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Trainspotting II – in 3D

August 4, 2008 by william alberque

A review of the novels Trainspotting and Porno by Irvine Welsh, by William Alberque.

I finally read Trainspotting after all these years. I was one of the many electrified by the opening sequence of that dazzling film back in 1996.

Britpop had already invaded my consciousness, and the arrival of influential DJ Mark Zimin, whose Red Room residency (The Living Room) launched me and a thousand further DJs on lives of dissolution and waste. The soundtrack provided the defining sounds of the era and the behavior of the boys (I mean the five-a-side football matches, petty transgressions and pub crawling, naturally) became benchmarks for how friends should interact. A few weeks back, 12 years after the movie, I purchased a paperback version of the landmark collection of short stories that *just* coalesces into a novel for 2.99 at Sister Ray on Berwick Street. I could not stop reading it – this in spite of the painful transliteration of the Scottish accents of several of the characters, coming off at first as a more annoying version of Huck Finn. Once you get the hang of it, though, it disappears into the backdrop, and the glory of this headlong rush of a book is revealed.

Those familiar with the film will be dazzled by the differences, rather than the similarities, between the two works. Many of the scenes are here, in the book, described in surprisingly affective and effective detail. More are re-ordered, re-structured, edited or left out, leaving us with two, equally fantastic, works of art. And that is what the book Trainspotting ends up being – a work of art. I hate the notions of “authenticity” and “real voices” and all that dreck that gets dredged up when people talk about first hand accounts of drugs, criminality and poverty. I have no idea if this is how the folk of Leith (the harbor next to Edinburgh) talked in the early 1990s, or if this is how junkies behave, or any of that. I don’t care. Instead, I, like many others, was enraptured in the overlapping narratives, the cavalcade of voices, like Tolstoy on speed, contained therein. The themes of (dis)loyalty and dissolving bonds of friendship, and false or failing identity – and the chemical and other means used to blot out these negative trends in life – pervade the story and carry a surprising emotional weight. One scene omitted from the film includes some explanation of the title and a passing moment of realization (so that’s Sick Boy’s father! That explains a lot. Not really) that is as startling as it is effective, mainly due to the lack of setup or follow-through that rendered it painfully real and immediate to me. By the end, I felt spent, but desirous of more, missing the characters I’d been introduced to and who so swiftly and cruelly parted.

Of course, I cannot separate the personal circumstances that surrounded my wholesale ingestion of the novel. I contracted salmonella poisoning after eating at the Post Pub (coincidence? I’d
rather not know), and spent the week finding out exactly how painful and emotionally as well as physically debilitating regular cramping and crapping can be (hello ladies!). My physically wasted state put me in a state far more empathetic towards the characters than I think I would normally be, being the judgmental, priggish, anti-drug type, myself. The movie playfully elided through the drug use, made it a lark, a side-effect – the novel puts you in the heads of users, and makes it harder to turn away and ignore the role of the characters in their own physical, emotional and psychological impoverishments. But it was the yearning to know more, to continue to follow the characters, to hear more stories about them, that struck me as I finished the book. And, of course, the inevitable humiliation of dropping the book into the bog right as I finished the last page – life imitating art in the nastiest, most stomach-churning way. I burn brightly with embarrassment typing those words, I can tell you, but it’s done.
Moving on.

To my surprise, I found, looking at my bookshelf, that I already owned the follow-up novel, Porno. In point of fact, I had no idea it was the sequel to Trainspotting, nor did I remember purchasing the book, nor do I remember anything about why it was there, how it got there, &c. Elated, I dove immediately into the book to recapture the rush of the first book, and catch up with my old friends. Annoyingly, Porno is far more focused, polished, and plotted than the original. It read
very much like a literary agent’s notion of how the first should read, with carefully arranged chapters strategically advancing the stories, weaving the details together on a much more marketable subject (well, porn, obviously) focusing on the most popular of the characters from the first. The shambolic charm of the first is lost nearly right away, and Welsh’s attempts to write from a female point of view is ham-fisted, and eventually nauseating, as two of the main women characters, Nikki and Lauren, descend into horrible cliché.

The violence of the Begbie character is now so numbing and pointless as to render all of his passages eminently skippable. Spud, too, has degraded so far as to be lifeless and uninteresting. The interaction between Renton and Sick-, sorry, Simon, holds out some hope for tension, interest, and real development, but I’m afraid Welsh has proven to be far better at describing the way something is rather than how it can and does change. Ultimately, Trainspotting worked because it was static, a trap, inevitable, and Porno fails because it tries to show that Renton can, will, and does escape from it all. It rings hollow, and it’s the side characters, the asides, the discarded cast members that hold more interest, that briefly fire life into the story, and give me hope. Welsh, I’m afraid, is unable to pull off the audacious task of continuing Trainspotting, much less topping it. His failure is as miserable as the bad pornography that the characters aspire to create, and as disappointing as Trainspotting is triumphant

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