Irvine Welsh Books

Once in a while I come across a writer who is so dexterous, so acute, that I am willing to follow him to whatever depths of depravity to which he chooses to descend.

Tim Willocks is such a writer, and in Bad City Blues, he has elected to visit a deeper place than I have gone before. The setting is a Louisiana hotter, dirtier and uglier than the one I have visited and it is peopled with demons disguised as policemen, addicts, thugs and men of the cloth. These creatures are violent and vengeful, heaping pain and indignities upon one another with an abandon that should chill and repel the reader, but the spare beauty of the language keeps us hanging on through the worst of it.

There are only seven characters in Bad City Blues and in lesser hands such paucity of interaction might seem cramped and claustrophobic, but it's clear that Willocks requires every one of the books 245 pages to bring them to life and could probably have done with another hundred or so.

As with most of stories of human nature, Bad City Blues is about two brothers. It is a logical way for a writer to start - two men who have had the same upbringing and background should turn out roughly the same way, yet one goes bad, the other goes worse. Cicero and Luther Grimes (Grimes - dirty, besoiled, low - even the names are evocative) are white trash who haven't spoken in years due to an unnamed wrong committed by Luther on Cicero. Luther spends most of his time in South America, training death squads and dealing drugs, while his brother elected to go to medical school. Cicero could have been a successful doctor, but instead now lives in a broken-down firehouse in a broken-down part of town and tends to the afflicted, often free of charge. Does this make him a good man? No, not really. Violence and retribution boil just below the surface of his calm demeanor. Though the "good" Grimes does not uncork his rage, the bloodlust surges through him and is as ugly as the acts perpetrated by the other characters.

Separated by years and miles, the brothers are pulled together by Callie Carter, a former hooker and current addict, who is on the run with a million dollars stolen from the bank where her husband is a Vice President. The husband, Cleve Carter, is also a television evangelist who sparks through his brief appearance in this book like a high-voltage wire chewed through by wild nutria.

Clarence Jefferson is a crooked cop who destroys or befouls everything he touches, including his sweet and unassuming Baptist wife. He catches wind of the million dollar heist and sets out to claim his piece of it, leaving a wake of bloodied and broken humanity behind him.

Bad City Blues is a ferocious and extraordinary book that will be enjoyed by fans of Chuck Palahniuk and James Lee Burke and burned in horror by fans of Agatha Christie and Joan Hess.

I've got the name of this book tattooed on my arm. Its not neccessarily my favourite book or particularly clever. But it has an underlying current that is like a shooting up smack whilst driving a stolen car through a residential area.

I am an American who owns over 300 cookbooks, and I consider myself a gourmet cook. On a recent trip to Britain, I scoured bookstores and chose this book over all the others. Iým glad I did. I have to say, this is absolutely the BEST cookbook I have come across in the past 20 years.

This book is not as comprehensive as The Joy of Cooking, which tries to tell you how to cook absolutely everything under the sun. But this book IS inclusive of everything thatýs important in classic British Cooking (and in traditional American cooking, as well)ýsoups, sauces, cheese and eggs, vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, picnics, puddings, cakes and baking, and preserves and pickles. In addition, it has chapters on The Great British Breakfast, Savories and Snacks, Sunday Lunch Roasts, A Festive Christmas, and Afternoon and High Tea.

As an American, I learned SO much from this book. I learned about the ORIGIN of bacon and eggs for breakfasts, about the histories of many different vegetables (quite different information than is included in The Joy of Cooking), HOW and WHY British cuisine got a reputation for being bland (it wasnýt always so), and many things about the history of eating which have just been plainly lost to us in America. For example, I did not know before that the origin of certain foods sometimes being served on a piece of toast was from the ýtrenchersý used in medieval times--ýtrenchersý being big slabs of bread which were laid directly on the table, and food put on top. The reason for the use of trenchers was that plates were too expensive for ordinary people to use. Not only are so many interesting discussions about the origins of different foods and customs included in this book, but ALL the recipies are interesting and FANTASTIC!

British readers will enjoy the depth and style of this book, while American readers will really learn a lot about the origin of our own traditional cuisine. I will treasure this book for many years. I am buying four more copies to give as gifts this Christmas. I bought the paperback edition. This book is so wonderful and will be used for so many years, that I highly recommend to other readers to spend the extra money and get a hardcover edition, if it is available.

