Fez_Monkey's Full Review: Trainspotting Screenplay Books
You know what? I've come to be comfortable with you. Hell, I like you and I respect you, so I've decided to share something with you. Now this is just you and me, okay? So I don't want to be humming long in a few days and have some total stranger come up to me asking about this, all right? Okay, here it is. I've got somewhat an addictive personality in some things. Not in alcohol, thank god, or I'd be walking around with a terminally cirrhosed liver the size of a Christmas ham. No, my addictive personality comes with entertainment - and with the exception of Ren & Stimpy and The Simpsons (and a few others), that is almost exclusively books.
I'm serious, when I was an adolescent I discovered Isaac Asimov and Lester Del Rey, and soon I had shelves of their books, along with things by authors like Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. In my high-school years I discovered Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson, and soon bought up all of the stuff they had to offer. In college, my taste turned to William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, and soon that was pre-occupying my every free-reading moment.
Now, as you can tell, my tastes tend to run toward the fringes. I mean, other than the fact that they use words and get published there is no way in hell anyone can really place good ole Billy Burroughs in the same literary sphere as, oh, say Tom Clancy. I guess it is safe to say that when it comes to the written word, I favor those who could be seen as subversive, disgusting, or counter-culture. Yeah, baby. There's nothing like some intense and frightening verbiage to spook the squares, and I am all into that.
The problem was that after I had devoured Vonnegut and Thompson and Burroughs and Bukowski, I wasn't able to latch on to any other source for a fix. I tried some of the contemporary authors who were hailed as envelope pushers guys like Don DeLillo, TC Boyle and Tom Robbins, but when you compare their stuff to some of the things that flowed from Bukowski's perverted psyche, well, Slappy, there aint a comparison. Those darlings of the educated-white-employed set were not only tame, but dull, by comparison. So, I had to entertain myself by re-reading my faves, and occasionally re-acquainting myself with some classics writers like Twain (Innocents Abroad, Letters From The Earth), Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange), Jaroslav Hasek (Good Soldier Svejk), Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Sailor's Song), Maxine Hong-Kingston (Tripmaster Monkey), and Joseph Heller (Catch-22). But I needed a new source. I needed someone who could crank out stuff for me for the next five to ten years.
Then, in 1997, I found him. True, it was through a film adaptation of one of his novels, but I found him. Him is Irvine Welsh, and the film & the novel well, you can guess what they are (hint, look at the category we're in now).
The beautiful thing about both Welsh in general and Trainspotting in specific is just how unapologetic they are. In their own rights, both the film and the novel are tremendous works, however, the film tends more along the line of a buddy pic focusing on Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, Tommy, and Begbie, their relationship to one another, and their separate relationships to heroin & alcohol, respectively, while the novel is much more grim and hopeless, focusing on their environment and the almost unbearable pre-ordained lives they have to live.
The central character in all of Welsh's novels is not any one person, but rather the schemes - Scotland's government subsidized housing complexes for the poor and otherwise needy. Welsh's narrative gives this pit of desolation more depth and dimension than most "Best-Seller" authors give to their gun-toting heroes or independent heroines. These are depressing holding pens for the worst of Scottish society, encompassing the brutality and poverty of a group of people with no hope. The depression and despair of the schemes serve to illustrate the greater Scottish condition as a nation under foreign rule. This greater condition is best summed up early in the novel when Renton, watching some schemies (residents of the schemes) enter a bar, "swagger in, noisy and intimidating," soliloquizes:
Ah hate cünts like that. Cünts like Begbie. Cünts that are intae baseball-batting every fücker that's different; Pakis, poofs, n what huv ye. Fückin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No, we're ruled by effete areholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fückin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shíte tuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.
Here is the effect of the schemes manifested in two behaviors: The swagger and mindless violence of "cünts like Begbie", and the self-loathing of people like Renton. This seeming dichotomy of expression is really just two sides of the same coin one directed outwards (Begbie's violence) and one directed inward (Renton's self-loathing). This product of life in the schemes is the real issue Trainspotting explores.
This passage also gives you a taste of the language Welsh uses in the novel. It is honest, stark, and uncompromising, and written almost entirely in the slang and accent of the Edinburgh scheme, bringing the reader into their world. This is not the language they teach in school, and therefore from the very beginning of the book where Welsh writes: The sweat wis lashing ofay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis just sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cünt. he automatically sets the tone of not fitting in. The intentionally awkward syntax and the harsh language serves to create an atmosphere that puts the reader in an odd balance with the plight of the schemies. These are people who feel like outcasts in their own society, and the difficult language in the text makes the reader (unless he/she happens to be a Scot from the wrong side of the tracks) feel like an outsider, thus creating a sort of subconscious empathy for these poor sods.
Welsh wields the constantly looming spectre of the schemes like a mace, and as a result busts you upside the head with some pretty gnarly social commentary. However, the true delight of Welsh's work is not the fact that he can bludgeon the reader regarding the ultra-cruddy life of the poor of Scotland, but that he can do it while not only making you like the characters, but making you laugh out loud at their exploits and weaknesses at the same time. The actions of these people, while exaggerated in the pages, seem almost logical given their greater environment, and so give us an easy means to identify with them, made easier still by the fact that each of the main characters are really little more than individual personality traits we all have brought to life. By that I mean that, even though we don't want to admit it, we all have a bit of Begbie's psychotic in us, as well as Spud's simplicity and meekness, Sick Boy's perversion, Tommy's bravado, and Renton's cavalier fatalism. How they respond to life in the schemes, both destructively and constructively, is based on their personality. So it's not surprising to find Begbie becoming more sociopathic, Spud more docile, Sick Boy more manipulative and self absorbed, Tommy dead, and Renton more cynical.
So, where am I going with all this? Well, aside from the obvious (that Trainspotting is a novel that goes far and beyond the film's reputation), my point is that Welsh's pen has crafted a full and complete universe that not only tells a great tale (or, in this case, series of tales), but also leaves you with the residual stench of the gutter you just visited. He makes no excuse for dragging you into this miserable world, nor does he look for the happy ending, because the scheme does neither. The fact that his writing upsets the straighter elements of society means the boy is doing something right. Luckily for me, Welsh is young, and apparently has much writing left in him. This is good, because Bukowski and Burroughs are both dead, Thompson seems to be in a sort of limbo, and Vonnegut has all but retired. I need Welsh because I just can't keep reading the same things over and over again.
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