Dead Men's Trousers

November 5, 2018
More than 25 years after they first appeared in Trainspotting, all four of Welsh’s hard-living Scottish friends reunite in Edinburgh, roped into an appropriately bizarre and macabre organ harvesting caper. Told from the perspectives of the four protagonists, the novel rolls slowly in the first half, updating their individual biographies separately—readers new to Welsh’s world need not be apprehensive—and setting up the brisker, and inevitably bollixed, execution of the theft plot. Two of these former reprobate mates have successfully escaped their pasts. Renton travels the globe as a music manager. Begbie, who runs into Renton on a plane in the opening chapter, is a successful artist living in California. Spud, whose narrative is most steeped in a slangy Scottish dialect, still lives on the edge and instigates the kidney-napping caper. Sick Boy, like Spud, is still in Edinburgh, and crashing with his sister, Carlotta, who screamingly blames him for the degeneration of her son, Ross, and husband, Euan, apparently on a debauched trip to Thailand. When the four finally get together, much comic mileage is wrung in rehashing old grievances. Not surprisingly, the crime unfolds like a Keystone Kops version of Ocean’s 11, but with an irrevocable final result. Welsh’s entire oeuvre crackles with idiomatic energy and brio, and this rollicking novel is no different.

December 1, 2018
The miscreants from Trainspotting (1993) return, off heroin and more financially stable but still prone to calamity.The fourth novel in Welsh's series--following the 2002 sequel Porno and the 2012 prequel Skagboys--thrusts the narrative into 2015 and 2016, with most of the leads pursuing lives beyond junk, beat downs, and petty thievery. Begbie has mined his thuggish Edinburgh past to become a rising star in the LA art world. Renton is a globe-trotting DJ manager. And Simon, aka Sick Boy, is an oversexed owner of an escort service. All are cleaner but not exactly clean, which Welsh plays for comic effect in the early going: Simon sends his brother-in-law on a sex-obsessed midlife crisis after dosing him with MDMA, and Renton is forever chasing down fixes for his demanding clients. Darker circumstances reunite the group as they're blackmailed into an organ-harvesting scheme that ropes in their old friend Spud, and things get grotesque and absurd quickly: Renton needs to leave a Berlin dance festival and ferry his laptop to an ad hoc operating theater so he can play a YouTube video demonstrating kidney surgery. Welsh's peculiar talent is finding the comedy in sex, addiction, betrayal, and death, and he handles the job so deftly that the novel nearly qualifies as comfort reading even in gross-out mode. (The steepest hurdle is the prose mimicking the narrators' thick Scottish burrs, with Spud's nearly impenetrable: "Ah pure dinnae want tae look up, cause sometimes ye git a radge or a wideo giein ye hassle"). And scenes featuring DMT trips are rendered in graphic-novel form, an inventive touch. Still, Welsh tends toward the gassy, with detours into soccer and a weak subplot involving a cop stalking Begbie. His characters have endearingly messy lives, but the mess is often in the prose, too.Welsh still overflows with predicaments to thrust his antiheroes into, for better and for worse.

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Starred review from December 15, 2018
The latest?and last??novel featuring the Trainspotting (1996) characters finds the mean-streets-of-Edinburgh crew middle-aged and mostly successful: Renton is a globetrotting DJ manager; Sick Boy runs an upscale escort service called Colleagues; and even psycho Begbie is now a popular artist going as Jim Francis. Only sweet, simple Spud, the arguable conscience of this loose series, remains stuck in hard times. But the trappings of success are misleading, and what ensues is in some ways as manic as the group's previous adventures as Renton desperately tries to repay money he stole, Sick Boy's dosing of his brother-in-law's drink has epic consequences, and Jim Francis reveals something darker beneath his California cool. Raunchy, profane, violent, and frequently hilarious in its epic descriptions of drug and alcohol abuse, the continued saga is remarkable for the way it delivers the anarchic goods to Trainspotting fans while touching on the ultimate obsessions of middle age: death and the purpose of life. The zenith of these books may well be the powerful prequel, Skagboys (2012), and nothing will match the intensity with which Welsh announced himself, but Dead Men's Trousers delivers a strangely life-affirming dose of dark absurdity, ensuring that, if this is the last we see of these characters, they won't soon be forgotten.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)