I’ve grown up alongside Irvine Welsh’s motley crew of junkies and psychos. Witnessing their youthful follies blossoming into mid-life crises has been like staring into a dark and oversized mirror that bounces my own neuroses back at me, only louder and in vivid Danny Boyle colour. I got quite choked up watching T2 Trainspotting at the cinema, the dramatic conclusion of which seemed to draw a clear and affecting line under the story begun in Welsh’s game-changing novel decades earlier. But despite that film’s crippling finality, in print these characters’ stories continue to emanate from Trainspotting’s nucleate like fault lines in a broken pane of glass. Back and forth through time, we get to explore the teenage years of Welsh’s central quartet in Skagboys, before catching up with them just a decade on from the events of Trainspotting in Porno and then skipping forward even further to middle age, which is where Dead Men’s Trousers, the latest instalment in Welsh’s life-spanning pentalogy, picks up the ride.
“You cannae go around battering the fuck oot ay cunts.
It isnae very nice, and ye can git yersel intae bother.”
It isnae very nice, and ye can git yersel intae bother.”
Dead Men’s Trousers is a book that would not have been worthwhile, or perhaps even possible, without the author’s radical reinvention of Franco Begbie in the immediately-preceding Blade Artist. Whilst Skagboys and Porno are not required reading before tackling Dead Men’s Trousers – Welsh repeatedly recaps the few plot points from each that have any real bearing on the narrative – knowledge of The Blade Artist does at least give the reader a leg-up on the book’s remaining three protagonists. The Renton, Sick Boy and Spud of Dead Men’s Trousers are instantly recognisable; each man’s life has followed a trajectory that, if not immediately obvious, feels consistent with their characters. Franco, on the other hand, has defeated destiny to become a revered artist in the United States, where he lives with his new Californian wife and two young daughters. Having apparently eschewed the violence along with the peeve that often propelled it, no trace of Franco Begbie remains – not even his name. And so when Mark Renton, now a jet-setting DJ manager, crosses paths with the man he infamously robbed (and lured into the path of a speeding car!) some 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, the ensuing tale is far more intriguing – and unsettling - than the simple game of cat-and-mouse woven throughout Porno and its cinematic counterpart T2.
Despite its blurb’s promise of death for one of Welsh’s famous foursome, Dead Men’s Trousers is by far the most fun book in the series. The whole affair is infused with a playful sense of absurdity that gives it an even more heightened feel than the preceding volumes’. We have one character who’s graduated from battering the fuck oot ay cunts to battering the fuck oot ay sculptures; another who’s fallen from casual thievery into the even murkier world of illegal organ-trafficking; a third who’s festive do-badding has backfired dramatically, landing him on a gangster’s speed dial and in a gangster’s debt; and a fourth who finds it impossible to live beholden to a man who’s not only forgiven his betrayal, but actively welcomed the rekindling of their old friendship, all the while living the affluent life of a successful creative that he feels should have been his.
Despite its blurb’s promise of death for one of Welsh’s famous foursome, Dead Men’s Trousers is by far the most fun book in the series. The whole affair is infused with a playful sense of absurdity that gives it an even more heightened feel than the preceding volumes’. We have one character who’s graduated from battering the fuck oot ay cunts to battering the fuck oot ay sculptures; another who’s fallen from casual thievery into the even murkier world of illegal organ-trafficking; a third who’s festive do-badding has backfired dramatically, landing him on a gangster’s speed dial and in a gangster’s debt; and a fourth who finds it impossible to live beholden to a man who’s not only forgiven his betrayal, but actively welcomed the rekindling of their old friendship, all the while living the affluent life of a successful creative that he feels should have been his.
“That was meant tae be me!”
The book’s greatest hook is undoubtedly this strange relationship between Renton and the artist formerly known as Begbie. Whereas The Blade Artist gave us a window into the self-styled Jim Francis’ soul, Dead Men’s Trousers gives nothing away – we’re as in the dark as Renton when it comes to Franco’s motivations. By turns terrifying and hilarious, the Beggar Boy toys with his old friend mercilessly, and just when we think we’ve worked out the truth of the punitive mind games being played, Welsh pulls a farcical finale out of his hat that manages to be as uplifting as T2’s was melancholy – and I’m not talking about Hibs winning the Scottish cup.
“I’ve been dragged down a sewer. I only went out for a drink at Christmas!”
Sick Boy’s thread of the narrative is almost as enjoyable, albeit in a much more slapstick way. Renton and Begbie enthral here because each man has changed; one more so than the other, obviously, but each has clearly grown since they were last around each other. Simon David Williamson, however, has not, and Welsh delights in setting the cruel exploiter up for yet another almighty fall. Sick Boy’s limb of the adventure is thus a comic study in comeuppance; a dark sitcom in which a boy who never grew up decides, on a whim, to completely dismantle his brother-in-law’s life, only to realise too late that his own survival hangs upon its reassembly.
Though Sick Boy’s reap-what-he-sows storyline in Dead Men’s Trousers parallels those of his previous outings, its familial setting lends it a very different feel. With him, there’s always the expectation that he will betray, inveigle, entice, corrupt – but this time he plumbs new depths, using those closest to him as his puppets and marks. His sister, nephew and (inevitably gay) son; his risibly benign brother-in-law, Ewan the foot surgeon, whose medical disgrace is sealed as soon as Spud and Mikey Forrester first mention an Eastern European kidney.
Though Sick Boy’s reap-what-he-sows storyline in Dead Men’s Trousers parallels those of his previous outings, its familial setting lends it a very different feel. With him, there’s always the expectation that he will betray, inveigle, entice, corrupt – but this time he plumbs new depths, using those closest to him as his puppets and marks. His sister, nephew and (inevitably gay) son; his risibly benign brother-in-law, Ewan the foot surgeon, whose medical disgrace is sealed as soon as Spud and Mikey Forrester first mention an Eastern European kidney.
“You live until you die, so how do you live?”
In keeping with his downtrodden existence, Spud’s role in Dead Men’s Trousers is overshadowed by those of his three cohorts, and perhaps even Ewan, yet it’s old Danny Boy that serves as the catalyst for the whole novel, both thematically and practically. Without Spud and his daft, kidney-munching mongrel, there would be no Dead Men’s Trousers, and worse still we might still be left nursing the barmy notion that Spud had somehow turned his lifelong pain into profit through the literary ventures that Welsh began to explore in Porno and John Hodge used so bloody rousingly in T2. Instead, the author uses Spud to effectively invert the implications of T2’s stirring dénouement , taking great delight in reminding us all that you can either be a mug or a cunt – and, for all his flaws, Spud’s never been a cunt.
I’ve now followed these four characters from heroin and vinyl though text-messaging and scud and all the way through to neo-liberal Christmases, Tinder, DMT, hashtags (#dickhead) and, inescapably, a dead man’s trousers. Their final outing as a foursome may hang by a delicate thread of coincidence that often beggars belief, but it’s a raucous read that’s unremitting amusement only pauses to rip the heart straight out of you – hopefully in more sanitary conditions than those in which poor Spud’s kidney was removed.
Dead Men’s Trousers is available to download from iTunes’ iBooks Store for £4.99. Amazon offer three different text editions: the original hardcover is currently listed at £11.28 (with free delivery) while the paperback edition is £6.29 (plus delivery for non-Prime members) and the Kindle edition is on par with iBooks at £4.99. The audiobook comes highly recommended - narrator Tam Dean Burn gives more of a performance than a reading. iTunes have it listed for £7.99 while Amazon charge £20.99, though you can get it for free with an Audible trial.
