Book Review | A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh

As Edinburgh’s most infamous ex-aerated water salesman will tell you, variety is the spice ay life, and it’s certainly something that’s in abundant supply in Irvine Welsh’s back catalogue. From talking tapeworms to Marabou Stork metaphors and sci-fi flies, over the years the Scots scribbler has proven himself to be incessantly inventive - and far from shy when it comes to experimentation. It’s quite remarkable, then, that it took so long for him to make his first full-length foray into farce. A Decent Ride, as its double entendre of a title shamelessly suggests, is an entire novel built around Glue and Porno’s loveable and libidinous “Juice” Terry Lawson – a character every bit as emblematic of the post-modern lothario as Franco Begbie is the pub psycho.

“Terry, feeling a tweak of romance in his heart, says,

                         - Kin tell you’ve no hud any bairns. That chuff ay yours is as tight as a drum!”

Introduced in Glue - perhaps still Welsh’s most underrated novel - the corkscrew-heided tea-leaf dominated the proceedings with his insatiable appetite for the Mantovani, before making a fitting return in the long-awaited Trainspotting sequel, Porno, where he very nearly stole the show with his Carry On film escapades. He later resurfaced as the principal protagonist of “I am Miami”, the story that Welsh penned to headline his collection of Reheated Cabbage in 2009.  For the most part cast in a transparently comic role, both Glue and “I am Miami” briefly touched on a deeper, more complicated side of the character – a darker underbelly that A Decent Ride turns to in order to drive its main narrative. Here, Welsh takes the reader on a meta-sexual odyssey through the mind of a man famed for such pearls as,  “…fuck off means naw, naw means mibbe, mibbe means aye n aye means anal…”, before taking that man’s licentious love life and tossing it off Forth Bridge, leaving us drowning in the madness of a man robbed of a decent ride.

“Moby Dick wis aboot this cunt chasin a whale, right? Ah see masel as that boy, only instead ay bein obsessed wi the whale, wi me it’s fanny, n the taxi’s like ma boat. So instead ay Captain Ahab, ye kin call me Captain Acab.”

A decade on from the events of Porno, and Juice T is now dividing his time between driving a taxi and shooting scud flicks for Sick Boy. With Old Faithful’s services fully booked for the foreseeable future, things start to go awry for Terry when his old mate Post Alec dies horrifically in a suicide attempt that didn’t go quite to plan (Poor old Alec couldn’t tell freezer from oven…) and at the funeral their mutual acquaintance, local gangster Victor Syme, burdens the busy cabbie with the stewardship of his main Edinburgh brothel. This comes hot on the heels of Terry grudgingly accepting a lucrative driving job for American businessman and reality TV star Ronald Checker, who finds himself mysteriously drawn to the indifferent hackman, and is followed in short order by a chance encounter with a suicidal playwright that Old Faithful virtually has to fuck the will to live back into – and who won’t leave Terry alone thereafter.
 

His life suddenly awash with hassle and need, matters become even thornier when Terry crosses paths with one of his father’s innumerable progenies at the hospital, where only a fierce hatred of Hibs - and the Hibs-supporting Terry - is sustaining the moribund Henry Lawson. In yet another astonishing feat of happenstance, Terry’s supposed wee half-brother is the boyfriend of Jinty Magdelen, the whore employed at Vic’s brothel who went missing on the night of Hurricane Bawbag, and whose disappearance sits atop the list of Terry’s troubles – particularly as he banged her in the back of his cab that very evening. With his habitual debauched existence fading fast as his stress levels skyrocket, it’s with an overwhelming sense of inevitability that Terry eventually collapses at the feet of his Trump-esque paymaster, clutching at his chest in agony. This heart attack would not only rob the Shagger II star of his vigour, but everything that defines him as a man. In a particularly cruel and riotous expansion of Porno’s banjo-string snap subplot, A Decent Ride sees the self-professed “George Clooney ay scud” forced to contemplate a life without sexual activity of any kind. Even the slightest sexual excitement could prove too much for his dicky ticker...

“…ah cannae fuckin well live withoot a ride.”