...I have always found his TV style to be irksome and irritating. But I have to give it to him with this well researched and mouth watering book. He has done Britian a huge favour here by celebrating all that is great about British cooking and reviving it. Certainly he seems to have had an effect, I have noticed how many British restuarants, cafe bars and grub pubs have sneeked in Cream Teas, Big Breakfasts, Toad in the Holes and Bread and Butter puddings; and they are all the better for it. If you have ever pondered at the sadness of lost food items from the British landscape, food which made Britain. Then I urge you to buy this book!

Interesting read about a man who started out in a life of crime, alcohol and drugs and turned around and helped many in his old neighborhood who suffered from the same problems. He did it all with soccer (or football in Scotland). His team only includes former drug addicts. A great story.

Awesome collection of 25 short stories and essays about soccer. My favorites were Stephen Baxter's "Clods," Tim Pears' "Ebony International" Nicholas Lezards' "The Beautiful Game," Steve Grant's "Casuals," Geoff Nicholson's "The Winning Side," Mark Morris's "The Shirt," and Mark Timlin's "Wonder Boy." That said, almost every story has something worthwhile about it, and for a soccer fan, this is a must read.

This is a small book but they've managed to pack an amazing amount of information and opinion into it. I'm a huge fan of Trainspotting, in all of its incarnations, and the energy of the work really comes through in this book - Robert Morace is clearly a big fan as well. He provides some fascinating background on Welsh's own background (especially about Thatcherism and its effects on Scotland) and his analysis of the novel itself is readable and hard to disagree with. I've read Trainspotting 4 or 5 times, but this has made me want to go and read it again.

I must admit. I only picked up this book because Irvine Welsh had a small part in its content. I am very happy I did though. It is a very charming look at a families build up to a wedding, as well as the ceremony and reception. What makes this book so unique, is two things. One, this is no "ideal" family. Two, Waplington was able to capture some rare moments with his photographs. Flipping through the pages, you can get caught in their lives. I almost felt a part of the family. As though I was in the same run down house, with children running all about me. Walpington lives with his subjects. In doing this, he is able to show us a side to their lives you would not usually see in a photograph. I can not praise this book enough. Once again, my love of Irvine Welsh, has introduced me to a gem. This book is worth the time and money and should be noticed.

Sure the movie is fantastic, pretty much everyone will agree on that, but to really get the full story one has to read the book. Yes, as alot of people will say, it is hard to understand at first because of the dialect, but Welsh is a master at the Scottish dialect, and to truly be absorbed "intae" the story, you have to have that key component.

Welsh brilliantly combines all emotions here over a rollercoaster ride through the drug scene in Scotland. An absolute must read for any book lover. Read "Filth" also. Welsh is flippin great.

Although it took me about 30 pages to get the hang of the language, I found Trainspotting to be a intriguing balance of crass humor and sub-cultural commentary, with the occasional note of revelation.

fantastic once you get the hang of the language and slang. Suggestion--watch the movie first to put a face with the characters. The movie is but a fraction of the book, so it won't spoil anything. LOVE IT!!!

Once you get over the dialect (it is written a scottish accent), and it doesn't take long to do. You find a funny, sad and disturbing account of drug addiction and the nature of friendship.
There's so much more here than in the movie.
One of my favouries.

If you like the movie and you've also got the soundtrack cds then go the whole hog and give it a read. It consists of a series of vignettes that were woven together superbly for the film. Readers might be put off initially by Welsh writing in a scottish dialect, but once you suss it out, it works most effectively in setting the scene and the characters - and there's a almost complete dictionary in the back. Some of the scenes are a tad grimmer than the film portrayed - hence the beauty of books allowing character development etc. But that said the film captured the essence of the book very, very well. The cover shows the cast of the film, and I think they did a grand job matching up the characters to the actors especially Begby.

Welsh indicates how easy it is for the disenfranchised of the western world, and probably all cultures, to find themselves trying drugs "just the once, I can handle it" and then caught in the embrace of addition, needing the next fix and how to fund it etc.

A very powerful protrayal of the sad and seedy world of drug addiction. (The "Mile End" track by Pulp captures it perfectly).

Recommended!

