pursue their
own sel fish ends. This change in social values, the breakdown in community, pervades
Trainspotting. In first chapter we learn that there are: ‘Nae friends in this game. Jist associates.’
(T 6) And when baby Dawn dies and Leslie needs a hit, Renton cooks up, ad mitting he will

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look after himself first: ‘that goes without saying.’ (T 56) Moreover, the heroin subculture of
the 1980s is a world where sharing, as in the sharing of needles, could quite literally cost you
your life. Welsh’s fiction explores the vacuum left behind by the disappearance of more
traditional notions of class and community. What little narrative trajectory there is in
Trainspotting sees Renton perform an act of rampant individualism. At the end of the novel he
commits the ultimate betrayal. He steals from his friends, turns his back on his community and
flees to Amsterdam. The novel’s conclusion is deeply pessimistic. In the post -Thatcherite
world society cannot be improved by the actions of the individual. Instead we live a kind of
econ omic Darwinism. The fittest survive by exploiting others and turning their weaknesses
into our own competitive advantage.

The lack of a stable vantage point mimics the experience of many characters in Trainspotting.
On the socio -economic margins of soc iety, their lives cannot be rendered by the cosy and
predictable plots of bourgeois life. We witness heroin’s utter annihilation of all other narratives
– work, family, sexual relationships – and its replacement with the terminal logic of drug
addiction. The formal politics of the novel then are intimately bound up with the book’s
interrogation of class. Welsh is highly sceptical of the bourgeois nature of traditional literary
fiction, describing it as a ‘middle -class plaything’. Trainspotting eschews man y of the traits of
the traditional realist novel, particularly its use of third person narrative. In doing so it aligns
itself with the textual politics that underpin much recent working -class Scottish fiction. For the
Glasgow writer James Kelman the form al politics of the realist novel are inherently elitist. The
omniscient third person narrator assumes a position of authority over the text, interpreting,
explaining and ultimately conferring significance upon the lives of individual characters.
Trainspot ting deliberately subverts such hierarchy. The characters themselves act as our guides
to the world of the novel. If Welsh’s work continues certain traditions of earlier working -class

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fiction, it also marks something of a radical departure. Trainspotting offered an important
corrective to the Glasgow bias – one that included George Friel, Archie Hind, William
McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman – that had existed within Scottish working -class
fiction. At one stage Renton wryly comments: ‘Ah’ve neve r met one Weedjie whae didnae
think that they are the only genuinely suffering proletarians in Scotland.’ (T 191) Welsh’s
fiction also signals a shift away from the depiction of lonely artists, bus conductors and
disaffected school teachers. His work focu ses on a younger generation, characters that have
never worked and in all likelihood will never work. It is their leisure time rather than their
experience of work that his writing explores. There is also an important generational shift at
work here. Wh ereas Kelman et al were publishing since the 1970s, Welsh did not make his
literary debut until 1993. His work deals with a post -Thatcherite world, a place where, as New
Labour would soon tell us, there are no alternatives to capitalism. The novel takes it s title from
an episode in the disused Leith central station, a place that implicitly gestures toward an
industrial past that has all but disappeared. The labour based society has been replaced by the
ethics of consumerism. Trainspotting rarely depicts pe ople working. Instead, through their use
of heroin, these characters are enthralled to a form of conspicuous consumption, a cycle of
behaviour that will eventually destroys them. The heroin hit recalls the endless deferment of
pleasure indicative of cont emporary culture. Like the consumer, the junkie is only ever
temporarily satisfied. Before long he must return for another hit, another purchase, another
moment of ever diminishing fulfilment. Renton’s rant – ‘Choose life. Choose mortgage
payments; choos e washing machines; choose cars…’ (T 187) – satirises the vacuous freedoms
of modern consumer culture. Here happiness lies in the freedom to choose absolutely anything
one wants. Such narratives of course conveniently neglect the fact that one must be ab le to
afford these choices in the first place. Ironically of course, heroin addiction represents the

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nullification of choice. The addict is highly compromised in their ability to exercise free will
and to choose alternative forms of behaviour.

The depi ction of drugs in Trainspotting is part of a general fascination for popular culture
within Welsh’s writing. For Willy Maley: ‘Welsh’s influences, or effluences, range across
contemporary film, music and television rather than resting on the [literary] ca non.’ This type
of manoeuvre, shunning the literary in favour of the popular, pervades Trainspotting: the book
opens with Renton entranced by a Jean -Claude Van Damme video; Sick Boy spends half his
time talking to and impersonating an imaginary Sean Conner y; and the novel itself is peppered
with references to music (Iggy Pop, The Smiths and The Clash) and football, particularly the
highs and lows of being a Hibs fan. On a train journey to London, Begbie illustrates the divide
between high and low culture, between the literary and the non -literary, in his own inimitable
style: ‘Wir supposed tae be doon here fir a fuckin laugh, no tae talk aboot fuckin books n aw
that fuckin shite. See if it wis up tae me, ah’d git ivray fuckin book n pit thum on a great big
fuckin pile n burn the fuckin loat.’ (T 116) What is at stake in these attempts by Welsh to
situate his book as some form of anti -novel? We might begin by questioning the author’s
attempts to downplay the literary qualities of his work. Episodic and fra gmented narratives?
Told from a variety of perspectives? And using indirect discourse to access characters’ inner
worlds? These are the hall marks of modernist fiction such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). In fa ct, Welsh’s fiction might be read alongside
The Rise of the Novel (1957) Ian Watt’s account of the emergence of the novel as a literary
form in the early eighteenth century. In the prose writing of Daniel Defoe Samuel Richardson
and Henry Fielding the st rict formal requirements of poetry gave way to a more casual form of
writing. Through the novel literary language comes closer to an approximation to actual
speech. Moreover, these early fictions were decried in certain quarters as signaling a lowering

18
of literary standards, a democratisation of literature and a worrying intrusion of commercial
life into the artistic domain of writing. All these issues pertain to Trainspotting. In denying
any literary pretence, Welsh mimics his own wily Mark Renton who is characterised by his
ability to code shift, to assume different voices and play to different galleries. The artifice of
Welsh’s fiction can be found it its ability to entice both the world of urban, youth culture and
that of the academic literary criti c. When Welsh does focus on taboo subject matter – drugs,
football violence, pornography – he attempts to situate these phenomenon within their broader
sociological context. Heroin is highly anti -social, an all consuming way of life that annihilates
all other narratives. For Robert Morace: ‘[It is] a potent floating signifier of social pathology,
political dependence, and consumer capitalism.’ When subsequent novels feature drugs it is
as ciphers within these highly politicised, ideological debates. T he anti -social nature of heroin
contrasts with a more mainstream drug culture in the 1990s. In 1996 Welsh published three
novellas under the title Ecstasy. In one of these stories he compares the ecstasy pills of club
culture with the wilful escapism of romance fiction. Getting ‘loved up’ and living for the
weekend are read in terms of a temporary reprieve from the everyday boredom of work life.
Later in Porno it is cocaine which is used to diagnose the unmitigated and aggressive
selfishness of capitali st Britain.

Whilst the film of Trainspotting focuses primarily on the issue of drugs, the novel offers a more
nuanced and expansive interrogation of working -class culture in Scotland. The themes of
sectarianism and racism, central to the book, barely fea ture in the film. In the novel the
characters sing Irish rebel songs at Begbie’s New Year’s party, whilst Renton’s brother is killed
serving as a British soldier in Northern Ireland. Trainspotting demonstrates the ambiguous
relationship between Scottish history and narratives of colonialism. A complicity in the British
imperial project exists alongside a wider sense of solidarity with other marginalised groups.

19
Renton’s infamous tirade that ‘It’s shite being Scottish’ openly appropriates the rhetoric of
postcolonial theory: ‘It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us […]. They’re just
wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture
to be colonised by.’ (T 78) Scotland’s dual status, as both vi ctim and persecutor in the British
imperial adventure, is most fully developed in Welsh’s second novel Marabou Stork
Nightmares. The book centres on Roy Strang, an Edinburgh scheme dweller who lies in a
comatose state in hospital following an attempted su icide. This was Roy’s response to the
unbearable guilt he suffered following his participation in the brutal gang rape of a young
woman, Kirsty Chalmers. The narrative oscillates between the fantasy world of Roy’s
imagination and his memories of growing up in Muirhouse, his temporary immigration to
South Africa, and his experience as a football casual back in Edinburgh. The immigration
episode of the novel juxtaposes the class politics of modern Scotland with the race
discrimination of apartheid South Af rica. Disempowered and marginalised at home, the
Strangs learn that as whites in South Africa they assume a higher social status. This situation,
however, is only temporary. The alcohol fuelled temper of Roy’s father eventually gets him in
trouble. He is arrested and the family is deported back to Edinburgh and Muirhouse. Roy
draws equivalence between his own experience of the scheme and the life of black South
Africans under apartheid: ‘Edinburgh to me represented serfdom. I realised that it was exac tly
the same situation as Johannesburg; the only difference was that the Kaffirs were white and
called schemies.’ (M 80) In separate articles Alan Freeman and Ellen -Raïssa Jackson along
with Willy Maley question the suspicious ease with which Welsh’s fict ion attempts to
appropriate the suffering of one group to bolster the persecution felt by another. This
deliberate comparison of class and race evokes James Kelman’s 1994 Booker Prize speech
where he described his own fiction as belonging to ‘a literatur e of decolonization.’ It also
echoes Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments (1989) where a group of impoverished kids