It’s a contrived and utterly absurd setup – but, just like invading aliens speaking in Scots dialogue gleaned from a football casual or a mystical curse transferring hangovers and comedowns from one man to another, it’s ceaselessly captivating. Particularly after the first half of the book’s abundance of carnal riches, Terry’s inability to have his hole erupts into an orgasmic cascade of comedy, and Welsh ekes it for all that it’s worth, even going so far as to dedicate pages to Old Faithful’s angry monologues and torment Terry with twisted nightmares in which he’s penetrated by his own dismembered member. Only golf, of all things, offers the tormented Perversevere poster boy some form of solace – until, of course, he realises that he’s just exchanged the pursuit of one hole for another.

“All Terry can think about are fairways, roughs, bunkers, greens, flags and, most of all, white balls and dark, dark holes.”

But as farcical as Terry’s plight is, the author also uses it to explore and enrich someone who, at a first glance, might appear to be his most clichéd character. Even at his most wolfish, I never got the sense that Terry was anything other than a decent human being – compare his behaviour to the exploitative Sick Boy’s, for instance, and note the difference. Terry tells women that he wants to give them the message, and, if they’re up for it, he does. If they’re not, he just moves on to the next candidate. He doesn’t pay them, and he certainly doesn’t force or manipulate them. He’s always been an open and unapologetic book - lewd and randy, but without malice; about as far from a misogynist as you could possibly get, in intention if not in fact.

“…lassies urnae pit here fir ma gratification, it’s totally the other wey around, ay… Ah’m pit on this Earth tae please thaim… That’s ma only role, n now it’s gone. Now ah’m nothing! See, if it wisnae fir the gowf –“

A Decent Ride convincingly champions this notion as a restless Terry gradually learns to focus not on the bitterness festering in his loins, but protecting vulnerable people and punishing their enemies, as well as his own, in ways that are both proportionate and apt. This novel might not quite see Juice T go full-on Travis Bickle, but it does a least cast “Kind Terry” as the saviour of working girls, the protector of wee bastards and even the Robin Hood of vintage single malts.

Yet while Terry’s viewpoint chapters and third-person escapades comprise the lion’s share of A Decent Ride, the book belongs as much to Jonty and Ronnie as it does to him. Both men are outlandish caricatures, on the face of it, but Welsh subjects each to his customary, corrupting makeover, slowly developing what initially appear to be unapologetic piss-takes into nuanced and surprisingly soulful protagonists. Expressly created to be a “youthful, punkish version of Donald Trump”, lines such as, “I pray for a proper hurricane to come back, to wipe, please God, this shithole off the planet! KILL THEM, GOD!”, do little to endear Ronnie Checker to the reader in the early going. Yet, even as Welsh moves into explicitly satirise Trump’s controversial business dealings in Scotland, he gradually stirs up morsels of sympathy for the whisky-fixated tycoon, using his affection for and loyalty towards Terry to at least humanise what could have so easily been an entertaining but two-dimensional parody.

“Jonty will never let his Jinty go because he loves her so. But it isn’t the same. And he knows: it isn’t right.”

More impressive still is Wee Jonty. Barely more intelligent than Wee Davey Renton, this bastard child of Henry Lawson is, against all the odds, one of the author’s most captivating creations. Whilst relentlessly amusing, his musings on life – or at least his narrow corner of it – are by turns tragic and endearing, and his thread of the plot is even more remarkable still. Master of misdirection that he is, Welsh places this awkward idiot at the centre of a tortuous tale built on sudden death and urban terrorism, using gold paint; petrol bombs; and even ketchup-coated nuggets to pull off one of his greatest narrative swerves to date. As with Terry’s story, its inspiration clearly comes from a subplot of Porno, with Jonty (and his “boaby”…) ultimately inheriting Curtis’s punchline, but this easy to forgive when you put the book down and realise that Welsh has had you rooting for an incestuous necrophile throughout. That’s a fuckin’ skill, that is.

If Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was ever to be remade as an explicit and Edinburgh-based Carry On film, then this would be its novelisation. A delight to guiltily immerse yourself in for hours on end, A Decent Ride is a humorous and often surprisingly stirring read that leaves you gantin’ on a follow-up ride with Juice Terry in his Joe Baxi. Guaranteed!

A Decent Ride is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store or Amazon’s Kindle Store for £4.99. Today’s cheapest retailer for the paperback is The Book Depository, who have it listed for £6.99 with free delivery.