Porno

The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting.
Unknown

I loved Trainspotting. I know that it’s the sort of book that many may not particularly like due to its graphic portrayal of drug addiction, but, the fact still remains that it is one of the best books I have ever read. In it, Irvine Welsh managed to accurately present the Scottish middle-class in all its glorious dialect, and all of it with a pretty catchy and cheeky plot.

Porno, however, as a sequel was filling but unnecessary. Upon seeing a cheap copy in a bookstore, I settled down to read it in an anxious glee and finished it in a couple of days. To anyone who did like Trainspotting, I would have to recommend the book but I wouldn’t hand it out as a prescription to anyone. This is because Porno, though written in a similar style and setting as its prequel, fails to deliver the novelty delivered by its predecessor. True, it has its moments and the climax is not so much as a peak but a point where you reach only to be shown the plateau of yet another sequel. For, lo, the book does not end as I had hoped. Ever since picking up that orange copy of Trainspotting, the one with the skull on its cover, I have been ushered into the cul-de-sac of Welsh’s mind and can only hope to see the hazy saga to its end.

The book begins, ten years from Trainspotting, with our megalomaniacal pal Simon ‘Sick Boy’ Williamson getting fired from a job due to his obvious charms and deciding to move back to Leith. His decision is final when he learns that he can have his aunt’s old pub to run. The pub attracts the wrong crowd but Sick Boy changes all that as the story progresses and takes control. However, Sick Boy is not bent on changing his old ways and still indulges in wake-me-up-before-you-go-go sex and maintains a thin white line between him and the rest of the world: cocaine. Nevertheless, some things have changed in Leith. Francis ‘Franco’ Begbie, who was in jail, is now out and hungrily looking for Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton who is still in exile and is flourishing as a club promoter in Amsterdam. Then there is Danny ‘Spud’ Murphy hanging around as well; still the same sweet fuck-up… still in rehabilitation, unemployment, heroin, robbing and scheming. He is married with Alison though and sits down to write a book on Leith history.

Some new characters and some from Glue also feature in this novel. There is Rab Birrell, his brother Billy, Lauren – an apparent feminist, Nikki – a university student who has body image problems, Dianne – Renton’s love interest from Trainspotting, Terry ‘Juice’ Lawson – the serial shagger from Glue and loads of new characters all over the place.

One cannot imagine how the abovementioned bourgeois characters could find shelter under the title Porno but one should leave such imaginings to the scheming & scamming mind of Sick Boy who wants to keep every finger in every pie. Sick Boy is still pissed off with Renton and manages to catch up with him and make temporary amendments in Amsterdam. He is busy and thrilled because Juice Terry and him have started fiddling in the porn industry, making stag videos they make with some of the Leith girls they know. The latest addition in this group is Nikki who is madly infatuated with Sick Boy and agrees to star in his latest project: a porn feature-film of epic proportions (in the right places). Sick Boy has the presence of an omnipresent scammer in this novel with him involved in some credit-card fraud and blackmailing as well, which he indulges in to raise some capital for the production of his porno. All is well until…

Perhaps I have a little harsh about the novel at the start, for now I remember some cheeky, some vivid, some sexual, some druggy and some raging passages of the book. Begbie’s contribution to the plot is brilliant and there is a hilarious and spine tingling part where his prey Renton and him are sitting beside each other in the hospital toilet, unaware of each other’s presence. And Renton clearly steals Sick Boy’s thunder once again. Lots of it.

The novel has some important issues dealt with subtly as well. Throughout, the reader is presented with both the sides of the story and shown the polarization of the sexes and how it affects the way we approach pornography. Questions of feminism, female exploitation, the what’s-hot-what’s-not of the porn industry, the decline of Leith culture, the changes in drug culture…etcetera, all find a place in Porno and the novel is not just about porno…like I had hoped.

Glue

'The finest kind of friendship is between people who expect a great deal from each other but never ask it.'
Sylvia Bremer

Have no doubts about this…Glue by Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Ecstasy, Porno) is not about solvent abuse, as much as I expected, but about the deep bond of friendship that acts like an adhesive in holding four friends together after three decades of growing up in the Edinburgh schemes. To be honest, I can only compare the book with South Park.