20
from a Dublin estate form an American soul band, claiming that the working -class are ‘the
niggers of Ireland.’ We might also read this co mparison in terms of a more general crisis
within the Left. By the end of the twentieth century the language of class, at least in its
traditional form, is regarded in many quarters to be theoretically bankrupt.
If Welsh’s work deploys the discourse of race as a way of re -theorising class, it is also
interested in how racism and other kinds of intolerance operate within working -class culture.
Begbie, for example, is denigrated as someone who is: ‘[…] intae baseball -batting every fucker
that’s different: pakis, poof, n what huv ye.’ (T 78) He represents the proto -typical hard man
who, whilst openly castigating his friend’s heroin use, is nonetheless addicted to his own drug:
violence. Trainspotting deconstructs the myth of the working -class hard man, de picting Begbie
as a bullying wife -beater, indulged by his friends and someone whose reputation is born out of
a psychotic disregard for others rather than any skill or courage as a fighter. Marabou Stork
Nightmares develops Welsh’s interest in masculine v iolence and, similar to heroin, locate this
themes within a broader sociological critique. As a child Roy’s father has him boxing his
effeminate half -brother Bernard. It is here that Roy’s sense of masculinity is intimately tied to
notions of physical ag gression: ‘TAKE THAT YA FUCKIN SAPPY BIG POOF.’ (M 29) We
witness the seeds of Roy’s adult behaviour as a casual being sown in his childhood. The link
between masculinity and violence is a learned response to life, one that is legitimated by a
particular set of socio -cultural values. Later the monotony of Roy’s working life as a computer
analyst is offset by the adrenalin rush of organised violence at the weekends. When exploring
why young men partake in such behaviour Marabou Stork Nightmares candidly reminds us of
its entertainment value. We might recall that Trainspotting opens with Renton watching his
Jean-Claude Van Damme video, anticipating ‘some serious swedging’. (T 3) In terms of a
wider cultural context the action movies of the 1980s would be seceded in the 1990s with a
number of highly stylised depictions of violence, including the films of Quentin Tarantino.

21
Marabou Stork Nightmares might also be read in terms of the more specific questions about
masculinity and violence examined in a book like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996).
Welsh’s novel portrays football violence as a displacement activity. It is a misdirected form of
retaliation, the angry outbursts of an abandoned generation of working -class men. At the end
of the novel Roy meet s his boss and has an epiphany about who the real target of his aggression
should be: ‘these are the cunts we should be hurtin, no the boys wi knock fuck oot ay at the
footba, no the birds we fuck aboot […] These cunts. Bit naw; we screw each other’s hoose s
when they’re fuck all in them, we terrorise oor ain people.’ (M 201)

If racism and homophobia are the dark underbelly of working -class culture, so too is the
misogyny that Welsh finds within this world. Begbie’s penchant for violence extends to his
wife June who, like his friends, lives in fear of his fists. Toward the end of Trainspotting Sick
Boy and Renton play a practical joke on their friend Kelly, telephoning the bar and asking for
‘Mark Hunt’. Kelly’s cries of ‘ANYBODY SEEN MARK HUNT’ are met with uproar from
the all male clientele and Renton realises, too late, that this is ‘lynch mob laughter.’ (T 279) In
Marabou Stork Nightmares this tension is graphically played out in the rape of Kirsty Chalmers
by Roy and his gang. Characteristic of We lsh’s fiction, the novel does not spare the explicit
details. The author justifies this strategy as a way of deconstructing mainstream representations
of sexual violence. However, for Evelyn Gillian there is a sense of collusion between Welsh’s
treatmen t of rape and the kind of patriarchal values it attempts to condemn. Such comments
echo the wider criticism of Welsh’s work by Elspeth Findlay. For Findlay the author’s novels
are complicit in the kinds of elitism they ostensibly attempt to critique. W hat they provide is
an essentially bourgeois audience with the opportunity to safely holiday in other people’s
misery. Marabou Stork Nightmares exposes the patriarchal nature of the justice system. Kirsty
is forced to publicly recount her ordeal and the n has her own sexual morality questioned by the

22
court, events that are described in terms of a second rape. However, Welsh’s feminist
credentials have been questioned by a number of critics. When Kirsty is denied justice by the
court system she visits th e comatose Roy in hospitalised and exacts her own revenge by cutting
off his penis. Female empowerment is represented in masculine terms, through the exercise of
violence and the reciprocal violation of the male body. But as Berthold Schoene argues, this
form of revenge sees Kirsty not escaping or transcending the codes of masculine society;
instead her revenge can only take the form of an explicit and violent attack on male sexual
identity.

If Marabou Stork Nightmares diagnoses the ineffectiveness of the court system,
Welsh’s third novel Filth turns its gaze on another state institution, the police. In contrast to
the decentred nature of earlier fictions, Filth mimics the narrative logic of crime writing
whereby the plot traditionally revolves around an outspoken detective figure and his attempts
to solve a murder. In this case Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is on the hunt for the killer
of Efan Wurie, a journalist whose father is the ambassador for Ghana. As with many forms of
crime writing, th e plot exists as a loose framework upon which to hang the figure of the
detective. Critic John Scagg’s describes the ‘Private I.’ of detective fiction as a form of ‘Private
Eye’, one which grants the reader a unique perspective on the world of the text . In contrast
to the quixotic Marlowe of Raymond Chandler or the stubbornly righteous Rebus of Ian
Rankin, Bruce Robertson is an anti -hero, an accumulation of all that is most loathsome in
Welsh’s earlier creations. Far from the enigmatic justice seeker, R obertson is a racist,
misogynistic, homophobe. He combines a misanthropic personality with heavy drinking, drug
taking and a ruthless desire to climb the career ladder within the police. Similar to Roy Strang
in Marabou Stork Nightmares, Robertson is a c haracter that it is difficult to spend time with.
As the novel progresses we learn that, far from hunting Wurie’s killer, the detective is

23
attempting a cover up as he in fact is the murderer. Unable to form bonds with family, friends
or colleagues the no vel ends with Robertson committing suicide.

If Filth sees the development of more extravagant plots, the same could also be said
about the novel’s form. Welsh attempts to develop, arguably with limited success, the kind of
narrative experimentalism that defined his earlier fiction. Robertson’s first person narrative is
sporadically interrupted by that of a tapeworm which, due to his unhealthy lifestyle, is slowly
gestating in his stomach. The worm’s voice appears in speech bubbles over the top of the m ain
narrative, gradually taking up more space as the book progresses. The tapeworm becomes the
voice of Robertson’s conscience which, by the end of the novel, reveals his personal history
and the events which moulded his detestable character. Welsh’s soj ourn into crime writing is
indicative of his earlier fiction in that it is the sociological implications opened up by the genre
he is particularly interested in. As Aaron Kelly argues: ‘Welsh makes subversive use of the
detective thriller in Filth to turn the genre’s formal logic of pursuing crime towards a
questioning of the very legitimacy of the police and the state.’

In his fourth novel Glue sees Welsh returns to familiar themes and motifs that
characterised his debut novel Trainspotting. Like its predecessor the book focuses on the lives
of several characters: Billy Birrel, Andrew Galloway or Gally, Carl Ewart and Terry Lawson.
Again Glue also shares out narrative duties, refusing to present a singular or coherent
perspective on the world. The ti tle of the novel alludes to the question of social bonds and
what it is that keeps individuals and communities together. Where Glue marks a significant
departure is in terms of its historical scale. Whereas previous fiction presents characters in
media r es, thrown into existence and attempting to make sense to the world, Glue offers
snapshots of these lives over a period of four decades. Beginning in the 1970s it follows the

24
four friends through childhood, adolescence and early manhood. For Aaron Kelly this change
of narrative perspective is arguably born out of the author, now a famous writer, and his
increased estrangement from the actual experience of the working -class community he attempts
to write about.

Welsh followed Glue with with Porno, a n ovel which saw the return of the Trainspotting
cast including Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Diane. In the novel Sick Boy and Renton,
enemies since the latter’s betrayal over the dope deal, return to Leith after several years working
in London and Ams terdam respectively. Porno then might be read as a book of homecoming,
for both Welsh himself and his two most memorable protagonists. The Leith that Sick Boy
and Renton return to is markedly different from the one they left. Like so many post -industria l
areas, it is subject to a process of gentrification. For Sick Boy the place is turning ‘from Jakey
Central to new Leith café society.’ (P 45) The characters in Porno show varying degrees of
adaptability to the changing nature of their beloved port. We recall the court scene in
Trainspotting where Renton’s ability to adapt to the situation that ensured his suspended
sentence. In contrast Spud, unable to act the part of the contrite defendant, received a custodial
sentence. Similarly in Porno it is Rent on and Sick Boy who are most able turn the post –
industrial landscape to their advantage. Spud, battling to stay clean and Begbie, freshly
released from prison, read the changes as just another form of the world’s inherent instability.
We might also read the heightened commercialism of this new Leith in terms of Welsh’s own
decision to return to these characters. In one interview the author comments on the potential
to make ‘mega -bucks’ from this his own ‘minor Harry Potter franchise.’ This willingness to
resuscitate characters, scenarios and settings aligns Welsh’s later fiction with other genres of
fiction such as the detective story, the romance novel or the thriller.

25
Porno also features Glue’s Terry Lawson who has begun to organise sex parties after c losing
time in the backroom of a Leith pub. Having bought his aunt’s bar, The Port Sunshine, Sick
Boy offers to rent a space to Lawson and his friends. When one of these parties is inadvertently
filmed by the security cameras, Sick Boy seizes on the noti on of a pornographic film as a
lucrative and highly enjoyable way of making money. Having learned about Renton’s
whereabouts in Amsterdam, Sick Boy visits him and persuades him to put in some money as
payback for his earlier betrayal in Trainspotting. In writing about the sex industry Porno
illustrates Welsh’s willingness to take contemporary fiction into new territory. Having said
this, pornography itself is heavily implicated in notions of voyeurism and spectator pleasure
and as such echoes earlier cri ticisms about the exploitative nature of Welsh’s fiction.

