Trainspotting

14/06/2024

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Trainspotting is a bit of a mishmash, a book written in a mix of Scots, Scottish English and standard English. It might not even be a novel. Ian Bell reckoned “the book's structure, as much that of a collection of short stories as of a novel, means that the narrative itself feels like an exercise in futility.” (Guardian) Here we have a book full of Edinburgh heroin-takers, drunks, manipulators and bullies going nowhere, and where the fractured form means that perhaps it isn’t going anywhere either. Yet even if the book doesn’t read like a typical novel, it may need to be read with more concentration as characters come and go. Characters given the briefest of roles in one part of the book come and play a central one much later, nobody more so than Alan Vinter, who is a horrible but momentary nuisance in a pub fighting with his girlfriend, and who becomes central to a revenge narrative much later on in the book’s longest vignette, ‘Bad Blood’. Then there is Johnny Swan, also known as Mother Superior because of the length of his habit, who weaves in and out of the book as a key drug dealer, someone who near the end is a vital character as he loses a leg to his addiction, and tries to fob himself as a war veteran. A woman gives him £20 and says that she lost her son in the Falklands conflict. He feels her pain but needs must, and any guilt he suffers is weak next to the need for another fix.

The book’s structure could have been a problem for the Booker judges. It was long-listed for this most prestigious of literary awards but it is a prize given to novels (though the wording changed in 2019), not short fiction, however interconnected. But the issue wasn’t the structure but the language and theme. Speaking to Miranda Sawyer in a stage interview, Irvine Welsh claimed two of the judges found the book offensive.  We might wonder if it is the purpose of those considering a literary prize to muse over how shocked they feel, especially when we have a term like the affective fallacy to indicate that one’s personal response to a book is hardly the be-all and end-all of literary response. However, we can accept easily enough that Trainspotting could disturb genteel sensibilities. Probably the most offensive word in the English language is a well-known slang term for female genitalia, a word that also refers to a person who is really not at all nice. Welsh uses it in the latter capacity in the very first paragraph of his novel. He starts as he means to go on, and you’ll find a couple of F-words before reaching the end of the first page, and once again the word for female genitalia used to describe a nasty piece of work.

But the book is likely to cause a few further problems — there is a terrible chapter where a mother finds her baby dead in its cot while the central character Mark Renton and his mates have been shooting up and sleeping it off. By the end of the scene, the mother needs another fix: “Ye cookin? I need a shot Mark. Ah really need a fuckin shot. C’moan Marky, cook us up a shot.” There is no comedy here but plenty in a chapter later where one of the gang, Davie, is staying over at his new girlfriend’s place (they haven’t yet had sex). She still lives at home and he is scuppering his chances as a good boyfriend already: he was hopelessly drunk the previous night. Gail has slept on the couch and doesn’t look too happy to see him when he comes into the dining room and she is eating breakfast with her folks. But that is the least of it. He has in his hands the bedsheets: there has been an awful accident. Davie reckons he will take them home and wash them. This isn’t just a bit of vomit and he wants understandably to keep the various evacuations all to himself. But the mum asks him to hand them over and she will do the wash. Davie insists not and in the toing and froing the contents of the sheets fly in all directions. 

If slapstick is often based on clumsy actions and embarrassing situations, then this sequence is a brilliant example, if cruder than anything you will find in Chaplin or Keaton. It is scatological slapstick, and yet integrated into a book that is all about substance abuse. Whether it is putting things into their veins or evacuating things out of their bodies, Trainspotting looks at Renton, Davie, Tommy, Spud, Begbie and Sick Boy as receptacles for self-abuse or abusing others. Begbie is the one given to beating people up on the flimsiest of premises: you don’t have to look at him the wrong way to receive a pasting; looking at him at all might be reason enough if he is in the mood for aggro. He is a boozer rather than a junky. Yet chiefly his high of choice is getting into fights not getting out of his mind, though he spends as much time loaded as Renton and co get smacked. “Ma heid’s fuckin nippin this morning, ah kin fuckin tell ye. Ah make straight firthe fuckin fridge. Yes! Two boatils of Becks. That’ll dae me.” (109). He is usually smashed. This is a subtle linguistic distinction perhaps but one that good urban dictionaries will insist upon: smacked is when you are on drugs; smashed when you are on the drink. Begbie often has a smashing time smashed as he smashes up places and smashes in faces.

