Irvine Welsh is a brave man. Trainspotting was a masterpiece. Now, he has put the characters from that first novel back to work again between soft covers. Eleven years on, Begbie the psycho and Spud the junkie, Renton the manipulator and Sick Boy the wannabe are exactly as they were, only more so.
Thus, having always been avid consumers of wank mags and stag vids, Rents and Sick Boy, the cleverest of the four, now progress to directing and producing a porno film. And, as we are in Welsh-land, they must rip people off to finance the film. The scam - it's a bank fraud rather than a junk deal (which is progress of a sort) - has at its centre Sick Boy's discovery that the preferred PIN for all Scottish Orangemen is 1690. The film that is financed by the scam, Seven Shags for Seven Brothers, is shot in Leith. Where else? Thus, the dangerous Begbie and the sad Spud have narratives that run in parallel to the shenanigans on the film set. The Leith setting also allows pages and pages of Welsh's phonetic trademark Edinburgh patois.
The novel is very funny, it teems with wonderfully drawn characters, and it is horribly accurate about the urban grubs that live not at the bottom of the barrel but underneath it. However, after I closed the book, I had a sense of let-down. Little things that had seemed marvellous, in retrospect lost their lustre.
For example: Begbie starts the novel banged up in HMP Saughton for manslaughter. Every six months or so, Sick Boy posts him in a stash of gay porn without a sender's address. These materials play havoc with his reputation.
I chortled as I read, but later I felt dubious. Could this happen? I work in a jail, so I checked with an officer in the know. The ruling in British jails, I was told, is that if there's penetration of any sort, or if the cock is higher than the Mull of Kintyre stands in relation to the Scottish mainland (I kid you not), it doesn't get in. Now the stuff Sick Boy sends in is from Soho, London, and with that provenance we can be certain it isn't of the health and efficiency variety. Ergo, Sick Boy's parcels are never going to hit the wings. Ergo, no joke.
So he made a mistake - big deal, you're thinking. Writers get things wrong all the time. Does it make it a bad book? No, it doesn't. It's not the mistake the troubles me; it's the lack of authorial application that has produced it. As I discovered in my conversation with the prison officer, you can get gay porn into a British jail. It is done, just not by post. With a bit more effort, Welsh could have made his gag impervious to my nerdy criticism. But he didn't.
With the Begbie gag, the skimping doesn't matter; but when the author pulls the same stroke with his other characters - and in particular with his principal female character - the readers' comedown, after finishing Porno, is infinitely worse.
Welsh's heroine, Nikki Fuller-Smith, is a Home Counties gal doing media and Scottish studies at Edinburgh Uni. She supplements her income giving hand-jobs in the sauna where she works evenings. Nikki falls in with Sick Boy; they go with some friends to see a stag vid. By the end of the evening, everyone's talking about making a proper porno. Nikki announces she intends to star, and she does. But how does a girl go from nothing to hand-jobs to porno ambition?
Welsh is aware of the obligation to explain. He offers three reasons. One, Nikki comes from a dysfunctional Tory family. Two, she's been so penetrated by the values of consumer capitalism that she can only conceive of herself as fully existing when she's a commodity on show. And three, she loathes contemporary feminism and wants to piss off all her sisters.
But these reasons aren't good enough. Nobody just jumps straight to hand-jobs and then into porno like Nikki does. It happens gradually. You progress from modelling to stripping to turning tricks, with a few life crises thrown in, such as a dead parent and a ghastly childhood and a serious habit. Denied a detailed back-story, Nikki never really comes to life like the male characters do. But then, we know all about their pasts; we got it in Trainspotting.
There are also internal contradictions within Nikki's story which muddy Welsh's thesis. The philosophy in Porno is that there are two types of human being: those who shaft and those who are shafted. It comes to the reader as no surprise that Nikki, as the heroine, announces she'll do anything but anal before a frame is exposed. And if that were how it was left, that would be fine. However, Welsh has to provide us with a reason why Nikki, who is not a psycho, shafts her colleagues at the end. And the reason he offers is that she has to shoot a scene for Seven Shags (which she has authored) in which she is sodomised with a dildo, and this leaves her feeling grubby. This is the start of her turning against her friends. As motivation, this is fine, but in plot terms it makes no sense at all, given what she says prior to shooting.
So how does one explain these narrative glitches? My theory is that Welsh is just too fluent, too talented. He's one of those lucky authors who can make anything work if it's in words - at least for as long as you're reading it. However, don't be put off by my caveats. Trainspotting fans will certainly enjoy this, and so should Welsh virgins. For all its faults, this at least is about something, unlike most of what passes for fiction nowadays. But be warned. This is not for the fainthearted. It is about making a porno - one that will never get past the censor in any British jail, and I doubt the Irish authorities would have it either.
Porno. By Irvine Welsh. Jonathan Cape. 483 pp. £10 sterling
Carlo Gébler is a writer and occasional film-maker. He is also writer-in-residence at HMP Maghaberry. His play, 10 Rounds, a re-working of Schnitzler's La Ronde reset in contemporary Belfast,
opens at the Tricycle Theatre in London on September 19th