Like the evolution of drugs in Welsh’s writing, Porno diagnoses a wider cultural shift in the
1990s regarding mainstream representations of women. The emergence of men’s magazines
such as Loaded a nd FHM during this period saw highly sexualised images of women become
an increasing part of everyday culture. In keeping with earlier novels, Welsh examines
pornography as the apotheosis of late capitalism and its commodification of all aspects of
human experience. In Porno Nikki Fuller -Smith is a middle -class English student who,
rejecting the pretentiousness of University life, becomes a sex worker and eventually writes
and acts in Sick Boy’s film. Initially Nikki is presented as the kind of liberated , confident and
sexually permissive woman who might so easily adorn the pages of Loaded. She believes she
can redefine notions of female sexuality and its relationship to something as politically
problematic as pornography. Eventually she concedes the im possibility of securing any
meaningful form of empowerment from the scenario whereby a group of men leer at the public
performing of sex.

26
Welsh’s sixth novel The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs tells the story of two
young characters, Danny Skinn er and Brian Kibby, who both work as restaurant inspectors for
the Edinburgh council. The novel plays with concepts of doubleness and duality familiar to
readers of Scottish fiction as far back as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Just ified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1886). Welsh’s characters are polar opposites in almost every way. From Leith,
Skinner is an alcoholic binge drinker. He takes cocaine and spends his weekends ru nning with
local Hibs casuals. In contrast Kibby is a nerd. He is clean living, does not drink and spends
his spare time hill walking with a local rambling club. Skinner’s broken background, he never
knew his father, is juxtaposed with Kibby’s own domes tic stability. Early in the novel the
death of Kibby’s father sets up the books climactic revelation that Skinner and Kibby are in
fact half brothers. As with earlier novels, Welsh is interested in extremes of behaviour. Taking
its cue from the cult of the celebrity chef, the title of the novel refers to a book which Skinner
himself reads during the novel. A hedonist’s bible, the book details overblown accounts of
culinary and sexual excess, and acts as a guide to the overindulgence of contemporary soci ety.
With echoes of the tapeworm in Filth, Bedroom Secrets illustrates Welsh’s tendencies toward
the surreal and the fantastic. Spurred by his jealousy, Skinner somehow is able to wish all his
hangovers onto Kibby who begins to suffer from the after affe cts of his rival’s excesses. The
novel interrogates the hedonistic nature of contemporary culture and it false promise of
consequence free living. The long term implications of our current lifestyles, both in terms of
the environment and future public he alth, underpins the surreal narrative of The Bedroom
Secrets of the Master Chefs. Whilst Skinner attacks life with a reckless abandon, Kibby is
eventually hospitalised and has to have emergency surgery on his liver. In contrast to the
episodic nature of earlier Welsh novels, Bedroom Secrets offers a highly constructed narrative.
The book’s fantastic storyline is interwoven with Skinner’s search to discover who his real

27
father is. He believes that finding his father will explain why he has become the per son he is
today. When his journey takes him to San Francisco, Skinner realises that it is the environment
at home is heavily implicated in his alcoholism: ‘But the pull, oh my God the fucking pull, aye,
much stronger in dingy auld Edina than in sunny Cal -i-for-nigh-ay […] Every bar I pass
containing a face: a memory, a story, and the fabric of a life. More than the alcohol I’m
addicted to that way of life, that culture, those social relationships.’ (B 319)

In Crime Welsh once again fleshes out a charact er that had featured in an earlier novel.
Ray Lennox first appeared alongside Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson in Filth. In Welsh’s
seventh novel Lennox is on holiday in Miami with his fiancé Trudi. The holiday was designed
to relieve stress following Lennox’s involvement in the Brittany Hamil case where a young
Edinburgh girl had been abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered. Never one to shun the
controversial, Welsh’s most recent novel explores paedophilia and the vulnerability of children
within modern society. In terms of a barometer of contemporary culture the novel also draws
on the huge media interest surrounding the real life abduction of Madeline McCann in the
holiday resort of Praia da Luz in Portugal in 2007. Whilst in Miami Lennox, hims elf a
recovering cocaine addict, goes on a drinking spree where he meets a woman named Robyn
and her friend Starry, who take him home. At the party Lennox witnesses one of Robyn’s male
friends attempt to sexually assault her young daughter, Tianna. Havin g broken up the party he
finds himself the next morning alone with the girl and responsible for her safety. When it turns
out that the girls attacker is local police, Lennox finds himself exposing a paedophile ring. The
tension mounts as the off duty cop attempts to return the girl to safety and restore some sense
of moral order.

28
The success of Lennox as the lone individual confronting the forces of evil sees Welsh’s
fiction occupy radically different ground from where it began. For nationalist critics such
tendencies arguably situate Welsh in a tradition of popular Scottish writing, one which includes
the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle,
and the international thrillers of John Buchan. The modes o f popular fiction which adumbrate
Welsh’s later writing provide a potent contrast to the deconstructive energies of his earlier
work. Like the character of Mark Renton, the transformations of Welsh’s fiction have been
decisive, dramatic and in the end, ra rely free from controversy.

Skagboys represents the beginning of the so called Trainspotting franchise that Welsh
created. This novel focuses on the famous gang again, but the difference is that the timeline is
different, we are going back in 1980’s to Renton and his friends, facing the pre -heroin cusp of
adulthood. Welsh returns to the characters created nearly two decades ago, but the succeeded
to retain a sense of authenticity. In the first chapter of the novel, we see Renton as a student at
Aberdeen University, in love with his g irlfriend Fiona, who regards heroin a loser’s game. This
young Renton is not willing to take heroin, pretending to do more interesting and funny things,
he even says: Stupid cunt, turning intae a fuckin zombie oan that shite when thaire’s aw this
fun tae b e hud… this is not the character that Trainspotting gave us, but his change starts along
with his disabled brother, Wee Davie’s death. Together with the other characters Sick Boy,
Spud, Alison, Tommy and Begbie , the author successfully creates an orchestra of first -person
accounts mixed with third -person narration. This first chapters are powerful due to the intensity
of their stories. For example, Alison’s mother dies of cancer after years of illness; Maria the
teenager starts using heroin after her mother is imprisoned for benefits fraud. The intensity of
the stories come from pain, sorrow, sadness and the bewilderment of young selves going on
the wrong path, derailed by disease, death and poverty. The despair and suffer, push them to

29
the edge towards pain -relief and heroin. Renton’s changing implies a lot of inner conflict, as
his love for drugs increase the love for Fiona is diminuated. He feels that their university
passion unfolds tenderly, he becomes drug -dependent and he knows that she’s losing the bat tle,
and the separation is now permanent, he needed to break up with her as quickly as possible to
fully commit to heroin, that will never leave room for anything or anyone else. Before this
episode, he was somewhere between two personalities, one as a her oin junkie and the other as
an ordinary working -class man struggling to do good. Trying to find a good reason to split up,
he brings up a few topics that reminds us about the choose life monologue of Trainspotting and
he says:
She’s talked abut us finding a flat together next year, Then graduation, nine -to-five jobs and another flat wi a
mortgage. Then engagement. Then marriage. A bigger mortgage on a house. Children. Expenditure. Then the four
D’s: Disenchantment, divorce, disease and death. For all her pr otestations to tae contrary, that’s who she was.
Where his family life was a backdrop in TRainspotting, here it is rigorously, painfully,
depicted, both before and after the fracturing grief of Wee Davie’s death and his drug habit.
Somehow, Renton seemed t o be younger in Trainspotting, because Skagboys offers greater
emotionally depth and insight.
The other characters show less evolution in spite of Renton’s story that goes to a powerful
emotional trajectory. They are basically the same -Sick Boy is the sa me sexual aristocrat ,
Begbie is still the psycho and Tommy is the good guy, and they are nothing more than this.
Anyway we can find a frustrating emotional stasis embodied in Sick Boy. We know few things
about his family life (his bullying father and meek mother), but his emotions are not explored
even if he gets a lot if narrative space. His sole characteristic is that sex is as much of a drug as
heroin, he considers that is an alpha predator, whose feelings are hidden even for himself. He
is not offering us moving stories, but ironically, peripheral characters like Maria and her
descent into addiction and forced prostitution, does.

30
We can say that Skagboys’ success comes from its similarities to Trainspotting. As Keith Miller
would say:
The novel is perh aps offered up in the spirit of Dark Knight -style reboot, a return to the lean efficiency of
Trainspotting after the bagginess of Porno and Glue.

Some episodes are too similar to Trainspotting: the trips to London that appear in both books,
stints in reha b, even if in Skagboys, the rehab episode is richer and more satirical and so on.
As I said earlier, Skagboys and Trainspotting were written with third and first -person variation,
but the former has a greater experimentalism and ambition in its form. Rent on’s, emotional and
intellectually angry diary excerpts from rehab are cleverly circular, appearing at the beginning
and again towards the end.
As in Trainspotting, Welsh shapes a world that summarise the social reality of the ages, trough
personal fates a nd outcomes, we can see unemployment, union tensions, ignorance and the
rising of HIV infection in this part of Scotland. He claims that this is a time when hundreds of
thousands of young, working class people in the UK had a lot less money in their pocket s and
a lot more time in their hands. This are the passages, that are sometimes powerful or heavy –
handed that makes Skagboys the equivalent of a historical novel, a prequel, rather than
Trainspotting that became the desperately contemporary novel.
Trainsp otting wasn’t successful only due to its characterization and drama, but also in its
timing, because it captured some ages that had barely passed with all its devastating fall out.
Skagboys is not influenced by the political background and its urgency, tha t is why the novel’s
success stands in its absorbing, energetic writing. The author uses his descriptive style, which
in many cases can be crude, violent and sometimes unexpectedly poetic, but the secret
“weapon” that he uses is the dialogue.
Together with, Trainspotting and Porno, Skagboys according to Keith Miller:
The books coagulate into one compendious narrative a comedie sub -hummane an essay in social anthropology
which not only itemises the lives, loves, highs and lows of a generation of Leith schemies , but also attempts a
coherent political analysis.

