Irvine Welsh Books

I'm a huge fan of Welsh's other books, but his characters don't translate well here. He's got a leg up in that the three main characters should all be familiar to Welsh fans, so minimal effort is needed to flesh them out, but in the end the notion that they somehow find love is so far-fetched that I thought it was a joke at first. Imagine Frank Begbie from 'Trainspotting' going soft over a bird and suddenly wanting to escape his violent and nihlistic life (all within the span of two or three pages) and you've got the essential problem I had with this play. The introduction by Welsh is actually the best part.

You get the feeling that the lost production costs are being recouped through the sale of this screenplay. Buy "Ecstasy" or "The Acid House" instead.

First play I've read from Welsh, but I was very impressed with the balance of humor, drama and typical screwed up mentality of the characters, which is a very common flavor of Irvine Welsh. It's a short read, but extremely entertaining and I couldn't put it down until I was done.

just going to be brief, but i thought this was an enjoyable quick read about two kidnappers and the guy they kidnap and his gf. its like welsh's other novels where it has some very funny parts but at other times has some very deep serious portions.
some of it might seem to be a bit of a stretch, but hey it is fiction, it'd probably be interesting to actually see on stage.
so if you like welsh i suggest readin this. or if you havent this might be a good starter read.

For those of you who don't know, such as myself, the phrase "you'll have had your hole", translates to getting some action. Which is exactly what this screenplay is all about. I enjoyed it very much. It is a quick read. Yet, somehow disturbing to the mind for a very long time. Once again, Irvine Welsh, has giving us charaters we can relate to. Though we may not all want to cop up to it. I have always found welsh's dialogs between charaters the strongest part of his work. This play is a great example of this.

It takes you though a few days in the life of three main charaters. The reader is becomes a part of a kidnapping, a seduction, a love story, violence, a rape, and into the head of a very twisted HIV infected, brutal outcast. I must confess, the end of this play really messed with my head. I wasn't sure I liked it. Until it dawned on me, how much of an impact it had on me. Any serious Welsh fan will love this play! Anyone who is sick of the same old recyceled fiction should love love it too. I've said it before, Welsh is not for the light hearted and easily distrubed people. That would be why this play was pulled off the stage in the U.K. Most people just aren't ready for this kind of writing. Which is why I think Welsh has such a big following among my generation. We all have a rebel in us wanting to get out. We all have twisted thoughts we never admit to. Welsh has no problem putting these thoughts into words. I'd hope that you fellow Welsh fans get ahold of this play. It will definatly shock even the most unshockable!

There's a much publicised divide 'twixt Edinburgh and Glasgow... the two cities lie less than fourty miles apart. One is huge and cosmopolitan, the other is the capital of Scotland. The title of the play subverts the phraze Edinburgh hosts are alleged to greet their guests with; "You'll have had your tea, then?"

This play, I think, preceeded Gargarin Way (by a playright whose name I cannot recall at present, but a similar sceniario, and just as good if not better).

It's worth reading. Really sick, obviously, but there's Mr Welsh for you.

The "air-con" mis-step appears in the first couple of pages of at least two of the pieces. I am writing this here because I specifically googled to see how many others had caught this howler.
This reader almost (ok, only almost) put the book down to email his mate in Scotland who's another Welsh fan to share dismay.
Irvine, Irvine, Irvine!!!
Please tell me this is your editor's fault!!!
This Haddie boy in the US didnae appreciate.
The subbuteo story's barry, but.

I don't understand why there are so many negative reviews here, this is not bad stuff at all, it is typical Irvine Welsh work, not bad at all. If you know what to expect from Welsh, then you should be pleased with the works here.

These short stories are pretty fantastic, especially the opener "Rattlesnakes", a Welsh classic. As for the rest, I am partial to "DOGS of Licoln Park, because being from the Chicagoland area, he captures the setting phenominally, especially considering he is from over-seas.

Overall, this is not his best work (read "Filth", or "Trainspotting", especially if you are a Welsh virgin), but it deserves more acclaim than the harsh reviews laid out here. His novels are better??? Fact. But for 9/10 authors most reviewers will say the same thing. For some reason people just don't gravitate towards the short story anymore, and thats a shame. Give it a try.

Irvine Welsh means to shock, but usually there is a point to it all. Previously, he's written short stories about such cheery subjects as armless, grown-up Thalidomide babies using chainsaws to cut off the arms of the people that created Thalidomide, and a guy who, after he's been fired, his girlfriend has dumped him and his parents have at long last kicked him out, gets turned into a fly by God and as a fly wreaks revenge on those who have wronged him, along the way seeing such things as his mother doing unto his father with a strap-on. But even those stories contain Welsh's trademark humor and observations about society. So what has happened to Irvine Welsh?

The first story, about a road trip gone horribly wrong, is a set-up in search of a story. There's no point, there isn't an ending, and the racial stereotyping is offensive even for Irvine Welsh. The second story, about a bar owner in the Bahamas who treats women as disposable, is really long and has no apparent point. After that, I pretty much gave up. No humor, no real commentary on life... not even anything particularly shocking. More Howard Stern than Irvine Welsh and not worth the bother even if you're an Irvine Welsh fan.

As others have noted, Mr.Welsh's superficial attempt at capturing Americana does not work - he uses much of the vernacular incorrectly e.g. "air con" instead of the customary "A/C" and some of the character names don't ring true and seem contrived. This is an unwelcome distraction and undermines the credibility of his settings. He appears to have done place research superficially, perhaps from maps or guidebooks. The insertion of phonetic Scottish words in the last half of the book seems a bit limiting and I was weary enough of his prose that I just skipped those sections altogether.
His erotica, while grittily realistic, is ultimately offputting since it does nothing to uplift the reader or support the narrative and seems only to give vent to the author's sordid fixations. You might feel a bit soiled after reading this nasty book - it is not a guilty pleasure but rather an unnecessary wallow in the sad and sordid lives of unremarkable characters.

This is the first Irvine Welsh book I've struggled to finish. The stories are trite, the attempt at capturing American accents falls flat and overall the whole thing just seems...uninspired.

This is a truly terrible book. The author, a middle class academic teaching at Edinburgh University in Scotland, clearly knows nothing of Scottish working class culture, which is the societal level which spawned Welsh's abrasive wordwork. Kelly basically makes up (seriously) most of this book, reading far-too-deep-and-tortuously-over-articulated meanings into short stories and novels that simply do not exist, supplemented by a selection of over-analytical, under-understanding quotes from other deluded examiners of Welsh's stuff.

When an author doesn't know that the use of the word 'us' in colloquial Scottish is simply a different way of saying 'me' and instead attributes this word in a sentence to a character talking about a 'multiplicity of personalities'...EVERYTHING he says is rendered suspect and void. If you want a critical analysis of Welsh that resonates with reason and reality, you will have to wait for another one, this being the first, because this man just doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. And he teaches this garbage to students too. Glad I'm not a student in his literature class.

Check out www.laurahird.com/newreview/irvinewelsh.html for a more in-depth review of this book.

'tis a screenplay based on the novel but translated into a conventional (americanised) English thus lost most of the power from Welsh' native brogue. points of interest in this miramaxbooks dud: a) b&w photos from the famous movie, b) complete cast, crew and soundtrack info and c)a shorter interview w Irvine Welsh himself.