A Little Drug’ll Do Ya : TRAINSPOTTING.<i> By Irvine Welsh (W. W. Norton: $13, 349 pp.)</i> : ECSTASY: Three Tales of Chemical Romance.<i> By Irvine Welsh (W. W. Norton: $13, 276 pp.)</i>
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Every now and again a work of fiction accidentally brings into focus something that has been lurking foggily on the edges of our collective psyches. Suddenly the book is not simply a work of art but a cultural icon--the expression of a prevailing mood or moment in history. For a critic, whose touchstone must always be the question, “Is it art?,” groping a way through the snowstorm of hype surrounding such literary events can be a real mind-twister. For the artist, being an icon can sometimes get in the way of creativity.
The latest hot literary phenomenon is “Trainspotting,” a first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, which the Scottish alternative magazine, Rebel, Inc., hyped as “the best book written by man or woman,” one that “deserves to sell more copies than the Bible.”
A fast-paced, tremendously good-humored, expletive-laden evocation (in local dialect) of the youthful Edinburgh drug scene and its attendant poverty and violence, “Trainspotting” has been a cult classic in the United Kingdom for three years, especially among students. It has also been a sell-out play and a box-office-breaking film. The paperback version is currently hitting the bestseller lists in the U.S., alongside universal raves for the British movie. And Welsh’s subsequent works, a drug-themed short story collection, “The Acid House,” and “Marabou Stork Nightmares,” a novel about the mind of a man in a coma, along with “Trainspotting,” recently held all top three spots on the Scottish bestseller lists. Hard on the heels of these books are the drug-related novellas in “Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance,” published in Britain in June--to disparaging reviews, to be sure, but still lapped up by youthful readers.
These sudden popular literary thirsts are inevitably stoked by a bottom-line-minded publishing business. But they are also the sign of something more profound. Of late, British fiction has been dominated by the colonial school (Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro), something of a reaction, perhaps, to the ingrained white, middle class-itis of British letters. The current broad recognition for Scottish literature--especially for Welsh, Booker Prize-winning James Kelman and Janice Galloway, 1994 recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ highly prestigious E.M. Forster Prize--is surely part of the same yearning for something fresh.
What’s seductively new about Welsh and a growing band of compatriots is that they’re giving literary voice not only to Scottish working class youth but to an entire disaffected, unemployed, drug- and music-obsessed generation. The way Welsh tells it, these guys see drug-taking as a viable alternative to working or marrying and having a family--a slightly different route to staving off the sense that life’s basically “boring and futile” and that “society cannae be changed tae make it significantly better.”
In a manifesto of sorts, one character declares it’s better to take drugs than choose “mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing [expletive] junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away [expletive] and [expletive] yersel in a home, a total [expletive] embarrassment tae the selfish [expletive] brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. . . . Well, ah choose no tae choose life. If the [expletive] cannae handle that, it’s their [expletive] problem.”
Of course, this rebel attitude is at least as old as the parable of the Prodigal Son. And Welsh is certainly only the latest exponent of what one might call British bad boy literature--from the anti-establishment, anti-heroic angry young men of the 1950s (Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Stan Barstow) to contemporary misanthropes like Martin Amis and Will Self, who thumb their noses at everyone in sight.
But Welsh’s raw, bleakly funny drug addicts are also rebellious in a uniquely Scottish manner. Though Welsh occasionally writes in third-person standard English for some authorial distance, he mostly lets his characters--Rents, Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and the rest--tell their stories in their own colorful language.
In fact, their exuberance and humor, their apathy and pain, are the only story here. There’s no lofty judgment-calling. (And this is surely what struck a chord with British youth.) If Welsh has a message, it’s simply this: Drugs can give you pleasure--heroin in “Trainspotting” and ecstasy in “Ecstasy”--a pleasure that is all too hard to find in life where boredom and pain are the norm. “Take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by 20, and you’re still . . . miles off the pace,” Rents says of heroin. But then you have to pay the price.
So clearly does Welsh spell out the cost of drug-taking, you start to sense the outrage behind his apparently noncritical tale-telling. Stealing, lying, pimping, selling what you love, humiliating yourself, losing friends--Welsh charts all the classic druggie acts. One girl addict’s baby dies; crib death is suggested, but the cause is surely neglect. A pusher loses a leg to gangrene. And a gross but very funny scene, in which Rents fishes in an excrement-packed toilet for two opium suppositories he has inadvertently expelled, serves to underline the addict’s obsessive self-absorption.
Indirectly, Welsh tries to pin some of the blame for individual drug-taking--and that includes binge-drinking, which is epidemic in Scotland, and drink-fueled fighting--on the emptiness and cruelty in people’s lives: the incest in one girl’s family, unemployment, boredom and a chorus of disapproving “auld wifies,” patronizing Englishmen, officious welfare types and various exemplars of the stern Calvinism that has driven many a Scot to off-the-wall humor, if not to more crazed behavior.
Less convincingly, Welsh also goes after corrupt institutions. In “Ecstasy’s” second novella, “Fortune’s Always Hiding,” he presents a fictionalized account of a real-life 1970s horror story: the marketing of a pain-killer for pregnant women (he calls it Tenazadrine), which caused serious birth defects in their offspring. In Welsh’s eyes, it seems, the pusher in the corporate suit is a bigger villain than the one on the street.
All of which makes for powerful reportage. But is it art?
I have no doubt that the vibrant “Trainspotting” will always have a place somewhere in the history of literature, thanks to its funny dialogue and its graphic depiction of the druggie life, though it may be somewhat lower on the list of enduring classics than its present showing on the commercial charts. “Ecstasy” is another matter. What might have been flaws in “Trainspotting” that were somehow transformed by that work’s stylish presentation--an inability to portray women, puerile observations about life, naive politics--are in “Ecstasy” an embarrassment.
The first novella, “Lorraine Goes to Livingston: A Rave and a Regency Romance,” features a female romance writer and her pornography-obsessed husband, a Somerset-accented necrophiliac and a Scottish nurse. The uncomfortable marriage of youthful rave culture with Monty Python-esque farce is only made worse by flat, chunky writing.
“Fortune’s Always Hiding: A Corporate Drug Romance,” in which Dave, a Cockney burglar, and Samantha, an armless Tenazadrine victim, plan vicious revenge on the corporate executives who did Samantha wrong, offers little more than some tense Hollywood-style plotting.
As for “The Undefeated: An Acid House Romance,” one of the few good things I can say is that it warns us of the potentially mind-numbing dangers of experimenting with artificial, ecstasy-induced feelings of love and peace that quickly turn to indifference when the effect of the drug wears off.
But art needs more than public service to come alive.
Part of the problem is that Welsh can’t do English culture. The first two novellas highlight his failure to inject life into a variety of British accents: Brummy, Geordie, Cockney, Posh English and Somerset. When he shifts to Scottish dialect in “The Undefeated,” the prose lights up a little. But all three novellas seem hurried, overly self-conscious about their mission to explain drugs and light on the authentic detail that made “Trainspotting” glow. It doesn’t seem possible that the same author who crowed “take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by 20 . . .” could also produce the tired-sounding, “Rebecca was having the time of her life at the Forum. The drug was taking her to new heights with the music. She took it easy in the chill-out room, enjoying the waves of MDMA and sounds inside her.”
Perhaps Welsh might consider retiring to his own chill-out room, where he might forget about being an icon and cook up something a little closer to his earlier exuberant prose.
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