31

The Sex Life of Siamese Twins, is a very different novel by all means from the others.
Firstly, we are not longer in the European space, Welsh its set in the American society, and
secondly the narrator are not longer males, but two women. By now, we know that one of
Welsh’s superpower is the compelling voices of his characters, even if this time we are not
hearing the whiff of Leith vernacular, Welsh delivers his message with the help of th is two
american feminine characters.
We are still speaking of Welsh’s way of writing, so even the main characters are women, the
action starts right away like a bang, where Lucy Brennan, a personal fitness trainer, disarm a
man with a gun who attempted to shoot two victims on a highway. As she uses her finest
kickboxing training, her moves are captured on another woman’s phone, Lena Sorenson, fact
that make the trainer a hero and a celebrity at the same time. At first, we might think that Welsh
will focus on the media circus, and in the novel we encounter scenes and funny elements
scattered in there for laughs, but the author has other aims, and pushes this this somewhere in
the background. In fact, the author focuses on nowadays themes such as: body obsess ion, co –
dependency and the American cult of will power. This themes are very well illustrated in the
novel, by following the relationship between Lucy and Lena. A major part of the story is written
from Lucy’s perspective, she is some sort of fitness freak , counting calories and working out
all the time, casting a vitriolic eye at anyone around her who doesn’t meet her exacting
standards.
She even says at some point in the novel: If you’re obese in Miami Beach you might as well be
in the advanced stages of leprosy, her language and attitude towards those who she sees as less
disciplined than herself are scathing. As Sandra Newman says in her article dedicated to
Welsh’s book: She’s a classic Welshian sadist dressed in a woman suit( replace narcotics with
protein powder).

32
On the other pole, there is Lena, an artist \sculptor, who struggles with self -esteem issues and
compulsive eating, when we first see her in the novel she weighs more than 200lbs(almost
100kg). At this point, Lena seeks for Lucy’s help to be more healthy and get into shape and
even though in the beginning Lucy was reluctant, but ultimately she takes the task a little bit
too serious, ending up drugging Lena, imprisoning her in one of her mother’s flats making her
to follow a strict diet and e xercise. This whole process, not only transforms Lena, but Lucy too,
they become unrecognisable by the end of the book. This develops another theme that Welsh
wanted to illustrate, personal transformation.
This book, shows us the failed American dream. In the American society is a pathological
desire for self -improvement, and Welsh find the perfect place to highlight it, the superficial and
vacuous Miami. There is the desire and promise to become a better version of ourselves in the
novel and is an alluring one, unfortunately there are very few who fulfill that promise.
The addiction theme is present as well as in other Welsh, writings. But here addiction, has other
faces, there is no longer alcohol and drugs that represents a problem -Lucy won’t even touch
coffee because of the toxic effect it has on her body – here addiction is represented by the
obsession for fitness in Lucy’s case, and eating in Lena’s. Another element that we find in
every writing by Welsh is sex. Thus here, sex is a addiction, at least for Lucy, revealing to us
a bysexual character avid for rough sex, while Lena channelled all her energy and talent into
her art, only to be demeaned and demoralised by a selfish, manipulative boyfriend who was
jealous of her talent.
The title symbolizes a mirror of the relationship between Lucy and Lena. The background story
of the novel is represented by two conjoined teenage girls from Arkansas who want to be
separated, even if the procedure would imply that one of them won’t survive, driven by the
desire of one of the teenagers to move forward her relationship with her boyfriend.

33
This is what makes Welsh’s writings so special, his books are commentaries of the society we
live in and he manages to deliver a message in a funny way with the help of his char acters’
voices. In this book, the author develops a deeply thoughtful and almost loving look at the
unique nature of the American experience and mindset. By no means this book offers literary
fireworks in the writing style, as Sandra Newman claims.

A Dec ent Ride, brings to light again a male main character, in this case “Juice”Terry
Lawson, previously seen somewhat one -dimensionally in Glue, Porno and a short story in
Reheated Cabbage. In this novel, we will see again the seedy underbelly of Edinburgh,
profanity, sex, drugs – things that are already familiar in Welsh’s work. He has established
himself as a leader in the miniature sub -genre where these four themes meet. Juice”Terry
Lawson is a cab driver in Edinburgh and a part time porn performer, he grappl es with aging
and the loss of his virility as he gets up to the usual blend of criminality and woman -chasing.
The book’s main issue is in Terry’s eventual struggle with his history and realities on aging,
but any scraps of wisdom are hidden deep beneath the painful prose and vulgarity of the
characters. Terry is living a grotesque life with no consequences beyond his eventual medical
impotency, capable of picking up women despite being a middle age strange guy with a
collection of pick -up line that could have been lifted straight out of the pornos in which he
stars.It’s clear that Terry thinks he’s on the titular d ecent ride, but viewed from the outside his
life is crushingly sad.
If Welsh does sometimes seem to be pushing his characters to lurid extremes just to see how
much we can take, there’s a solidity and even a charm to his cast of characters that grounds t his
novel in an unexpectedly persuasive emotional reality.
Terry is a champion shagger, with enough ex -wives and nymphomaniac conquests scattered
around the city to attest to it. Alternating with Terry’s first person perspective, are those Wee

34
Jonty MacKa y, a well -meaning, frequently picked -on simpleton who is put through his paces
when his wife disappears and Ronald Checker with a grand, possibly devious business plan.
Welsh skilfully ventriloquises all three characters, along with a ragbag cast of schem ies and
prossies. Once again, much of the novel is narrated in lowlands vernacular, bouncing between
points of view and featuring entire chapters written in phonetic Scottish dialect, that Welsh
favors. Given the sadness one feels immediately for Terry, an insatiable aging man with
multiple divorces and dead friends, it would be possible to tell a compelling story about what
means to age beyond the very thing you hang your identity on.
A Decent Ride, is described by the critics as a hilarious, pitch -black comedy, looking at the
age-old themes of sex and death, but in a thoroughly original and invigorating way.

The Blade Artist, as Glasgow West End claims is: Ultra -violent but curiously
redemptive new novel is elegant and electrifying. After Porno and Skagb oys, Welsh is going
back to one of his famous characters ,his novel focuses on the most violent character ever
created by him, Franco Begbie. Even though, Begbie was never a drug user, his addiction
stands in violence and criminality. He spent much of his l ife imprisoned, but after he has found
rehabilitation through art and prison education, he seems to left the violence behind. Moving
to California, having a successful marriage with his therapist Melanie and two daughters seems
like a perfect life for our old Begbie, now named Jim Francis. Jim Francis, is no longer the mad
man addicted to fights and stabbing, but a loving father and a famous artist. This new man is
not longer illiterate, we see him reading on his Kindle, A Clockwork Orange and he even made
improvement in his vocabulary, leaving behind his accent and vulgar language. The only
“violence”we see on this artist is in his art. His artistic trademark is to make models of
celebrities and them disfigure them. He’s no ordinary artist, as his agent obs erve, clocking that

35
some of the knives, in his studio aren’t traditionally used by artist, Jim Francis is a strange
one, no doubt about that.
Welsh suggests duality through this character, and this is visible in the moment when he feels
his family threate ned by two men who are later found dead by the police. At the same time,
Francis is recalled to Scotland by the news of a death in the family, the unexplained murder of
his first son, Sean. After attending to funeral, he finds the police doing little to in vestigate the
murder, but plenty of his acquaintances point the finger at the violent gangster Anton Miller.
At first we might believe that the story follows Begbie’s attempts to find the one who murdered
his son, but in fact he examines his own identity a nd relationship to the past. Welsh, offers
plenty of flashbacks that make us understand the source of his former behaviour. Right now
the character negotiates the two facets of his personality: Jim Francis, an artist who channels
violence into creativity, and Franco Begbie, a psycho who used a sharpened knitting needles
when he wanted to sort some poor cunt out. Welsh’s novel is then, a take on the established
trope of the double in Scottish literature, a tradition leading back to the Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The strange Case of Dr. JEkyll and Mr. Hyde(1886). The development of the
character climaxes in the novel’s revelation that Sean was not killed by a small Leith thug, but
by his younger brother Michael, a fratricide that alludes to Begbie’s disastrous fatherly advice
to Michael in Porno:
Ye huv to learn tae stick up for yirsel. Jist git a fuckin basebaw bat n batter the cunt’s heid in, wait till ehs asleep
n ehs kip, like, Tha t’ll fuckin well sort um oot. Worked wi Joe, only wi me eh goat a half -brick ower ehs heid.
That’s what yuv goat tae dae. Eh might be stronger thin you but ehs no fuckin well stronger thin a half -brick
across ehs fukin chops.

Michael’s murder is a violent realization of this advice, and it clearly troubles Begbie to meet
the legacy of his past unreconstructed self in his younger son.
As we are used to, Welsh uses a third -person narrative voice with a switching to the flashbacks
and to Melanie’s perspective . In a comparison to Begbie’s monologues in former novels, in the

36
Edinburgh dialect with an explosive verbal energy, in this novel the prose is sometimes seen
lifeless and flat.
Otherwise, The Blade Artist is lean, clever and propulsive. Even though it do es not shows a
marathon of obscenity as we are used by know, but rather violence that mostly hangs as a threat.

