Irvine Welsh was one of the publishing phenomena of the 1990s, a genuinely new and alternative voice who brought into the book-buying culture a whole generation of new readers who would otherwise barely open an XMen comic. His success was undoubtedly kick-started by the movie version of his sprawling Scottish picaresque, Trainspotting, but the acclaim is well deserved, and included subsequent memorable stories in Acid House and his stylistically adventurous and shocking second novel about drugs and rape, Marabou Stork Nightmares, possibly his best book and one fully deserving of that year's Booker prize, had the jury held their nerve.
Unfortunately, as often with such phenomena, the output has suffered thereafter, not helped by the frequency - and volume - of output, which seemed aimed at cashing in on the phenomenon and, in the case of Ecstasy and Filth, relied on stock shock-tactics and a juvenile profanity which felt a bit uncomfortable from someone who is now 42. (Welsh is an unusual counter-culture icon and, in tandem with his allegedly wild, drug-taking years, he impressively managed to do a University MBA and worked as a trainee officer for Edinburgh Council).
Glue is something of a return to form, an ambitious portrayal of four lads, growing up in the tough Scottish housing-scheme culture of the 1970s, and whose connected lives are charted over the course of the next three decades, taking in adventures in Munich and "larging it" in the Australian outback. Old products and pop songs are conspicuously scattered about (Edward Heath, The Wonder of You), a sort of literary equivalent of a good props wardrobe, and there is the trademark infantile, often foul humour, including awful chapter headings, which tend to distract from some of the more thoughtful writing underneath.
But Welsh has a witty turn of phrase, and his characters, however minor, are almost always memorable. As before, the Scottish idiom, at first impenetrable, becomes collusively endearing, like listening to an old hooligan in his rocking chair, supping from a can of Tennants.
One character, Terry Lawson, reflects on those clever "Monty Python cunts" and how they all went to Cambridge: "ye kin bet they didnae start daein silly walks and aw that shite in thir exams". But, at 469 pages, you'd want to be up for a lot of this.
In many ways, what Welsh does best is provide a social documentary of the whole sweep of music-driven "youth culture", from punk to rave, and it is probably this which most satisfies his readers, along with those scatological, bad-taste episodes, which give the whiff of derived danger, like a blood-stained Tarantino movie poster in a student bedsit.
This is a pity, for in his earlier work, such as Marabou Stork Nightmares, Welsh seemed to be going in a more challenging, elemental direction, both stylistically and in terms of his troubled characters and their moral exploration. Still, in "hanging with the kids" - he is also "a keen DJ" - he gives us a few laughs. We even have a scene in which the viewing of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman is combined with the individual use of a vibrator, creating a peak of female arousal - for which Gere might be grateful, given all those unfortunate rumours about his sexuality some years ago.
Eamon Delaney is an author and critic