At the start of Men in Love, we meet Edward Allister Reece, a seedy, world-weary sailor and mentor figure who bears a striking resemblance to Samuel Beckett. He sets the tone with a blunt dichotomy: “You need to decide whether you’re a shagger or a lover ... when a shagger falls in love, it’s game over.” This framing haunts Irvine Welsh’s return to the Trainspotting gang as they stagger out of heroin’s death grip and into a new addiction: love.
The novel, set at the tail end of the 1980s, follows Renton, Sickboy, Spud and Begbie as they try to rebuild lives fractured in their early 20s. There are no clean breaks, no sanctimonious endorsements of sobriety, just a swap of dependencies. Heroin is out; MDMA is in. Love is the last available high, the ultimate one.
Told through their distinctive voices, Welsh delivers a funny, propulsive meditation on sex, intimacy and vulnerability. Most compelling is the ruthless Sickboy. His pursuit of Amanda, a posh Londoner, is less romantic than tactical. For him, love is social currency, a tool for crossing class lines.
Men in Love, a doorstopper nodding to DH Lawrence, is a proper, traditional novel, intricately weaving multiple lives and perspectives into a portrait of a society in flux. The characters’ internal shifts mirror a broader cultural transition, from heroin’s nihilism and stagnation to rave culture’s ecstatic individualism.
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Each short chapter opens with an epigraph from a Romantic poet. Initially puzzling, this choice reveals Welsh’s deeper ambition: sincerity. This is a novel about growing up and searching. It’s steeped in that old Romantic ideal of yearning for transcendence. These men are chasing a better life, an ideal love, a high that might last forever.
In the end, each character offers a reflection on love. Renton’s lingers: “And I know she is out there, and everything I do – every other love I have had or will have – can only be about getting myself ready for her.” This is what Welsh captures so well: the seething toxicity in much of what we pursue as love, alongside the powerful beauty of those misguided ideals. It’s the logic of addiction: knowing something is wrong and still being helpless under its spell.