Irvine Welsh latest book, is Dead Men’s Trousers and is the novel that will bring us
closure to the so called Trainspotting franchise. The act ion is set in 2015, and finds the four
camarades fully grown men with successful business, all besides Spud that is till a drug and
alcohol addict. Renton is a famous Dj manager, wealthy enough to pay back the money he stole
from his friends, Begbie as we saw on The Blade Artist, is now a famous sculptor and a loving
husband and father, and there is Sick Boy, still into pimp business but now he owns an escort
agencies called Colleagues. The plot of the novel is developed by several topics: Renton wants
to escape from the past by giving back the money he stole from them years ago, Begbie wants
to make Renton feel how is to be cheated, Sick Boy wants revenge, and Spud who only longs
for a life. With the help of his famous gang, Welsh wants to illustrate the na ture of ageing and
redemption, and the means that is possible to live well under late capitalism. The author has a
habit of offering to his characters mini -political and metaphysical discourses that are often
variance with their nature.
It wasn’t a Welshi an novel is there not parodic onslaught of sexual slease, savage exploitation,
miserable cynicism, grotesque violence and male sentimentality.
The action starts in the moment in which Renton sees Begbie in an airplane, and is shocked by
the fact he is not attacked making him think that he was running all his life from a man that
does not exist anymore. When the gang meets again, they are about to travel a lot, we’ll see
again a lot of violence, and there is also a lot of things about DJing and contemporary art
business, kilos of coke and booze and also an ongoing plot regarding the trafficking of stolen

37
kidneys. Ageing does not change them very much, some of them are fathers, Spud and Sick
boy have sons, one is lawyer and Sick Boy’s son claims to be gay, so his father as a open
minded person regards this situation as a minus one competitor in gaining women. The plot is
entertaining, and it have some subplots one focusing on Begbie who is followed by a policeman
who things he’s a serial killer, and one focusi ng on Renton. The novel seems to have a
philosophical centre, reflected by Franco Begbie, when he talks about Sick Boy and Mark:
Him and Sick Boy thegither: it eywis annoyed the fuck oot ay ays when they went on aboot drugs…Ah mean, take
the cunts or din nae: but dinnae fuckin talk aboot them twenty -four\seven!.

The novel proves that wisdom does not come with ageing, our four characters being a proof to
that. This final novel of the franchise, is the novel that kills one of the main characters bringing
us up to a closure.

38
GENDER ISSUES

When in comes to Welsh and gender, perspectives are splitted in different directions.
Some will say that Welsh’s works are more often focused on male narrators and male
characters, rather than women, and the female characters tend to be masculinized, but i n the
previous chapter, we observed that Welsh can use female narrator( The Sex Life of Siamese
Twins) as well to create an unique universe. Of course the Scottish author is best known for his
representations of men and masculinity, creating powerful chara cters categorized as hard men,
for instance Trainspotting’ s Franco Begbie and Roy Strang in Marabou Stork Nightmaers,
prototypes of violence and chaos. He links the shock and awe with this toxic masculinities, as
Morace would say ladlit of misogynistic kin d for the Loaded crowd (Morace 2007: 128), his
writings are filled with a switching of gender identity being somehow unstable, changing
gender roles due to anxiety. This chapter’s aim is to present the direction of gender
representations in Welsh’s work an d the increase of feminine presence in his texts.
There are some critics that would agree with Stefan Herbrechter’s opinion regarding Welsh’s
writing, saying that above all, he writes about the dissolution of patriarchy and the
de(con)struction of masculi nity (2000:109). Furthermore, there is also a recognition that this
involves an unprogramatic inclusion of broad range of gender identities as a natural part of
his fictional world (Morace 2007: 27). Nonetheless, when it comes to Welsh’s fiction, is the
gender relations that give pause for thought to this potentially optimistic reading. In his novels,
men and women usually come together for sex and also sometimes intimating the viole nt
potential of male sexuality( the scene of a gang rape in Marabou Stork Nightmares), the author
created a delineation of gender relation together with the existence of male and female bodies,
have made critics to put labels such as the aesthetics of repu lsion (Riach 2005: 45) to describe
his literary work. In the context of a dystopian gender, the direction of gender representation

39
referred to above, clearly present us the presence of female characters in Welsh’s more recent
fictions, culminating with the novel The Sex Life of Siamese Twins, the very first novel with
not just one female narrator but two.
This new direction to femininity has made Robert Morace to claim that this new work
of Welsh seems to be trying to make amends and to prove that he can do women. (2007: 128).
This experiment left critics with so many questions thinking that the representation of women
in the narratives, succeeded to expose the sexist workings of a patriarchal society and it could
mean the end of its legitimacy, and also s ome critics argue in comparison to earlier novels, if
he continues to reproduce that which they are intended to critique, namely, oppressive
representations of women. Moreover, the later fiction seems to promote a repositioning of
traditional gender roles (Schoene 2004: 141), or female characters that belong to welsh are
merely dragged up, men XX-chromosome versions of lads (Campbell 2001: 8).
If we think of Welsh’s engagement with gender and the gender inversion of this latter image,
we might think of Bakh tin’s concept of carnivalesque. This concept is strongly associated with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, the theories that implies the relational nature of language and the
form of the novel that’s been all over in Scottish writing and especially in Welsh’s f iction. For
instance, Roderick Watson claimed that the Bakhtinian concepts of dialogical processes,
Rabelaisian excess and heteroglossia have become very valuable models for defining and
discussing the Scottish literary and cultural tradition (1997:5). As it concerns Welsh, we see a
lot of similarities between the concept and his novels, we see a strong reference to the language
he uses, the usage of vernacular as the interplay of a multiplicity of voices…fully embodies
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia [and] revels in…over -turnings of received meanings’ ( Kelly
2005: 25). Anyway, when it comes to Welsh is his writing, including unexpected reversals, that
create a scary carnaval (Riach 2005: 41).

40
The concept of carnival, is Bakhtin’s most popular and cli ched concept (Pearce 1994: 54), and
it refers to some trends in literary representations that involve the temporary cessation,
overturning or inversion of the world of monological authority and orthodoxy and the erupting
of the liberating forces of lawless proliferation and renewal (Morace 2007: 19). Carnival has
its roots in the medieval carnival which temporarily suspended and upturnes the orthodox
hierarchy and allowed, quite literally, the people their voices (Pearce 1994: 55). Carnival is a
parodic str ategy, which ruins repressive authority and constructs a cynical linguistic distance
between the two voices or perspective [the parody and its source], causing them to interrogate
each other’s truth, thereby refuting either’s claim to unitary, uncontestabl e Truth (Morris
1993: 155). One of the most important features of Bakhtin is the grotesque realism of the
carnivalesque, with, as Mary Russo comments, a focus on grotesque body:
The open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body
is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations
of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world. (Russo 1986: 219)
In Wel sh’s work we see a lot of such excess even from the beginning of his success with
Trainspotting. Eloquent in the novel is the episode in the First Day of the Edinburgh Festival,
where Renton had and urgent relief: Ah empty my guts, feeling as if everything ; bowel, stomach,
intestines, spleen, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs and fuking brains are aw falling through ma
arshole intae the bowl. (Welsh 1994: 25). Another grossly episode and this time focused on
women, that are traditionally associated with leaky bo dies, in Eating out, the waitress Kelly
takes revenge on some repulsive English white -settler type (302) customers by putting in their
food her own bodily excretions including menstrual blood and urine.
The representations for feminine might look at first like the carnivalesque transgression of
order, the overturning of settled hierarchies proposing a diminution of power relations which
could benefit women in the struggle to resist their inferior positioning. From Kate Webb’s
perspective the connection of c arnival for feminist purposes is not as straight forward strategy

41
as some would wish. Women and carnival, might, ultimately, be inimical because female
biology and the fact of motherhood make women an essentially connecting force, while
carnival is essenti ally the celebration of transgression and breakdown. (1994: 301). Welsh
never put a spotlight above motherhood, he writes briefly about it and for most of the times it
is not about caring mother, and in this statement, Webb puts women on another level, a l evel
that Welsh never tried to experience in his writings. In other words, in Welsh wrote his
manifests in a truly, frighteningly, carnivalesque world of violence, homophobia, the most
profound sexism, male rage and rape. (Watson 1997: 13). Kate Webb even comments this
saying:
When women become the object of this disorder – as they are in war, or in rape, or in kiddiporn – then the idea of
carnival becomes much more problematic for them, and their relation to it becomes an inevitably ambivalent
one…carnival is as likely to defeat women as it is to bring down order. (Webb 1994: 305)
Webb developed a thesis in which patria rchy relies upon such masculine transgression of
order as a reminder and a symbol of the very force which shores it up, thing that could illustrate
the carnival aspect of Irvine Welsh’s writing. Some say that it could highlight what Jackson
and Maley ident ify as a lacuma in Welsh’s work, the question of female agency. (2000: 193).
Surely, Welsh’s female characters are more highlighted by the plot and their
relationships with men, as Riach points out:
Women are more strictly delimited by the directives of p lot and their relationships with men then by own character
and motivation (2005: 40).
Actually, their identities are more fixed compared to men who are in constant change, are more
adaptable to situations, adept performers of their identities and effective mimics of multiple
discourses and language registers. One of the most eloquent example of such character is
Renton, who often uses his skill in negotiating a subversive path through the implications of
power in language (Kelly 2005: 53) as he code switche s between the Leith vernacular and
Standard English, scene surprised in the moment of his trial in court, when he avoids a sentence

