Dead Men's Trousers (Mark Renton, 5)

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Mark Renton is finally a success. He now makes significant money managing DJs, but the constant travel, airport lounges, soulless hotel rooms, and broken relationships have left him dissatisfied with life.

That said, there's a lot of plot in latter-day Welsh. It's not just about the misery of the human condition by way of a decrepit Scottish junkie setting. This time, there are crazy imaginative scenarios organ transplants and various murders. Among the deeper themes presented herein would be the concept of death. So many funerals. The violence scenes are serious, with the feeling that it can lead to a permanent end at any time. And about the acceptance of it. A beloved old school character even passes, but I won't spoil by saying who. Basically, Dead Men's Trousers is like episode 28 of the Irvine Welsh Literary Universe. Kind of like the MCU, but moderately more literate. And while this latest episode is no Endgame, it is thoroughly entertaining. There is a major plot arc starting from a drink spiked with MDMA powder, the consequences of which flow throughout the book and are truly but believably sordid. This brings in repressed sex addiction, gangster exploitation and the illegal organ trade. A dog reaching and chewing a human kidney is not convincing; has this dog got primate hands that can undo clasps? The plot skids on the bank of complete absurdity, but never quite falls in the pond. Mi sgomenta un po' adesso iniziare un nuovo romanzo, ho riso parecchio per alcuni passaggi, ho rallentato perché la lettura durasse il più possibile.Another entry in the Trainspotting saga had my hopes high that Welsh might have returned to form after the slew of forgettable books he's churned out in the past decade or so. I was disappointed. If it wasn't for Skagboys, I might well be considering the idea that Trainspotting was indeed ghostwritten by Spud Murphy. Hell, maybe this is Welsh trying to tell us something? Unfortunately, this also has me questioning whether the other books are as good as I remember them being - a question which I'm sure will answer itself in due course. Spud's character goes through a lot of shit in this novel. But the ending of this book suggests that the next book about these characters could be told from Spud's point of view, through his autobiography. I hope I am right. Frankly, I am such a big fan of these characters that I would read anything put out by Welsh. With Dead Men's Trousers, is Trainspotting a trilogy now? No, it's bigger than that. While indeed this is number three, after Porno (which was loosely "adapted" into the T2 film), there is also the Skag Boys prequel.

The stewardess, not the lovely Jenny I was chatting tae, but a low-rent, pleb-serving, varicose-veined battleaxe, bike-rode into decrepitude over decades by the few hetero pilots, without even a hint of a sparkler thrown into the mix, is right over, her crabbit pus rammed into my coupon. Welsh non è autore per tutti, che sia lasciato a noi bastardi potenziali che lo abbiamo nominato portavoce. You're nothing but a work-in-progress until that day you fall out of this world into the land ay dead men's trousers. I love these boys, and reading this book was murder. Desperate to just zoom through, to inhale the violence, the shagging, the plots, the revenge, I forced myself to go as slowly as possible and savour every moment. It was torture. Welsh presents several sub-plots within which he can introduce and withdraw his characters. The two book vendetta with the American policeman is a good example of this. The blurb flags up that a major character is going to die and it's clear who the likely candidate is, but Welsh skilfully sows doubt right up to the tragedy occurring. Previously peacable characters explode with sudden violence as decades long resentments boil over, particularly where characters have literally been too clever for their own good.Carl’s been dragging his flight case ay records wi him, perspiring like a Thatcher Cabinet minister wi the education portfolio up for grabs, and looking dangerously red. It's kind of similar to latter-day Simpsons episodes. Not quite the institution it used to be, but if you just watch to watch you can enjoy.

Danny Murphy (Spud) is the only one still living in Edinburgh and is still an addict, spending his days begging on the street for change.Uh-oh. Ah’m no sure aboot this, man. — What? Is that no illegal, smuggling body parts, like the invasion ay the bodysnatchers n aw that? In this the latest and apparently last novel in the series, the gang, now all in middle age are thrown together for one last enterprise. Then he runs into his old partner in crime, Frank Begbie, from whom he’d been hiding for years. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist in Los Angeles, and doesn’t seem interested in revenge. The parts with Begbie are also a huge improvement from the disappointing The Blade Artist. I respect Welsh for pulling off Begbie's transformation from a psychotic force of nature to a well known artist, loyal teetotaler husband and responsible father of two kids. He is still a psycho to people who try to mess with his family. I guess Welsh was trying to make the point that truly great artists are not what they seem to be on the surface.

Like his last few books Dead Men’s Trousers is a return to the Trainspotting/Glue universe and takes it’s cues Porno and The Blade Artist. Gone are most of the things which made Welsh great in the first place - the original cultural references, the Scots dialect, the counter-culture/drugs scene, basically anything distinctively to do with contemporary Scottish life. Dead Men's Trousers, like The Blade Artist, feels extremely Americanised (or at least obviously written by an author who no longer spends his time with the people and places he writes about - someone who is out of touch, to say the least). I think this might be one of the bigger reasons why his more recent work fails to hit the mark.Begbie, as we learned from The Blade Artist, is outwardly apparently a reformed character and is now Jim Francis, artist and sculptor living in California with his wife and two young daughters. Global commercialism has compelled the Scots tae pretend tae like Christmas, but we're genetically programmed tae rebel against it. For all the sound and fury about “neoliberal Christmas” (the subhead for part one), Renton and Begbie have become a cultural brand, safe and replicable.