Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a very good book. It is the story of a heroin junkie who is trying to go clean while hanging around his skag using friends. The story takes place in Edinburgh, Scottland, and 99% of the book is written in heavy slang. If you've read A Clockwork Orange, it's kind of like that, but with a lot more slang. The writing style of Welsh is amazingly creative. Every chapter is about 10 or so pages long and has a different name. They are usually from the 1rst person perspective of the main character, Renton, but a lot of the time the chapters are written from the perspective of Renton's friends. Sometimes the chapters are even written in the third person; this is the only time that the heavy accent isn't used. Part of the genius of this book is that each chapter is a short story in itself. Somebody could come along to a library and read only one chapter from the book and, in most cases, it would be a little short story that doesn't require the reader to know the history of the characters or anything. The book seems to be composed of a ton of little short stories (in chronological order) about a group of friends. When you are finished with the book, all of the little short stories come together and form one large story about the friends.
It is a lot like the Catcher In The Rye in the sense that the 1rst person perspective of the character is so realistic that you feel like he is a real person. That is essentially the essence of the Catcher In The Rye. Of course, Catcher is a classic, but I think that I like Welsh's story even more. It is just as realistic and believable, but he has added so many other elements to it. I havn't read any other book like this before. You can find traces of Chuck Palahniuk in this book (as you can in Geek Love or any of the other books that inspired him). I seriously suspect that the idea of the virus clinics that Jack went to in Fight Club came from this book; I speak of the chapter entitled "Bad Blood" in Trainspotting.
In fact, I recomend that everybody reads the "Bad Blood" chapter of Trainspotting next time they are in a book store or library. It is an excelent example of how each chapter can be viewed as a short story, it shows some of Palahniuk's inspiration, and it gives you a good feel of Welsh's writing style and his amazing imagination. Also, the "Bad Blood" is from the perspective of Davie, who doesn't have as thick of an accent as a lot of the other characters, like Renton. Hence, the chapter is easier to read. The book has a slang dictionary in the back in case you get lost, but only about a 3rd of the words are in there. Don't worry though, you'll hardly notice the slang when you start reading it.
Another cool thing about the book is how all the bands they mention are on the level. Ones I can remember are: Iggy Pop (a lot of talk about Iggy), the Clash, the Fall, and the Pogues are some respectable ones I can think of off the top of my head. They also mention the unrespectable: Skrewdriver. They only mention Skrewdriver because they meet some nazi skinhead type though. I wonder if any of these bands are on the soundtracks. I would think so. I'll have to look into that, my dad has one of them, so I prolly will.
Anyways, Trainspotting is a really great book and I consider it one of my favorites now. I am definately going to read more of Welsh's books too, including Porno, which is a sequel to Trainspotting. I'll tell you how those turn out.
PS: For an example of the slang used in this book, I've started working on a slang converter which will translate your text into Trainspotting-esqe slang. Try it here.
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