Dead Men’s Trousers
by Irvine Welsh
Jonathan Cape, £16.99
Review by Keith Bruce
EVEN more than the deadline-disdaining Douglas Adams probably failed to foresee the
shelf-life of his improbably extended Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy”, as a young tyro author in Kevin Williamson’s Rebel Inc stable, Irvine Welsh could not have imagined the characters of his reputation-establishing debut, Trainspotting, facing up to middle age more than 20 years later.
If the writer is to be believed, this fifth volume (unless you count the tangential Glue) of the drug -and sex-filled adventures of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud, is the last, and it certainly reads that way. Here is Welsh emptying the shoebox (or desktop folder) of notes pertaining to the back-pages of his posse of wayward Leith school chums, and extrapolating a fate for them all that includes the settling of scores, payment of dues and a remarkable quotient of old-fashioned moral lessons.
We already know from the pre-publicity that one of them does not make it to the final pages (and frankly, it is no great surprise which) and, just as importantly, we have already had the transformation scene, in 2016’s The Blade Artist, which saw the psychopathically violent Frank Begbie redeemed by art (and the love of a good art therapist).
The franchise has been sustained by the application of the 1970s Scottish news story about the work of the Barlinnie Special Unit on lifer Jimmy Boyle, whose memoir, A Sense of Freedom, was reprinted a couple of years back, with a new foreword by Irvine Welsh.
This sequel to The Blade Artist is a tying-up of loose ends – for Welsh, for his characters (and specifically Mark Renton) and for a generation of readers, now themselves middle-aged.
Just as time passes more quickly as you get older, Welsh crams plenty of action into the year-long timeframe of Dead Men’s Trousers.
We learn pretty swiftly that Begbie’s new persona as internationally successful artist Jim Francis is indeed less than completely comprehensive.
In fact none of the quartet has moved on all that much, despite Renton’s superficially successful career as a manager of club DJs. In what is sometimes too like a pastiche of Bond novels (or movies) not to be deliberate, Dead Men’s Trousers trips gaily around the globe to European capitals,
dance-music hotspots and the US West Coast, but always ends up back in Leith, which is as it should be, of course.
For all that Welsh has clearly plundered the experience that being a globally-successful author has won him, he is still best at the coruscating first person narrative of his home team, who share the storytelling with chapters written by a similarly-vocabularied third person narrator.
It is not the generic patois that Welsh puts into the mouths of his characters that elicits the best gags (no one in Edinburgh uses that much rhyming slang), so much as the different cadences in their speech and thoughts that make them instantly identifiable from one another. Therein lies the heart, soul and skill of this book.
Other bits aren’t as clever. A basement Edinburgh “sauna” setting for a pivotal plot twist has “a big TV set on one wall and a red velvet curtain on the other” and “cushions decorated with gold lace trimmings”. Ten pages later we are unnecessarily reminded of “a red velvet curtain”, “scarlet cushions, bordered with gold lace” and “a large flat-screen television, fixed on a wall” by the same third-person narrator.
More amusingly, the Sick Boy-narrated chapter that follows makes a characteristic analogy between a mature woman’s “sex-tourist holiday in Jamaica” and the annual visit of the chimney sweep, in which the Scots word “lum” is spelled with a final “b”. How much blame can Welsh pass over to his editors at Jonathan Cape for that one? In a harem-scarem short-chapters race to the tape at the end of the book, Welsh draws a clear line under this phase of his writing life.
The moral tone of the plot resolution, even if it owes as much to Western movies as Western religion, may come as a surprise to some of his fans, but makes a Hollywood version more of a likely prospect. Unlike that other great Edinburgh-born movie franchise – which has also spawned tourist tours of the capital – a screenwriter would need the last two books as a platform for T3 Trainspotting, rather than making two movies of the one literary denouement.
The comparison is not so far-fetched: in his final victory over the shadowy bad guy in Dead Men’s Trousers and arrival at a place of moral equanimity, Renton becomes a radge Leith cousin of JK Rowling’s boy wizard.
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