42
for shoplifting, saying that he only wanted to read the books he stole and had no intention to
sell them, and he gives an el oquent account of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy (Welsh
1994: 165 -6). Another episode would be in the novel Filth, where the police inspector Bruce
Robertson spreads the sexist, racist, obscene language of his thoughts with a command of the
speeches of political correctness in order to reduce the progress of an anti -racism course he has
been forced to attend. Women are very often associated with the lack of authenticity and
presence, with mimicry and performance, that is why they are denied by this mu ltiple shape –
changing. For example, in Trainspotting, whilst the names of the female characters remain
fixed…the male figures are subject to continually shifting designations (Kelly 2005: 50) in their
various nicknames.
Although, for Arron Kelly this mi ght look like a sense of masculinity in crisis, the shifty male
identities could be interpreted with the characteristics linked to femininity – a lack of
authenticity and presence emphasised in the masquerade and performativity of identity. If we
think of W elsh’s earlier novels the female characters are marginalised leading to a colonization
of femininity in abigail Soloman -Godeau’s perspective, so that what has been rendered
peripheral and marginal in the social and cultural realm, or actively devalued, is effectively
incorporated within the compass of masculinity (1995: 73). This can amount to the exclusion
of women from representation and more complicated designation of the feminine. An example
of expulsion of the feminine principle is most dramatically ex ecuted in Marabou Stork
Nightmares, where a rape vistim, Kristy takes personal revenge on her attacker, killing them
one after another. At the end of the novel she tells Roy, the main author of the delict, before
murdering him you’ve made me just like you (Welsh 1996: 259), we can interpret this as a
masculinization of the female character, leaving Roy at the end of the novel as the main,
possibly the sole, victim. Thus, the lacuna of female agency, then, becomes an eradication of
sexual difference (Schoene -Harwood 2000:156), a dissolution of the feminine (Jones 2006).

43
Though, together with Solomon -Godeau’s theories, is a possibility to find feminine characters
in a considerable number in Welsh’s fiction, that often takes the form of an unfortunate
queering of the male body. In his fiction, we can see a various number of homosexuals,
transsexuals, drag queens and transvestites, bringing to the text a notion of feminised
masculinity. In this case, Welsh brings up that there is a feminine aspect to the hysteric al
violence of the hard man, as in one of his satirical portray from his short story A smart cunt(
Acid House):
One thing about hard cunts that I’ve never understood: why do they all have to be such big sensitive blouses? The
Scottish Hardman ladders his t ights so he rips open the face of a passer -by. The Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so
he headbutts some poor fucker. Some other guy is wearing the same patterned dress as the Scottish Hardman, and
gets a glass in his face for his troubles. (Welsh 1995: 276) .
The fact that women are marginalized, promotes a fast increase of other femininities, part of
Morace’s broad range of gender identities, as masculinity tries to define itself in relation. There
are a set of characters to prove it: the gorgeous young quee n (Welsh 1994: 233), Renton picks
up who looked like this lassie used tae fancy ages ago(234); Denise the drag queen in A smart
cunt, who embarrases most homosexuals and loves to be hated (Welsh 1995: 243), Bernard,
Roy’s broken -spirited pansy half -brother (Welsh 1996:30) in Marabou Stork Nightmares.
Moreover, the most extreme example is in the novel Filth, where cross -dressing and female
impersonation signal the limits of a psychotic dissociation. It looks like this novel’s aim is to
expose and humiliate the sexist male, found in a corrupt policeman Bruce Robertson. This
character is shaped with a relentless misanthropy, focused on the desire to cause pain, this being
a result of his own shame, living with the thought that he is the illegitimate child of an infamous
rapist. Welsh categorizes, explores and complicates this evil face of his character, and the e vil
shows plenty of times in the novel naturally, developing also the carnivalesque narrative into
chaos and misrule, changing the moral weightiness of all authority and argument. This
policeman is hard -drinking, takes drugs, is a corrupt sociopath, that i s not in itself an original
strategy; there is a rude satire in the novel, when Welsh gives a voice of reason to the tapeworm
in character’s gut: I know for sure that the complexity of my soul doesn’t even start to

44
approximate the basic organism that is my body says the worm, So what can I call myself then?
Well, all I can call myself is the Self (Welsh 1998: 70). Anyway the disorder of the
carnivalesque is for sure strained here, and the evil sexism and racism highlighted in the novel
can surely be interpr eted as a sign of the resentment that is the inverse of carnival’s joyous
relativity and that results when carnival turns bitter (Morace 2007: 92). Joyous does not
describe the reconnection with the feminine enacted in this narrative in Bruce’s incorporati on
and mimicry of his wife Carole. This might be a sign of his disintegration -a psychic
fragmenting of selfhood that parallels the breakdown of his body – which in the end results in
his suicide. There are some sections in the novel named Carole, Carole Ag ain and so on, that
are at first glance to be narrated by Carole, Bruce’s wife, but by the end we realise that these
are just projections of Robertsosn’s own consciousness:
We’re remembering how this all started: that when Carole first left with the bairn we used to set the table for two
and then we started wearing her clothes and it was like she was still with us but not really. (Welsh 1998:343)
Robertson’s cross -dressing is a symbol of the all -male, sexist dystopia he inhabits, where
women are not subjects in themselves, but objects upon which male subjects project fears and
anxieties (Kelly 2005:165). Thus, the connection with the feminine in th is situation is more a
trail to accomplish a male fantasy and only marks the marginalisation of women in Welsh’s
fictional worlds.
From this perspective, Filth represents a decisive moment in Welsh’s work, the place
and the direction after these queered c haracters massively disappear and women become more
prominent and narratively significant. This turning could constitute a reverse to the
colonization of femininity – a slowly realised one – and give to female characters a voice and a
chance to be heard amo ng Welsh’s mad heteroglossia, a form of retrieval and also the proof
that he can do women. In the following novel, Glue, a novel about male camaraderie and
bonding over the period of a generation, has the novelty of a group of women characters
introduced l ate in part four, who have their own stories to tell and whose lives are, at least

45
initially, perfectly unrelated to that of the men (Schoene 2004: 140). In Porno, the novel that
brings up to life the famous gang of Trainspotting , it has as subject the do-it-yourself dimension
of the porn industry, and one of the narrators is a young English woman, Nikki Fuller -Smith,
who is a student of Edinburgh University who seeks fame and wealth becoming a porn star. At
this point, Welsh’s female characters are more vo cal and visible, and critics observed that,
claiming that the author’s work became more conventional. In Glue, he jettisons the radical
typographical and technical experimentation to write a proper book (Kelly 2005: 175 -6), in
which for Morace much of the writing seems canned or a combination of the inept and the
inapt…stale language for equally stale ideas (2007: 124), while Porn is a flaccid read (Morace
2007:228). The central form of earlier narratives are changed now by adding a female
perspective.
However, the increasing of female visibility is characteristic to Welsh in many ways. His
female reminds us of his male characters, because the former are often irreverent and
exuberant; they are drinking, taking drugs, look for sex with enthusiasm and speak vernacluar
in the same manner the guys do. This characters invert the femininity scenario. In addition
Maria Pini describes with reference to rave culture, that these female characters explore a right
to adventure, and they are doing in the same way as th e men illegal adventures which have
traditionally been primarily the preserve of men (Pini 2001: 170). Welsh adopted the idea in a
parodic manner – as we expected – and this is how he created a short story from Acid House,
Where the Debris Meets the Sea. He had chosen four famous women, Madonna, Kylie, Victoria
Principal and Kim Basinger that are fading away in a luxury mansion in California, keeping
the occupied by fantasising over magazines and videos of sexy young Leith men. In order to
be more ironic and comic, he made them speak in the Leith vernacular: We’ll nivir go to fuckin
Leith! Kim said, in a tone of scornful dismissal. Yous ur fuckin dreamin. (Welsh 1995:92). This
images of women, brings the accusation that Welsh’s female characters are rude and l addish,

46
who are imitating men so they are not diminishing the oppressive and objectifying system of
interpersonal relations; they are dragged up men. Schoene analyses Lisa and Charlene from
Glue, and is against the critique above saying that they are as em ancipated females, who
categorically reject woman’s inferior place (2004:140), furthermore:
What seems more significant is that Welsh portrays his women characters as capable of forming strong homosocial
bonds, without the mediation of men, and that their practices of resistance and self -assertion are presented to us
as a true alternative to the men’s…What ensues is a dramatic deconstruction of traditional gender polarity, and the
tentative beginnings of a radical communal reassembling.(Scoene 140 -1)

Closing in the same manner the novel does on the death of the father of one of the four ferm
male friends, and marking the passing of the traditional males values he stood for, possibly
Schoene speaks the truth when he promotes such an optimistic reading.
This sort of theory can be tested in a text that focuses on female experiences. The novel
The Sex Life f Siamese Twins, could help to illustrate the theory having protagonists two female
characters and focuses on their bonding in unexpected circumstances. Being a Welshian novel,
respects the popular model of narratives of male bonding as we met in Trainspotting and Glue,
and the dominant themes of drugs – in this case fitness and toxic food – violence, carnivalesque
sexuality and the corporeal pleasure and pa in of the grotesque body, making us to believe that
these women are indeed female versions of Welsh’s familiar stock of male characters. This
statement is strengthened by Sandra Newman, that declares that Lucy, one of the protagonists
is a classic Welshian sadist dressed up in a woman suit…replace narcotics to protein powder.
Thinking of Welsh’s tendency for irreverent and anti -estabilshment male characterisation, our
attention is thus focused on the fact that he can only create characters from a masculi nised
perspective. But it could propose also in Morace’s claim, for example that, Welsh has lost his
distinctive voice and, with it, the bunch of voices shouting to be heard that made his early
fiction so urgent, unpretentious and compellingly local (2007: 234), that feminisation of his
characters could be the sole way in which to invigorate his jaded (Morace 2007: 124) literary
corpus. This freshnes of femininity might revive the languid masculinised form that could only

