Rob's Reviews > Skagboys

It's been a long time – 15 years? – since I read Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, but its prequel, Skagboys, feels even better, at once more ambitious, darker, and funnier than its predecessor. Focusing once again on the same four characters (Mark Renton, Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson, Spud, and Begbie), Welsh relates the story of how three of them first got hooked on heroin in the mid-1980s, while he simultaneously critiques class warfare, Margaret Thatcher's United Kingdom, and Scottish national identity.

Told more or less in a series of vignettes, what Welsh does exceedingly well here is detail their descent into addiction (especially Renton and Sick Boy) as a reaction to the disgust they feel with themselves – pleasurable anesthesia that distracts them from all the things they hate when they look in the mirror. This level of addiction is something I'll never understand, but after reading Skagboys I kind of get it. Oblivion is nice, right? There's a certain appeal to knowing your only obligation in life is finding your next fix. But what Welsh definitely doesn't do is glamorize heroin addiction, which was the rap against Trainspotting. As the characters gradually become more fixated on the spike in their veins (to paraphrase Lou Reed), there's no attempt to pretty up the corresponding decay in the rest of their lives. Welsh is, like always, not afraid to go dark, and I found myself relating to the characters – Renton, especially, a college kid who really should know better – with varying degrees of disgust and disappointment.

It's a rough read, but it's also laugh-out-loud funny in places (their climactic scheme to steal a factory's worth of morphine is hysterical and horrifying at the same time), and Welsh's use of Scottish vernacular ("Totally skint, man, n the bread trap ay Christmas n New Year looms. It's a awfay scene. Mind you, everybody's in the same boat. Begbie comes roond the gaff, n yuv nivir seen a rooster in such a foul mood, ken?" begins one chapter) is as vibrant as ever. I need to reacquaint myself with the rest of his stuff, but right now Skagboys feels like the best thing Welsh has ever written.