Then there is sex. Sometimes you’re waiting forever; five weeks is a long time in sexual politics — when your girlfriend tells you she doesn’t want to turn the relationship physical too soon because she has read about taking your time in Cosmopolitan. Davie Archibald is the victim of such views as Gail wants to wait till the affair is emotionally established first. But waiting can be a good idea: the book's main character Renton going back to a girl’s place discovers after the deed that she is fourteen, while he is mid-twenties. “He felt fifty-five instead of twenty-five.” Sick Boy is the one with the smooth and effortless sex life. He is discreet about it, “Sick Boy never goes into any details about his sexual adventures. His discretion, however, is only observed in order to torment his less sexually prolific friends rather than as a mark of respect for the women he gets involved with.”  

The book doesn’t only play up boozing and drug-taking, fighting and fornication, but that is more than enough to be getting on with. Welsh’s style is all over the place but there is a method to the mayhem and partly why the book was such a success and has entered the culture (along with the film). It has an astonishing ability to draw out the salient features as anecdote, giving shape to the book not as a plot but as a series of incidents that, drawn together, allow such a rich sense of time and place as it explores Edinburgh in the mid-eighties. “It's become this big, cultural marking point’, Welsh says, “really, this artefact, and it cuts right across countries.” (Esquire) Rather than seeing it however as a series of stories loosely put together, better to see it as a book about a culture brought closer together by the impoverished milieu: by the collective need for oblivion and the desire for community, no matter if certain members of it, like Begbie and Vintner, and Sick Boy too, are out for themselves. 

     The book is what happens when Bakhtin comes to Leith, when the dialogical meets a vivid sense of place. The book offers what Mikhail Bakhtin would call heteroglossia as it mixes different registers, evident here when Renton can offer an accentless voice and a large acceptable vocabulary when speaking to a judge and a strong accent and plenty cussing when speaking to his mates. But it is also polyphanic, a term Bakhtin uses to describe Dostoevsky’s work: “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.” (‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work’) Trainspotting may seem a mess, it may seem like a series of stories rather than a work of novelistic integrity yet it also captures very well a vibrant community, a community that by the end of the book gets rejected as Renton rips off his mates. He goes off to Amsterdam with the money from a drug deal, and the novel has its ending. Renton leaves apparently for good the environment that has been the basis of the book, and one that he couldn’t quite escape when living and working for a while in London. If a novel often has an integrity of time and space, Welsh interprets this to mean an examining of milieu during a given period of time. When its most prominent character leaves the country and seeks a new period in his life, the book must end, and so it does.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Trainspotting

Trainspotting is a bit of a mishmash, a book written in a mix of Scots, Scottish English and standard English. It might not even be a novel. Ian Bell reckoned "the book's structure, as much that of a collection of short stories as of a novel, means that the narrative itself feels like an exercise in futility." (Guardian) Here we have a book full of Edinburgh heroin-takers, drunks, manipulators and bullies going nowhere, and where the fractured form means that perhaps it isn't going anywhere either. Yet even if the book doesn't read like a typical novel, it may need to be read with more concentration as characters come and go. Characters given the briefest of roles in one part of the book come and play a central one much later, nobody more so than Alan Vinter, who is a horrible but momentary nuisance in a pub fighting with his girlfriend, and who becomes central to a revenge narrative much later on in the book's longest vignette, 'Bad Blood'. Then there is Johnny Swan, also known as Mother Superior because of the length of his habit, who weaves in and out of the book as a key drug dealer, someone who near the end is a vital character as he loses a leg to his addiction, and tries to fob himself as a war veteran. A woman gives him 20 and says that she lost her son in the Falklands conflict. He feels her pain but needs must, and any guilt he suffers is weak next to the need for another fix.

The book's structure could have been a problem for the Booker judges. It was long-listed for this most prestigious of literary awards but it is a prize given to novels (though the wording changed in 2019), not short fiction, however interconnected. But the issue wasn't the structure but the language and theme. Speaking to Miranda Sawyer in a stage interview, Irvine Welsh claimed two of the judges found the book offensive. We might wonder if it is the purpose of those considering a literary prize to muse over how shocked they feel, especially when we have a term like the affective fallacy to indicate that one's personal response to a book is hardly the be-all and end-all of literary response. However, we can accept easily enough that Trainspotting could disturb genteel sensibilities. Probably the most offensive word in the English language is a well-known slang term for female genitalia, a word that also refers to a person who is really not at all nice. Welsh uses it in the latter capacity in the very first paragraph of his novel. He starts as he means to go on, and you'll find a couple of F-words before reaching the end of the first page, and once again the word for female genitalia used to describe a nasty piece of work.

