Irvine Welsh's collection of stories old and new only serves to put his recent works to shame, writes
Stuart KellyWELL, you have to admire his chutzpah. Most authors presenting a collection of old stories originally published "
in fugitive form in magazines and long-out-of-print anthologies" well over a decade ago, would shy away from any imputation that a barrel was being desperately scraped or a bottom drawer being expediently emptied. Not so the gallus Irvine Welsh, erstwhile enfant terrible, who boldly entitles his scrapbook of orphaned pieces, Reheated Cabbage. But the chippy and cheeky title actually diverts from the real problem with these "tales of chemical degeneration". To seven stories, dating from 1994 to 2000, Welsh adds an brand new 80-page novella, "I Am Miami". In effect, the reader can compare the pre-millennial Welsh that burst on to the literary scene with the scabrous and seminal Trainspotting with the present-day, best-selling phenomenon. The effect is startling. It's not the reheated cabbage that sticks in the craw, but the freshly microwaved modern fare. The book simultaneously reminds you how interesting, dynamic and dangerous an author Welsh once was, and makes you wonder where it all went wrong.
The opening story, "A Fault On The Line", from 1997, starts "As far as it went wi me it wis aw her ain f***in fault. The c***s at the hoaspital basically agreed wi ays n aw, no that they said sae much, bit ah could tell they did inside. Ye ken how it is wi they c***s, they cannae jist come oot and say what's oan thir f***in mind like that. Professional f***in etiquette or whatever the f*** they call it" – except with fewer asterisks. The stylised phonetic language is direct, abrasive and cleverly mannered; with its rhythmic, meaningless expletives and sardonic glance at the "professional etiquette" that supposedly reserves the staff from speaking just like the narrator. The story itself is brilliantly ghastly. The narrator's self-delusion is overwhelming, and conjures a world where every explanation is an excuse, every consequence untethered from responsibility. It may not be to everyone's taste, but it is serious, challenging and filled with a monstrous energy.
Other stories include a vignette of Begbie's Christmas dinner, which again examines a conscience both corrupted and vaingloriously inflexible, and a subtle dissection of male camaraderie's suppurating sexism, "Victor Spoils" – one of Welsh's only convincing attempts at a female character. "The Rosewell Incident" is an extended pun – Rosewell, Midlothian, rather than Roswell, New Mexico, is the epicentre of extra-terrestrial activity – but it has a grotesque and snarling humour about it, like a pilot for a Scottish League Of Gentlemen.
By contrast, the recent piece, "I Am Miami", is dead on the page. Juice Terry and N-Sign Ewart from the forgettable Glue encounter their former headteacher in Florida. The language is self-consciously bookish, with "azure sky", "vanilla sands", a smattering of "somewhats" and such lax and redundant sentences as "Water... Black could only gasp like a man marooned in a desert". The religious teacher (who uses cod-Biblical language like "holpen" and "enbeast", yet we are supposed to believe in his misguided sincerity) meets them, and, after some inadvertent drug-taking, all of them decide they aren't so bad after all. As a plot contrivance, let alone a psychologically convincing closure, it's lazy and sentimental: narcotics as deus ex machina rather than doors of perception. "I Am Miami" tries too hard to sound like literature, and doesn't try hard enough to explore conflict, difference or complexity. The violence which seethed and snaked in his early work – violence against language as much as against individuals – is utterly averted here. It even ends with an invitation to dinner, like a bad American sitcom episode.
Across the old and new work, there's a surreptitious fear of male homosexuality (it's a personal hell in "Catholic Guilt", appropriate punishment in "The Rosewell Incident", motivating shame in "I Am Miami"). It is almost as if the flip-side of all the male bonding – and mates are always more important than mating – is an obsessional recoil. For a writer so publicly committed to liberal ideals, it strikes a curiously laddish and distasteful note.
On the basis of this book, Welsh's invigorating iconoclasm has all but ebbed away. Black, in the new story, derides the "so-called ironic anti-establishment posturing" of his former pupils. Exactly the same charge could be brought by the early Welsh against his latter self. When his new novel – a prequel to Trainspotting – is published it will mark the apathetic transformation of fury to franchise. v
