Irvine Welsh: Trainspotting

Your thoughts and feelings of Trainspotting. It was a dark comedy which portrayed junkies, in a realistic light i thought. Not gratified, nor sympathiszed. Just raw, the real deal. To show that when you're a drug addict, nobody is your friend. You are purely selfish and serving heroine.

I loved it!

I tried Porno, the sequel, but I just couldn't get through the thick accent.

Cheers

Read all of Welsh's novels. Absolutely fantastic. So grim yet so funny. Begbie has to be the most violent character ever in book form. He's not the most disturbed though.....that honour must go to DI Bruce Roberton in Irvine Welsh's Filth.

I also had some difficulties with the thick accent, but thought it was a very clever book. I agree that it didn't glorify drug addiction, if anything it was a gritty portrayal of the desperation these people sunk to at times & the self loathing involved.

I found them good yet disturbing. Seeing it in a film was interesting. It isbn't glorifying drug use, if anything, it's showing how it turns you into nothing.

I've read all of Welsh' books and enjoyed them. The one I found more disturbing was Marabou Stork nightmares

I liked the movie, but i'm just too tired of all the drug addict books to read another.

I have this on my pile. Picked it up months ago. It's orange.

Ifeyinwa said:

Your thoughts and feelings of Trainspotting. It was a dark comedy which portrayed junkies, in a realistic light i thought. Not gratified, nor sympathiszed. Just raw, the real deal. To show that when you're a drug addict, nobody is your friend. You are purely selfish and serving heroine.

I loved it!

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I read 'Trainspotting' and found it a bit of a struggle.

I don't dislike dialect writing, or for that matter, the wildly shifting POV and multiple first-person narrators. I love 'As I Lay Dying,' for instance.

To me, it fell under the category of an 'important' book, a hard, honest look at a ghetto culture that steps out of the inevitable race issues that cloud an American tale of the same.

I also thought Welsh made a great case against the 'Drug War' (whether that was his intention or not). Just the opening sequence, fishing the suppositories out and reinserting them: what can the law do to a junkie that's worse than what a junkie will do to himself?

But I can't say it was an enjoyable read. Having a more cohesive plot might have helped, as opposed to a bunch of vignettes that seem to have little to do with each other at many junctures. Also, just because you're writing in dialect, it doesn't mean you can't use more conventional dialogue attributions. It's not only difficult for an American (who doesn't know the fine points of Scottish dialects) to tell WHO is telling the story, but even in a given segment who is saying what, and what is an after-thought or interior narrative.

None of these things by themselves would be a problem, but the overall effect was a lot of work for the payoff in my view.

dont agree with the above post at all, although i sypathise with the fact that the dyalect used in the writing may prove difficult, this is a superb book, well written and worth reading for anyone who is willing to make the effort to get past the innitially dauting language barrier. i struggled but after a while found myself using the dialect in my own speech.! Great book , i think his best by a long way.

JKennedy82 said:

dont agree with the above post at all, although i sypathise with the fact that the dyalect used in the writing may prove difficult, this is a superb book, well written and worth reading for anyone who is willing to make the effort to get past the innitially dauting language barrier. i struggled but after a while found myself using the dialect in my own speech.! Great book , i think his best by a long way.

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If I thought it sucked, I wouldn't have finished it. But I was just perusing my copy of 'Mason & Dixon,' as I decide whether to finally read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' and Pynchon wrote 'M&D' in period language, especially the dialogue, but really even the narrative of Wicks Cherrycoke is full of allusions and descriptions that required frequent references to the OED when I intially read the book.

Pynchon was able to pull it off, make it worth the work. The thing with giving no narrator indication at chapter breaks, it makes it difficult to know who's telling the story and there's no reason not to give that POV hint. I think that's why I have mixed feelings about 'Trainspotting,' I felt like if he was going to write it in dialect, with multiple narrators, and a nonlinear plot, the payoff needed to be bigger. Or it needed more 'aha' moments where you realize something and it makes other things snap into place. Those are great moments, but I didn't have any of those I can recall when I read 'Trainspotting.' I'd forgive a hundred turgid pages easily for that moment when the scales fall away and I realize that 'this' and 'this' and 'this' was related in some profound way that I'd missed.