Boy I love this book. Chocked full of depravity and debauchery, this is a trip through the seedy side of life, and your tour-guide is Bruce Robertson, the most corrupt, vile cop ever. And by the way, he is hilarious. To crawl into the mind of this man is a trip inside the mind of Satan the detective. Irvine Welsh has a sense of what makes people uncomfortable, and he shoves your face in it.

This book is definetely not for the faint of heart or the easily offended, but if you like stories that drag you along the downward spiral through the dredges of society, and leave you begging for more, pick up this book. You won't be able to put it down, even though many times you will feel compelled to.

I was only bored for about 1.5 pages of this book, which says quite a bit for a novel. Usually I get to about page 180 of a book and say, "All right, let's wrap it up. Enough's enough." Not so with "Filth" (or "The Great Gatsby" [which isn't all that long, mind you].)

If you buy this book and read it and have some sort of decency about you, you will, at times, feel ashamed that you continue to turn the pages, wondering what D.S. Bruce Robertson is going to do or say next. The main character is about as deplorable as any human being can be, but he does try to save a man having a heart attack, so he's got that going for him.

Robertson has a tapeworm inside him that occasionally speaks through text overlaid on text. Trust me, you don't miss anything due to some words being obscured.

The part where Robertson goes to Amsterdam is really the part where the hammer drives the spike. Just remember, there are people out there like the main character, spiralling into depravity and cruelty.

It's really a wonder that this thing ever got published . . . but I'm glad it did. Long live free speech and publication.

"Irvine Welsh, the delusion that drug fetus become pregnant to non-resettable corpse feti=streaming, the guerrilla=vibrator of the abolition world, exterminated the human body pill brain universe of a chemical=anthropoid." - Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric

bruce robertson one of my favorite kooks this one belongs between your dostoevsky and shakespeare on your bookshelf i kid you not

Admittedly, this book will not be for everyone...some of you may be too prude to swallow Welsh's violent and raw prose ;)

Some may be turned off by the tape worm's story, or by the chronic masturbation, or by the abundant misogynist comments. But others may think it's a brilliant bit of creative sickness...others who are sick and twisted like me, that is.

The use of Scottish vernacular/phonetic spelling may slow some down, but I feel it truly adds depth and feeling to the story. For me, Welsh's writing is musical and realistic (almost painfully so).

If you haven't read any Welsh yet - you're missing out! If the reviews on this page are turning you off, try Trainspotting first - it's a good introduction to Welsh's style & not nearly as revolting or shocking.

Irvine Welsh has been a lot of things to a lot of different people- some say he's the best thing to happen to British writing in a decade, some say he's just a flash-in-the-pan with uncouth sensibilities who writes thoughtless, violent stories about amoral scumbags. Say what you will about Welsh as a writer- be it that he's talented, sick, brilliant, strange or just plain nuts- but he is, and has never been, boring. Until now. "Marabou Stork Nightmares" is a colossal letdown after the one-two punch of "Trainspotting" and "The Acid House", a jumbled, convoluted tale about a repugnant [man] trawling his last moments away in a life that most closely resembles a bedridden hell. This is not the first first-person account of a psychopath that Welsh has written- see later, his aptly-titled "Filth"- but even at his worst, D.S. Bruce Robertson had a sort of perverse wit to him, while this story lacks anything short of coherence, wit, humor or even plot.

The protagonist of this brutish tale is Roy Strang, a bedridden criminal pissing the last moments of his sad life away in a bed, ready to die. As he slowly slips in and out of consciousness, Roy reflects on the family upbringing- that entailed rape, sexual molestation and the vicious abuse of his right-wing Uncle- that led him to this state. We see later in his life, as Roy attempts to straighten himself out, get a job and "choose life", as it were, but we continue to see that he cannot escape the sins of his past. All the while, he hunts the formidable African Predator the Marabou Stork- a personification of all the misery, evil, hatred, pain and badness in Roy himself- on a wild Safari in Africa, that ostensibly all takes place in Roy's morphine-and-depravity-addled brain.

The novel proves that Welsh can still pull plenty of tricks out of his proverbial hat when it comes to language- some of his bawdy, boy's-night-out Scottish dialogue still provokes a chuckle or two, while the disgusting gangrape scene towards the book's denouement is one of the more haunting I have read in recent memory. And yet, for all its mild pleasures, this book still sees Welsh falling majorly short of the mark, sinking into the endless mire of Roy Strang's egomaniacal fever dream. Consider this one a real "Nightmare".

