In thrall to Leith’s lost boys

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Skag, you may know, is heroin, and Skagboys is the prequel to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. It’s his second revival of the characters from his 1993 debut — a book which remains underrated despite (or because of) the success of Danny Boyle’s film. With typical flippancy, Welsh called the movie Carry on Trainspotting but its success shone a harsh light on his subsequent writing. His 2002 sequel, Porno, was more like Confessions of a Trainspotter. Skagboys feels like a serious attempt by the author to re-engage with his initial inspiration.

It is set in 1984, against a backdrop of unemployment and recession, and begins with a bleary recollection of a visit to the miners’ picket lines by the accidental junkie, Mark “Rent Boy” Renton. “Ah’m thinking that we’ve lost,” Renton observes, “and there’s bleak times ahead, and I’m wonderin’ what the f**k am ah gonnae dae wi the rest of my life.” Welsh also provides occasional “Notes on an Epidemic”, to underline his implication that heroin use, and the spread of Aids, were encouraged by the economics of the Eighties.

But this is not a documentary, and Welsh is too much of an entertainer to labour the point. The strength of Skagboys lies in its characters, and Welsh’s poetic rendering of their innermost thoughts. The streams of consciousness are polluted by chemicals, and it takes a little care to distinguish between the ramblings of Renton (self-critical, with literary leanings) and Spud (comically optimistic, and prone to convoluted rhyming slang). “Lou Reed”, meaning “speed”, is guessable. Less obvious is “Lou Macari” meaning “barry” or “very good” in Leith-ese. (Younger readers may wish to note that Macari was a Scottish international footballer. Ian McLagan, meaning “shaggin”, was a musician). The voice of Welsh’s most compelling character, the “pavement warrior” Franco Begbie, will need no signposting.

Parts of Skagboys were excavated from Welsh’s Trainspotting notebooks, notably a brief, squalid sojourn in Hackney, “the London borough of South Leith”. Welsh’s London dialect lacks the musicality of his Leith chatter: “farking” is ugly in anyone’s language.

There is more plot than in Trainspotting, and more concentration on the supply and demand side of the drug culture. The ending, where Welsh’s skag-starved losers mount an assault on a drug factory, is daft. But plot isn’t really Welsh’s thing. He is that odd thing: a literary writer who disguises his intelligence. He’s also a moral writer, albeit one with pornographic energy.

So while you can place him in a literary tradition which flows from Alasdair Gray and James Kelman (and maybe Joyce before that), Welsh remains a lapsed punk, hung up on the Velvets and Iggy Pop. Skagboys suggests various reasons for the heroin explosion which made Eighties Edinburgh the “Aids capital of Europe” but the thicko Spud offers the most persuasive explanation for the narcotic mishaps of his peers: “Wannabe cool dudes likesay Rent, Sick Boy n moi … mibbe goat too enmeshed in the ‘fuck you’ rock’n’roll culture.”

He wouldn’t have used the word “wannabe” in 1984 but that’s a small misstep. Welsh is still enmeshed, still rock ’n’ roll and the rest.

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