But the book is likely to cause a few further problems there is a terrible chapter where a mother finds her baby dead in its cot while the central character Mark Renton and his mates have been shooting up and sleeping it off. By the end of the scene, the mother needs another fix: "Ye cookin? I need a shot Mark. Ah really need a fuckin shot. C'moan Marky, cook us up a shot." There is no comedy here but plenty in a chapter later where one of the gang, Davie, is staying over at his new girlfriend's place (they haven't yet had sex). She still lives at home and he is scuppering his chances as a good boyfriend already: he was hopelessly drunk the previous night. Gail has slept on the couch and doesn't look too happy to see him when he comes into the dining room and she is eating breakfast with her folks. But that is the least of it. He has in his hands the bedsheets: there has been an awful accident. Davie reckons he will take them home and wash them. This isn't just a bit of vomit and he wants understandably to keep the various evacuations all to himself. But the mum asks him to hand them over and she will do the wash. Davie insists not and in the toing and froing the contents of the sheets fly in all directions.

If slapstick is often based on clumsy actions and embarrassing situations, then this sequence is a brilliant example, if cruder than anything you will find in Chaplin or Keaton. It is scatological slapstick, and yet integrated into a book that is all about substance abuse. Whether it is putting things into their veins or evacuating things out of their bodies, Trainspotting looks at Renton, Davie, Tommy, Spud, Begbie and Sick Boy as receptacles for self-abuse or abusing others. Begbie is the one given to beating people up on the flimsiest of premises: you don't have to look at him the wrong way to receive a pasting; looking at him at all might be reason enough if he is in the mood for aggro. He is a boozer rather than a junky. Yet chiefly his high of choice is getting into fights not getting out of his mind, though he spends as much time loaded as Renton and co get smacked. "Ma heid's fuckin nippin this morning, ah kin fuckin tell ye. Ah make straight firthe fuckin fridge. Yes! Two boatils of Becks. That'll dae me." (109). He is usually smashed. This is a subtle linguistic distinction perhaps but one that good urban dictionaries will insist upon: smacked is when you are on drugs; smashed when you are on the drink. Begbie often has a smashing time smashed as he smashes up places and smashes in faces.

Then there is sex. Sometimes you're waiting forever; five weeks is a long time in sexual politics when your girlfriend tells you she doesn't want to turn the relationship physical too soon because she has read about taking your time in Cosmopolitan. Davie Archibald is the victim of such views as Gail wants to wait till the affair is emotionally established first. But waiting can be a good idea: the book's main character Renton going back to a girl's place discovers after the deed that she is fourteen, while he is mid-twenties. "He felt fifty-five instead of twenty-five." Sick Boy is the one with the smooth and effortless sex life. He is discreet about it, "Sick Boy never goes into any details about his sexual adventures. His discretion, however, is only observed in order to torment his less sexually prolific friends rather than as a mark of respect for the women he gets involved with."

The book doesn't only play up boozing and drug-taking, fighting and fornication, but that is more than enough to be getting on with. Welsh's style is all over the place but there is a method to the mayhem and partly why the book was such a success and has entered the culture (along with the film). It has an astonishing ability to draw out the salient features as anecdote, giving shape to the book not as a plot but as a series of incidents that, drawn together, allow such a rich sense of time and place as it explores Edinburgh in the mid-eighties. "It's become this big, cultural marking point', Welsh says, "really, this artefact, and it cuts right across countries." (Esquire) Rather than seeing it however as a series of stories loosely put together, better to see it as a book about a culture brought closer together by the impoverished milieu: by the collective need for oblivion and the desire for community, no matter if certain members of it, like Begbie and Vintner, and Sick Boy too, are out for themselves.

The book is what happens when Bakhtin comes to Leith, when the dialogical meets a vivid sense of place. The book offers what Mikhail Bakhtin would call heteroglossia as it mixes different registers, evident here when Renton can offer an accentless voice and a large acceptable vocabulary when speaking to a judge and a strong accent and plenty cussing when speaking to his mates. But it is also polyphanic, a term Bakhtin uses to describe Dostoevsky's work: "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices." ('Problems of Dostoevsky's Work') Trainspotting may seem a mess, it may seem like a series of stories rather than a work of novelistic integrity yet it also captures very well a vibrant community, a community that by the end of the book gets rejected as Renton rips off his mates. He goes off to Amsterdam with the money from a drug deal, and the novel has its ending. Renton leaves apparently for good the environment that has been the basis of the book, and one that he couldn't quite escape when living and working for a while in London. If a novel often has an integrity of time and space, Welsh interprets this to mean an examining of milieu during a given period of time. When its most prominent character leaves the country and seeks a new period in his life, the book must end, and so it does.


© Tony McKibbin