I found the book quite hard to read and not just because of its unnecessary length, 555 pages, but because of the trademark Scottish phonetics pioneered by Welsh running through this length. Nevertheless, putting the book aside now and coming up for air, I have to say that it is a very involving book with complex characters and that if one liked Trainspotting then one is bound to like Glue. This is because while the former was criticized for glorifying drug abuse, the latter only glorifies street principles and the relationship between those living by the code. Franco, Spud and Renton make cameo roles in this novel as well.

Like South Park, Glue has several characters but mainly revolves around the lives of four friends who grow up in Edinburgh schemes in the nurturing environment of street values. They are Terry Lawson (womanizer and lazy), Billy Birrell (boxer), Carl Ewart (famed DJ) and Andrew Galloway (drug addict and HIV positive). These guys have traits of becoming what they become later in their lives from an early age which perhaps goes to show that we all carry our futures in our pasts. We get a decade by decade account of their lives told by each of them individually as monologues and this presents different sides of the story and an interwoven storyline.

Needless to say, there will come a part in the book when you’ll sit back and say, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny! You bastards!” but I’ll leave it to you to find out who the Kenny is, not being a spoiler. This is not a book for the faint hearted because Welsh doesn’t seem to give a toss about readers who do not understand Scottish phonetics and the monologues of the characters are such that would pass for normal talk in a Scottish pub. But there is also the evolution of Scottish culture in the backdrop and how the lives of those living in Edinburgh revolve around it. From football fights, raves, snorting coke, dropping Es, the Oktoberfest at Munich, the numerous sex accounts…this book has it all. And what’s better, the next time a Scottish person talks to you…you will have at least some idea what the hell he/she is talking about!!

Ecstasy

‘It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.’
Logan Pearsall Smith

The ecstasy in this collection, Ecstasy: Three tales of chemical romance may refer to the drug but this is only superficial and has layers of complexity huddled into them. Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Glue, Porno), it has to be said, is exclusively a rave-writer and as such most of his works observe the abyss of drug-users and how the pull of this abyss often has varying results. Thus, each of the three novellas in this collection have completely independent focus and in each Ecstasy acts only as a flashlight in searching for ecstasy.

In Lorraine goes to Livingston, a best selling author in the romance genre is left paralysed and bed-bound. She plans revenge on her cheating, gambling and whoring husband with the help of her nurse, Lorraine. This story has some Will Self bizarreness to it in the way it grotesquely parodies trashy paperbacks and tells of necrophilia in the hospitals under full knowledge of the supervision.

Fortune’s always hiding tells of a young couple, a deformed woman and her criminal lover, and how the take revenge against the corporate goons who deformed the beautiful lady for life with a thalidomide-like drug.

My favourite novella in the collection and the one which is true to its ‘tale of chemical romance’ tagline is this third and last one: The Undefeated. It tells of a couple, yuppie Heather and raver Lloyd, who fall in love while doing E at raves and parties. It is written alternatively between the two lovers so as to present each one’s side of the story and understanding of the drug culture not just a whole but to each gender, group and class. As the two discover each other soon their love of Ecstasy is transformed into the ecstasy of Love.

Comparisons will surely be made here with Trainspotting, Welsh’s most famous work that deals similarly with the drug culture in Leith and Edinburgh, but readers should remember that the drug in question here is Ecstasy and not Heroin. As anyone that has taken ecstasy would know, the drug makes you energetically confused and fuming for more and more unlike heroin. Heroin is a very slow drug that is depreciatingly smooth and makes one very, very immobile. Thus, Trainspotting may have had its slow grins but Ecstasy has its melting laughter. Music plays a very important role in the E-couture so when one reads The Undefeated, one becomes very aware of the musical environment and the nightclubbing that was absent in Trainspotting where the characters were too busy burning out as opposed to going out. However, the collection does posses Welsh’s familiar Scottish phonetics and black humour.

Give it a go. You may not easily find the drug (you may be looking in the wrong places) but the book is a best-seller and can be purchased by pressing the link below. If only E was as easy to come by.