2017 Challenge - Trainspotting

Book 6 (March, Mad People)

Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh (read by Tam Dean Lin)

Reason for Reading: Set primarily in Leith before its late-80s revival, Trainspotting is as alien to me as anything I've yet approached, and the madness which marks it for March reading (and, yes, I actually read it in late April,) relates to heroin addiction, which is also something alien to me.

The striking thing about comparing novels that have achieved classic status to those which have not and likely will not is the language. Your run of the mill fantasy epics, milporn SF and airport potboilers, even the best of them, use language as a simple medium, a means to convey meaning from the author to the reader, and yes, that's what language is, but... But a great book doesn't just do that; a great book contains language that both conveys meaning and is aesthetically striking in its own right, and this is true no less of the profanity laden, idomatic invective of Trainspotting than of the lyrical flow of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel contains more uses of the c-word than any, probably every other book I've ever read, but it is never gratuitous, even when it is. If that makes any sense.

Trainspotting is an angry, hard-to-like book about angry, hard-to-like people being angry and hard to like. It's tough going, but it's supposed to be, and it is the triumph of the novel that even if you don't like its various protagonists, you end up kind of getting them. The shifting narrative voice provides multiple perspectives on each character: Of particular note is the tension between self-styled idealist Renton and self-styled man of the world Sick Boy, and the juxtaposition between Spud's rambling speech and more coherent narrative voice. Franco Begbie is a monster for the ages, and Renton's musings on the group's communal creation of the legend of Begbie the hard man, the stand up mate, is one of the most interesting threads of the book.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, and it's not a book to be approached casually, especially by those not familiar with the Scots - and specifically Leith - vernacular. I went with an audio book, which probably helped, but it still had to go off when I was tired (and of course could not be listened to in bed for fear that my daughter would wake up, wonder in and start calling people doss c&*$s.) Leith-born actor and professional reader of Irvine Welsh novels Tam Dean Burn runs around every conceivable variation of the Leith accent in the course of the book, infecting the listener's inner monologue with the best variation it can manage - in my case, not very good - and an urge to call people radge bastards. That alone speaks to the power of language.

Did I like it? No, but then it's not a book that wants to be liked. It's a very good book, possibly a great book, but you wouldn't want to hang out with it all the time.