47
serve to further the colonisation a nd objectification of the feminine which undermines the
subversive potential of literary carnival where women are concerned.
Certainly, The Sex life of Siamese Twins has aspects of the carnivalesque about it to make us
wary on this count. In the novel we e ncounter murder sequences, fancy painting parties, media
fame, unexpected plot twists, all put under the light of an ironic spotlight. However its sustained
focus on female experiences does foreground serious consideration of the particular material
detail of female oppression: the sexual abuse of both characters, Lucy and Lena; the effects of
trauma, body shaming and its consequences of a fascistic conceptualisation of the female body
all contribute to the oppressive pattern of women’s life represented her e. As an example, we
have the moment in which Lucy focuses more on Lena’s diet, burst into her home, throws away
all her toxic food and the body shames here in front of a mirror, she uses her as an example of
how a female body should look like. Lucy promot es the image of a fit, smooth classical body.
This moment is also carnivalesque one, as exposing Lena with no shame, pointing out how she
should look like so she evokes the countercultural connotations of the grotesque body – we
acknowledge the excess that is present as well as the fit that is absent.
The boundaries of femininity are well explored in The Sex Life of Siamese Twins. In this
novel, Welsh tries to think like a woman to describe each experience in particular, power,
talent, love and motherhood in the most unnexpected way in order to create a proper universe
for his first female narrators. The opening of the novel introduced us to the moment in which
Lucy puts a man with a gun down with her kickboxing skills, moment that is captured by Lena
with h er phone, making Lucy a star overnight. The story focuses on the relationship built
between Lena and Lucy, starting with the level of trainer and student, ending in friendship and
marriage. As we know by know, from the previous chapter, Lucy is a fitness t rainer, obsessed
with calories and extreme sport and Lena on the other hand, is a retired sculptor who found
comfort in food and cute pictures with small animals. What links the two of them is the sexual

48
abuse, Lucy was raped by a gang of boys and she was blamed for it, and Lena was abused by
her parter who was jelous of her talent. Those events shape the future women, resulting an
exaggerating improper behaviour, where Webb comments, saying that women are not subjects
but the object of disorder. Russo ads to that:
The marginal position of women and others in the indicative world makes their presence in the subjective or
possible world of the topsy -turvy carnival quintessentially dangerous…In the everyday indicative world, women
and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already
transgressive – dangerous, and in danger. (Russo 1986:217).
The carnivalesque is centred on the moment in which Lucy kills Lena’s former
boyfriend and Lena transforms him in on e of her sculptures. This situation proves that female
characters could be in danger even if they rule the narration, the carnival misrule so is by
definition a temporary state, in many ways a licensed disorder, the empowering in any manner
of the marginal marginalised, such as women, is a dangerous precedent not without effects
when the status quo is restored. Eloquent in this sense is the moment in which Lucy finds out
that the man with the gun, was actually abused in childhood by two attackers, the suppo sed
victims of that time. The media goes crazy in the moment when the police finds out the body
of a little girl, discovered in the house of one of the attackers, making Lucy to be seen as an
enemy and no longer a hero.
Even in its modes of disorder, there must be a reminder and a symbol, using Webb’s word, of
patriarchy’s power.
A situation of hierarchical reversal is highlighted is that Lucy takes revenge on society. Male
violence in Welsh’s fiction is almost an obsession -men in his works tend to be las civious, lying
scumbags, and of the few male treated in other way is in this novel, where a male character
happens to have had half penis bitten off by a barracuda, this also being a carnivalesque
situation. Welsh’s male characters are contradictory, at on ce anarchic and conventional,
signalling the limitations of his carnivalesque subversion in an age and for a generation for

49
whom the conflation of subcultural dissent and entrepreneurial capitalism holds no
contradiction. (Monk 1996:285)
However, in the d irection of his engagement with gender relations and the last
representation of a rebellious woman, could be the revolutionary inconsistencies and frequent
annihilation of Welsh’s male characters full of maculine inability, except through colonisation,
to connect with the feminie and its potential to refresh critical disruption. This is meaningful ,
for example in this novel the female protagonists are marginalised in their past in a continuing
threat of order, but they have also a moral upper -hand in contr ast to many of Welsh’s men as
the worst of the women’s violence is contained in fantasies. The protagonists are capable of
aggression: one of them is able to kill and the other to mask the murder into art. Yet this murder
episode is seen as a self -defendin g mechanism, these agressive acts are seen as Scoene’s says
practices of resistance and self -assertion even if they do not constitute a true alternative to the
men’s (2004:140). In the novel, the female resistance, sometimes violent to male exploitation
and cruelty evokes Schoene’s desire for a turbulent reshuffling and communal reassembling
(141) of gender roles and relations, a process of repositioning which is beginning to be imagines
here.
This radical possibilities might come from female resistance to dominant hegemonic
femininity, as with the very well shaped female characters from The Sex Life of Siamese Twins.
In conclusion to this Clair Wills writes of Klaus Theweileit’s argument in Male Fantasies that
is presenting a different history of the creation of bourgeois identity…he stresses the part played
by a fantasy construction of womanhood in the evolution of a civilised ego, that this distorted
fantasy arises from a historically repres sed femaleness. (2001:93). As an example, the image
of Bruce Robertson’s imitation of his wife Carole, is resisted by Lucy and Lena who create
their own versions of the story. This female characters are seen as agents of anti -bourgeois
disaffection and the y are Welsh’s only potential female rebels. The novel revitalized Welsh’s

50
writing, by adding the carnivalesque for promoting social change where women are concerned
and also proved that he can do women.

51

FROM FICTION TO PHENOMENON

Being a phenomenon means seeing more of your novels dominate a bestseller list for
eight months, then Irvine Welsh is indeed a Scottish and a worldwide phenomenon. If we think
of his success after Trainspotting publication in ‘93, in less than three years, adaptations of
Welsh’s work have been staged by both Edinburgh’s Traverse and Glasgow’s Citizen’s
theaters. Nowadays, this adaptation moved forward, from theater adaptation to movies and
musicals, making the author Irvine Welsh, some sort of real life sup erstar. The author himself
said in an interview for Louisiana TV, that success changes people’s perception about you,
because you go from being this junkie loser who was writing his memoir, into some kind of
artist, to a massively talented person. Of cou rse, all this fame and success were nothing without
his peculiar fiction. We saw in the previous chapters a glimpse of what his fiction means and
what are the issues and themes that he tries to illustrate in a particular manner. Some would
say that his fi ction is raw, drug -infested, brutal, funny and he has broken most of the rules and
got away with it, but he won the hearts of his readers and became the author of the people who
don’t buy books. His fiction was criticized often, but he knew what was doing , Welsh has
secured his audience and he knew it, as Ian Bellif states in The Guardian (1995):
The young clubbers who devour his book don’t read critics a fact that may explain both his success and the
apparently terminal condition of the English novel, wri tten by reviewers for reviewers. The people buying his
books are the people who don’t buy books.

By far, the attention was brought to fiction focusing on the main novels of the authors,
but this chapter’s purpose is to point out the characteristics that turned Irvine Welsh’s fiction
to a phenomenon.

52
As we know by now, in the early 1980’s Irvine Welsh’s life was going nowhere fast. His
teenage dreams of being a rock star, or a famous footballer, were over, and he was stuck in a
series of dull white collar jobs which he despised. He was drinking heavily and experimenting
with heroin. The outlook wasn’t good. With the advice of someone close to him, he threw the
dice one last time and started writing. This is how Trainspotting was born, the novel that
change d everything. At the beginning the reviews were good, but even Welsh’s publishers
didn’t hold out high hopes. Yet just a couple of years later, the novel, a dazzling collection of
loosely connected stories, was voted the greatest novel of the twentieth cen tury in a UK poll.
It went to sell over one million copies in the UK alone and has been translated into thirty
languages and it was also declared , the most shoplifted novel in British publishing history.
Practically, this book changed his life in good an d assured him with the fame that he has today,
and Trainspotting became somehow a symbol of the ‘90s. He said at some point in an interview,
that his mother was worried when the book came out, telling him that he shouldn’t wash his
laundry in front of the public, giving the source of inspiration, but she came along and read all
her son’s books.
In spite of all critics, Trainspotting became the voice of a generation, and it was pronounced
The best book ever written by man or woman…deserves to sell more co pies than The Bible,
(Rebel Inc.), he was declared by The Sunday Times, The voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser
and grow eloquent…Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He
is the best thing that has happened to British wri ting for decades.
The novel, was turned into a stage version by Harry Gibson, who would go on to adapt more
of Welsh’s novels. At first was mounted as a studio offering at Glasgow Citizens Theatre in
1994, it received a full -scale production at the Traver se Theatre during the 1995 Edinburgh
Fringe, and then transferred to London’s Bush Theatre and the West End.