I read this book only because I liked the film. And that's the only reason I bothered finishing it. I can't say that I thought it was that good, and it's put me off wanting to read any of his other stuff. I couldn't stand all that rendering of dialect nonsense.
I don't like it when writers ingnore traditional/correct punctuation and grammar either. I'll put up with it sometimes, depending on whose book it is, but it really wears my patience thin, even when writers I like do it.

I haven't read Trainspotting. I enjoyed Porno. The characters are well-developed and believable, the plotting is pretty tight. Only two--Begbie and Spud--of the six or so characters are written in dialect and the dialect's really pretty easy to understand once you start to get into it.

For me, Begbie is one of the best-drawn demons of modern lit, right up there with Hannibal Lechter, and Sick Boy isn't far behind. One of the pleasures of the book is the contrast between these two psychopaths, each adapted to his own environment.

I don't think there'll be a movie.

I loved Trainspotting because it was so raw and close to the bone. I lived in an area of Scotland like that when I was a student, and have come across people like Begbie and the mentality of 'he's evil but he's a mate so what can you do?' that his 'friends' share. It's also the only book that has made me physically sick (the suppositories part was just too much for me lol), so any book that can cause a reaction that strong must be doing something right (?!) Porno was also good but wasn't as realistic and repeated a lot of stuff already covered in Trainspotting so didn't have the same impact, though the last scene with Sickboy Begbie and Renton certainly had me holding my breath....

(NOT trying to derail the topic)

nhunter said:

I haven't read Trainspotting. I enjoyed Porno. The characters are well-developed and believable, the plotting is pretty tight. Only two--Begbie and Spud--of the six or so characters are written in dialect and the dialect's really pretty easy to understand once you start to get into it.

For me, Begbie is one of the best-drawn demons of modern lit, right up there with Hannibal Lechter, and Sick Boy isn't far behind. One of the pleasures of the book is the contrast between these two psychopaths, each adapted to his own environment.

I don't think there'll be a movie.

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I never in a million hears would have thought of Begbie and Hannibal as similar characters.

The thing that's interesting about Hannibal as a character (though I think Harris fucked the dog with the ending of the last book), is his motive is so different from a typical serial killer. I used to read a ton of true crime and I got bored with serial killer profiles because it's always a sex hangup. Hard to solve because most murder victims know one another, but very predictable and dull after a while.

Hannibal, with his ritual cannibalism, is way off the usual. Buffalo Bill had a sexual component, and I can't remember what the main motive was for the killer in 'Red Dragon' (it's been too long, I just remember he picked his victims from developing home movies at Kodak or something, and had a blind girlfriend). But even Buffalo Bill isn't in the Ted Bundy mold.

I think that's what appealed to me about 'All the Beautiful Sinners,' it was such a wild sort of serial killer case.

I just finished Trainspotting

I cannot (i repeat, CANNOT) find the dvd for the film... Does it even exist? And i hope the subtitles are in standard english

But I just finished the book and it was really good. I wouldn't have wanted the book in any other way. The dialect makes it difficult to read but if u try reading it out aloud, it's easier. I would prefer if more books are written like this...

Plus I think it takes a lot of effort to juggle so many characters and make them so so so different...

I'm just very curious about everyone's reaction to the ending... Did it make anyone laugh very badly or is it just me? Nobody around me seems to think the ending was good...

musiqueperson said:

I'm just very curious about everyone's reaction to the ending... Did it make anyone laugh very badly or is it just me? Nobody around me seems to think the ending was good...

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I liked the ending, it was good to have some optimism after so much misery and violence; it made me feel better that somebody escaped....

It is simply - the best book ever written.

After reading this thread, I'm gonna have to dust off my copy and read it again, maybe even check out the sequel.

I love this book.. it took some getting through .. and i had to learn how to read in a scottish accent..! and i did need to re-read a lot just to make sense, but it's a brilliant book.

I've never read anything else of his though..