Trainspotting
by Irvine Welsh
Summary
Set among heroin users in late 1980s Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, the novel follows Mark Renton and his circle, Sick Boy, Spud, the violent and entirely sober Begbie, and Tommy, across seven loosely chronological sections narrated in rotating first person Scots dialect that Welsh renders phonetically on the page. Renton repeatedly tries and fails to get clean; in one notorious early chapter he retrieves opium suppositories from a toilet after a bout of diarrhea, and elsewhere the accidental death of a friend's infant daughter is left largely unexplained and unpunished, the book's flattest and coldest passage on purpose. Tommy, introduced to heroin partly through Renton's own carelessness after a breakup, contracts HIV and dies of an AIDS related infection, while Begbie's violence, which has nothing to do with drugs at all, remains the group's most frightening constant. The book closes with Renton, temporarily clean and living in London, joining the others for one last deal, a large quantity of heroin sold to a dealer in the city; rather than split the money as promised, he steals the entire share meant for Begbie and Sick Boy, leaving only Spud his cut, and disappears into Amsterdam to start over alone, the novel ending on an act of betrayal delivered with the same flat lack of moral comment as everything before it.
The Scots dialect is disorienting for the first chapters and then becomes the book's whole voice, blackly comic even at its bleakest, moving between despair and outright farce within the same page without ever romanticizing the drug use it describes so closely.
Historical Context & Significance
Secker and Warburg published Trainspotting in 1993, and it was longlisted for that year's Booker Prize. Multiple accounts from people close to the judging have described two panel members threatening to resign over its content, a story repeated often enough since to have become part of the book's own reputation, though it is best read as widely reported rather than as an official Booker statement; whatever the mechanism, the novel did not reach the shortlist, which that year went instead to Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. No other major literary prize considered it.
Commercial success followed instead of a jury's approval. Welsh has said it sold more than a million copies in the United Kingdom by 2015 and was translated into thirty languages, and Danny Boyle's 1996 film, scripted by John Hodge and starring Ewan McGregor, turned Renton's closing choose life monologue into one of the decade's most quoted pieces of British cinema, later ranked tenth on the British Film Institute's list of the hundred best British films.