Skagboys

June 18, 2012
Built upon 100,000 words set aside in the process of writing Trainspotting comes this prequel set in gritty early ’80s Leith, Edinburgh. The familiar voices of Mark “Rent Boy” Renton, Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, Danny “Spud” Murphy, Frank Begbie, Matty Connell, and Alison Lozinska crowd the pages of this sprawling narrative. Mark, who goes off to Aberdeen University, plans a rail tour of Europe with the girl of his dreams, Fiona Conyers, and seems poised to leave behind old mates like Ali, who secures a cushy job assisting efforts to eradicate the Dutch elm disease ravaging Edinburgh’s trees. On her first day at work Ali accompanies her boss to a pub and meets his brother, who is secretly smuggling industrial grade heroin out of the local pharmaceutical plant, inadvertently unleashing another ravaging early ’80s disease, AIDS (Welsh details both in newsy “Notes on an Epidemic” chapters). Meanwhile Matty, Simon, Frank, and Danny idly wander the streets in pursuit of pints, skag, lassies, brawls, and kindness. But after Mark deceives Fiona about his own drug use, and his disabled little brother dies, he joins the downward heroin-fueled trajectory of his disaffected peers. Parental intervention, arrests, and even rehab can’t change the course of their addiction as they become increasingly cynical and uninterested in anything other than the next fix. Their combined experiences twist together the fading London punk scene, the declining power of the proletariat, hooliganism, neo-Nazism, and the AIDS epidemic that characterized Thatcherite Britain. Careening between boisterous, belligerent, hilarious, and maudlin emotional registers like a drunk at a party, this novel has a dizzy energy in spite of its aimless plot and general corpulence. As with much of Welsh’s oeuvre, it’s not for the uninitiated—the prose is dense with Edinburgh dialect, disturbing sexual encounters, explosive violence, and much sorrow. Agent: Jenny Chapman, Jonathan Cape.

July 15, 2012
Once more into the ditch: Welsh revisits the economically depressed, heroin-sick slums of Edinburgh in this hefty prequel to Trainspotting (1993). Much like that book, this one is a collection of episodic stories that roughly cohere as a novel, written mostly in Scottish dialect and illuminating the despair of its characters as Thatcher-era Great Britain disassembles the nation's safety net. Again, the lead character is Mark Renton, a philosophical young man who seems poised to rise above his lower-middle-class station until heroin (i.e., skag) implodes him. Not long after he starts using, he's dropped out of university and wants to quit drugs but not very badly--in one heartbreaking scene he admits to his girlfriend that he's more interested in his relationship with heroin than with her. Shifting among various characters' perspectives, Welsh shows how rapidly addiction sank Mark and his friends, but Welsh is no moralist, and he's just as likely to mine their lives for humor as pathos. Desperate for consistent fixes, they pursue one harebrained scheme or other--a stint working as mules on a ferryboat goes particularly poorly--and their freewheeling banter shows that if nothing else, the drugs haven't erased their personalities. Welsh's themes are repetitive, and there is no reason why this book couldn't be half as long. But it's marked by some virtuosic set pieces. In one scene, an addict watches a group of boys drop a puppy down a garbage chute, and his distressing (and heavily metaphorical) trip into the dumpster encapsulates the junkie's journey with equal parts horror and comedy. And a lengthy rehab journal by Mark is a witty, fiery, joyously vulgar vision of life in detox, showing how his better self slowly emerges. But as we know from Trainspotting, such moments of redemption rarely last. Red meat for Welsh cultists, but a heavy load for anybody else.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2012

If you love Welsh's enduringly edgy Trainspotting, you'll be excited to hear that this book is billed as a prequel--and as an alternate. Here's how Mark Renton and his buddies hope--and then fall prey to heroin and despair.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2012
Nearly 20 years after Trainspotting, Welsh delivers a stunning prequel that shows us how his characters got hooked on heroin. The opening sets us firmly in the Thatcher era, with college student Mark Renton joining a union protest, thinking he'll score some street cred; in the bloody melee that follows, he acquires both a cynical eye and a nagging back complaint. Welsh provides continued social context by interleaving dry, factual Notes on an Epidemic that chart Edinburgh's exploding heroin use and, subsequently, AIDS cases. (A subplot about the city's swift response to Dutch elm disease suggests misplaced priorities.) All this reminds us that the personal tragedies of Trainspotting were part of a much larger story, but, as before, it's the remarkable characterizations that give this work such devastating impact. Though Welsh's characters are younger, he is older, and his writing has become even more nuanced. Renton's psychic pain, Sick Boy's Casanova complex, the gentle natures of Spud and Tommy, and Begbie's terrifying violence are richly and heartbreakingly rendered. Their descent into addiction is made real and horrifyingly inevitable: they know it's bad for them, we know it's bad for them, and neither of us can stop it. A haunting and important book that deserves serious attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)