From the author of Trainspotting, this story is told on three levels: the world around the main character in the hospital room where he lives in a coma, the flashbacks to his life in his mind, and the deeper dream world in which he and a fictitious friend hunt the terrible marabou stork. The main character is not a very likable fellow, and the story gets pretty hardcore at times, once making me physically sick. But if you like a book that has a visceral effect on you, as I do, this might do.

I can't tell you if this book is good or bad but it is written in a hard to read dialect. I'm not telling anyone not to read this, but if you can't read poetry, you probably wont be able to read this.

Once again Irvine Welsh delivers another brillant book deplicting the struggle of everyday life. As the book summary says Roy Strang is in a coma and fantasizes about hunting the Marabou Stork in Africa. It also tells his life leading up to his coma and the hardships he endured while growing up. A great book.

I found this book to be quite entertaining once I got into it. Welsh takes the reader into the mind of Roy Strang, a man who I could never imagine relating to, sympathizing with, or understanding. The dialogue is cool and not difficult to interpret. Welsh makes a good moral argument about powerlessness and the hatred it can bring into people's lives. The book's two victims, Roy himself and the woman he later brutally rapes, are both turned into violent souls seeking to regain the power that was stolen from them. I thought the rape scene went a bit far. What the main character does is just about the worst thing one human being can do to another. It's hard to believe that a person capable of such things is not pure evil. I warn anyone who may not want to read a detailed account of a brutal gang rape to not pick up this book. I question the ethics of writing such a scene, especially when you are a man. But that will be for you to think about. On Welsh's defence he makes every argument against the brutality of rape as well as the justice system's inability to protect women.
The ending is fascinating and worth debating about. All in all a recommended read.

The sequel to Welsh's "Trainspotting" brings back many of your favorite characters, from Rents to Spud to Begbie, as well as introduces some new characters.

And it does not disappoint. More wild adventures, more drug fueled hilarity, more explicit situations, it's all you've come to expect from Welsh and more.

Another Welsh classic, dive in and enjoy.

I walked away from this one realizing I hadn't a shred of empathy for a single character; I literally didn't care what happened to any of them, the lot were that reprehensible. If they got shot, or stabbed, I was prepared to be happy about it!
Don't get me wrong, Irvine possesses talent; it's just wasted here. Well, everywhere.
But fair play, the title and cover (old cover with blow-up doll) tell you precisely what to expect; and that's what you get. Trashy, forgettable filth. It was good for a laugh at least, to see the librarian's expression when she saw what she was dispensing.
But you can read the same caliber of yarn in any whack-off mag.

Ditto to the all previous reviews.
Irvine Welsh is an extremely talented writer. He displays such finesse in putting several different personalities, mindsets and even gender to paper. I couldn't believe that it was one mind writing as the different characters.
The characters were tragically too real. The situations were tragically humorous and perverse. Just when you start to root for a character and think everything's going to be okay, something pulls him (or her) back down exposing that this is real life he's writing about here and not Pretty Woman.
Kudos to him.

I found Irvine Welsh's Porno in a bookstore before I had ever heard a review or even learned of its existence. I'd only read Trainspotting, and was thrilled to discover that this book followed the same group of terrific characters--years later. Renton, Sickboy, Spud and Begbie return under a whole new set of circumstances. None of them are saints, but drugs are not the focus anymore. No, it's sex this time. The gang gets involved in making a porn film to hilarious outcome. Like Trainspotting before it, Porno goes with the first person perspective of several characters, divided by chapters. Welsh shows off his writing talents by making clear who we are reading in each chapter by the voice he uses for each of them. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, well drawn, and a true gift for fans of Trainspotting and the characters that inhabited it. Now if only they'd get Danny Boyle and the original cast to make this movie. Trainspotting made his and the actors' careers. Let's hope they realize that and give us a sequel on film. Great book. Synopsis available elsewhere.

Irvine Welsh is one of the most brilliant writers I know, he has mannaged to create a sequell to "Trainspotting" which is not dissapointing as I expected it to be. in this book you get to know more about simon (sick boy), begbie and spud murphy from their one point of view , about severall characters who appear also in "Glue" ( Terry, rab birrell...) and to an interesting new female character (nikki).Welsh has an extraordinary talent of bringing his characters alive and making you feel as if they realy exist. the ending is just perfect. you must read this!