Irvine Welsh: Porno

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

You can bet Irvine Welsh's publishers were wheedling for a sequel to Trainspotting from the moment it went stellar. But, happily, Welsh left it alone.

His next two or three novels weren't his best work but he came back strongly with Filth, a nasty wee tale of a bent, scheming, cross-dressing copper.

Better yet was Glue, set on the same turf as Trainspotting and writing some of the characters into the periphery.

And now, without further ado, here it is: the sequel to Trainspotting.

Porno combines the strengths of Filth, in which the malevolent scamming of the main character made for compulsive reading, and of Glue, where you could tell Welsh relished being back among his own. It even takes the most attractive character in Glue, Terry Juice Lawson, and mixes him up with the cast of Trainspotting.

It's a few years on. The crew have cleaned up and kicked their habits, although for poor old Spud Murphy it's still a day-to-day thing. Second Prize has found God. Mark Renton is still lying low over in the Dam, but he's dreaming of being back in Leith. The "wee radge" himself, Franco Begbie, is just out of jail, but hardly what you'd call rehabilitated.

Into all of this walks Simon Sick Boy Williamson, who has scammed his way into a modicum of success and a world of pretentiousness in London. He's back in Leith to try out a new venture, namely making a pornographic movie, but he's got a few sidelines as well - selling party drugs, doing cocaine and baiting Begbie, so that when he can finally locate Renton he can unleash the full fury of Franco upon him for the grand rip-off that Renton pulled at the end of Trainspotting.

Once again, the book uses phonetic representation of dialect - not as broad for most of the characters, because they're older and have more world-experience than in the Trainspotting days, although Franco hasn't come far.

There's a hurdle for readers: an initial adjustment period to be gone through. Once you're there, though, it's exhilarating, and you find those little dialogues you hold with yourself in your head being conducted in a broad Eddybro accent.

Some are quick to dismiss Welsh as a fad, but Porno puts his qualities as a writer beyond doubt. From the outset, he sets his characters out like pieces on a chessboard; and as he begins to move them around, you know you're in the presence of a grand master of storytelling. The plot expands into all the preposterous, lurid magnificence of the inflatable sex-doll in the cover photograph: you can't help but be drawn in by Sick Boy's Machiavellian scheming; by the strangely pristine logic of Franco's psycho world-view; by the suspense as you know that Renton's and Begbie's destinies must cross sometime before the end.

Underneath it all, there's a satire of the porn industry which works up into a brilliant climax. The last couple of scenes are vividly filmic, and you wonder whether Welsh again has an eye cocked on the silver screen.

Bring ay oan naw.

Jonathan Cape

$34.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.