53
Yet the best thing is about to happen soon after Danny Boyle saw the play, which led to the
1996 film that took Trainspotting to another level of cultural phenomenon. Danny Boylde,
hired John Hodge, his collaborator on 1994 Brit flick Shallow Grave, to adapt Trainspotting
for the screen, eschewing the episodic, multiple narrator structure of the novel for the more
linear demands of a feature film. T he movie adaptation wasn’t a blessing only for the author,
but for some very young actors. The film version became a stunning award -winner, rebooting
the UK film industry and helping to launch the careers of a squad of young Scottish actors such
as Ewan Mc Gregor, that played Renton, Kelly Macdonald (Diane), Ewer Bremner, who
originated Renton on stage, became Spud, Jonny Lee Miller as Sick Boy, Robert Carlyle as
Begbie, and so on. The film, shot on a budget of 1.5 million dollars, went on to gross that 72
million dollars at the global box office and, like the book before it, sparked critical acclaim and
controversy in equal measure. During the 1996 US presidential campaign, Republican nominee
Bob Dole condemned the film for its perceived moral depravity and glorification of drugs. The
movie was the highest -growing British film of 1996, and was ranked tenth in the British Film
Institute’s list of Top 100 British films of all time. Amongst its many accolades it was
nominated for an Oscar and three BAFTAs, and i t garnered Ewan McGregor numerous Best
Actor prizes, catapulting him into the major league of British screen stars.
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television.
Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc p layers and electrical tin openers…, it’s a
monologue most beyond the millennial divide can instantly recall from reading this novel,
narrated by a rugged, youthful Ewan McGregor in the opening of the now a cult -classic film
or seeing reproduced on poster s and other adolescent paraphernalia during the decade after
Trainspotting was published. The movie pushed the novel to fame, and it became an influence
on its audience. This monologue became the most used quote in all kinds of campaigns and

54
promos, but mo st of them were using the quote for anti -drug campaigns. The author himself
said that, Trainspotting has an influence on drug education:
IF you look at all the drug education stuff, the anti -drug propaganda, it’s practically been lifted right out of
Trains potting.

The fame of the novel, the memorable characters and their nasty situations, became
lessons for worldwide teenagers.
The phenomenon does not stop after Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh have very convinced
fans. They love and respect his work, but they involuntary became addicts by reading his books.
The author is feeding them with new books, where we can find the original squ ad in different
situations and stages of life. So the phenomenon is sustained even today because Welsh never
stopped writing.
Twenty years after the Trainspotting movie was released, its original stars reunited to
shoot its long talked -about sequel. T2 or Trainspotting 2, released in January 2017, found
Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie back in Edinburgh where they’re now attempt ing to
conquer the porn industry. Despite the years of protesting that they could ever tamper with the
legacy of the original, it seems that Boyle and the actors couldn’t resist. Resistance has also
proved futile for Welsh, because the movie T2 is based on his 2002 novel Porno. What is
memorable in both movies is that Irvine Welsh, had a cameo role of the drug dealer Mikey
Forrester, and he and the actors were very enthusiasts to bring the squad back to life again. In
whichever form they appear, the charact ers’ exploits seem to feed the phenomenon.
This madness continues, even though it doesn’t have the same characters, because there
was an ecranisation after another novel by Welsh, namely Filth. Scripted and directed by Jon
S Baird, Filth shares some of t he Trainspotting energy. It takes a determinedly worm’s eye
view of human nature. It is obscene, puerile and cynical by turns -and that’s its glory. The
producers reportedly struggled to find financiers who would go near such miasmatic material.

55
Nonetheless , thanks to tremendous performance from James McAvory, the film has an
emotional kick that we did not expect.
Irvine Welsh, knows how to maintain the phenomenon alive, he is keeping his audience
updated through his Twitter account, interacts with them and he keeps writing. People are still
very interested in his work and very interested about the destiny of the original squad from
Trainspotting, that is why he released in 2018, his latest book, Dead Men’s Trousers, bringing
the squad together once more, on ly to feed again the phenomenon.
Nowadays, this phenomenon is still very powerful, because Welsh has never stopped
to inspire young writers to create a world as they like. He influenced them to write freely
without all the literary fireworks, to write fro m experience and their own feelings. Even though
for the author, re -reading his own work was like a nightmare, -he states this in an interview for
The Independent: Aw man, it was fucking shite re -reading Trainspotting…you know what it’s
like, you don’t w ant to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you
would do differently. It wasn’t a great experience – for younger writers his work was the base
of their own literary career and it seems like it blew the doors of literature off their hinges and
it is like anything is possible. Of course this was seen as a curse and a blessing at the same
time, for every author that is under pensionable age and he tries to write about young people
taking drugs in a vernacular language is automatically compared to Welsh. But a quick straw
poll of young British novelists shows that, cutting across location, gender, class and narrative
styles, the phenomenon created by Welsh remains a pivotal work.
Younger writers like Helen Walsh, whose debut novel Brass , created a madness in
2005, said about Welsh that when his first novel came across she was 13 or 14, and it was an
inspiration to her. She said:
It was the first working -class British novel that was validated by both the literary establishment and the wor king
classes sought to portray. Welsh created a modern proletarian English literature, while becoming the voice and
hero of a disenfranchised generation. Later, as a young writer, it gave me the confidence to depict the extremes
and excesses of a marginali sed end of society, in the rhythm and patois of the streets.

56
The Trainspotting phenomenon had an extreme effect on teenage minds and the young
Middlesbrough writer Richard Milward agrees saying:
It made me realise you can write about anything. Irvine’s b ook was the first, and possibly still the best example
of high and low art colliding in literature. And it seemed unflinchingly honest. Irvine is about as punk as literature
can get. He validated breaking any taboo worth breaking and he’s still doing it, w ith a cracking sense of humour,
to boot.

As for Doug Johnstone, that mix of high and low art and the often -overlooked comedy were
crucial. He said that:
James Kelman had been writing about working -class culture in Scottish vernacular for years, but his b ooks didn’t
speak to me like Welsh’s they seemed rather humourless and never contained contemporary cultural references.
In contrast, Trainspotting was full of comedic set pieces, recognisable scathing banter and mentions Iggy Pop and
Sean Connery. I was s old.

Furthermore, even if they don’t write in vernacular other Scottish novelists like Ewan
Morrison, who writes his books in Standard English describing middle -class Gen X -ers says:
What I really like about Welsh is that, after Trainspotting, you didn’t have to try to pretend that you were writing
high literature, flagging up big themes: mortality and timelessness, love and loss, all that baby boomer pish. He
just said, no, we’re trapped in this culture, a lot of it is really shite and we should write ab out that with a sense of
humour and empathy for those trapped within it.

For others this empathy was the key, for instance the Welsh writer Niall Griffiths said:
The total lack of authorial censure in Trainspotting gave those characters humanity and dign ity. I thought the
compassion in that book was astonishing. Trainspotting was about an entire class that was being dehumanised and
made invisible. Welsh showed that world and that literature doesn’t have to be about posh Oxbridge people. I
remember thinkin g it was a world away from Amis and McEwan. Books should be psychic fuel for the living,
and Trainspotting gave people the idea that there is an alternative which is just as literary, just as thoughtful and
intelligent, but that also has urgency.

These ar e just a few confessions that young writers wanted to point out about Irvine Welsh’s
work and his impact upon them. The author himself wanted to say why people resonate with
his literary work and the impact he had on his readers, that is why he said:
I think it was two things. First, there were the characters -they’re very vividly drawn, so you’re pulled into their
world and their thought processes. And related to that, you’re seeing a world that you know exists, that everyone
knows – even a middle class stu dent who smokes a bit of dope still has to score it from somebody – but that hadn’t
been depicted before.
I think these were the things that resonated. I’m appreciative of the fact it still speaks to readers, but it doesn’t
have any deep resonance for me. T o me, it’s just another piece of work.

In addition, the phenomenon created by Irvine Welsh starting with his debut novel,
Trainspotting is clearly a strong influence upon its readers and future writers. Due to his free

57
way of expressing himself, to the ir onically and humorous perspective he developed a new
direction not only in literature, but in film industry too. This transition from fiction to
phenomenon was made step by step and built a strong connection between the writer and his
readers, making the a uthor to create even more brilliant works to keep this connection alive.

58
CONCLUSION

Irvine Welsh has proved to the world that anything is possible if you focus on what you
can do best. Life wasn’t easy for him, his background is full of pain, stress, drug addiction, but
he managed to escape through writing and created the phenomenon that is today. Even if in the
beginning his work was criticized very often, Trainspotting his debut novel became a cult book
and at the same time a generation -defining. That is why Aaron Kelly named him Poet Laureate
of the chemical generation. He has spoken fr eely about working class and its struggles, about
drug addiction and sexual abuse, about all dark themes that most of the writers were avoiding.
Authenticity was the key – he used some of his journals to write his first novel – to gain every
reader’s heart, authenticity, irony and black humour. Over the years he developed a complex
form of his fiction, most of them written in the Leith vernacular and his novels have the most
various topics and the most unimaginable characters, whose evolution can be followed in more
than one novel. The fact that the writer uses characters that are already known by the audience
increase the interest of reading only to find out what happens to their hero.
As we know by now, more of Welsh’s books focuses more on male narrators, male
characters, male bonding and so on. There were some issues regarding gender equality in his
novels, he was often criticized for the male characters too, but the author again proved with
professionalism, that you can do anything, and this is how he cr eated a novel that have two
female protagonists/ narrators. Moreover, the novel The Sex Life of Siamese Twins, was closely
analyzed to see how the writer succeeded to create a new universe from a feminine perspective.
The path to phenomenon started with Trainspotting, and continues even today, because
Irvine Welsh is still writing, keeping his readers close. The movie adaptations, the stage
adaptations, the musicals were all a major fact in developing the phenomenon. He had a huge

59
impact on the future gene ration of writers, giving them the freedom to use and choose anything
they’d like to write about, he opened many doors in the literary career.
In conclusion, I can only say that Irvine Welsh, is a writer, is a voice, is a phenomenon.

60
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