Skagboys by Irvine Welsh – Reviewed by Guy Portman
Skagboys is the prequel to Trainspotting. Its colourful, mostly young characters hail from the Edinburgh port suburb of Leith. There is the bookish, unambitious Mark ‘Rents’ Renton, and his best friend, the verbose, predatory womaniser Sick Boy. Others include harmless, accident-prone Spud, overweight ginger Keezbo, and the pathologically violent Franco Begbie.
The friends get up to numerous, often humorous escapades, entailing drinking, partying, bedding members of the opposite sex, pranks at work and more besides. Protagonist Renton has a spell at university and a period travelling abroad. But the main focus is Renton, Sick Boy and other’s increasing obsession with heroin. Their lives soon descend to a continual cycle of getting high and then searching for their next fix before the sickness takes hold. Be it the superior white powder purchased from Swanney, or the inferior ‘braun’, their rapacious appetites for chasing, sniffing and shooting can never be satiated.
Skagboys is a work of Transgressive Fiction set in the 1980s against a backdrop of Thatcherism, the rise of dance of music and HIV. The extensive employment of Scottish vernacular makes traversing this tome (548 pages) challenging yet rewarding.
Irvine Welsh is an idiosyncratic writer who thrives on breaking literary rules. Examples here include the utilisation of dashes as a substitute for speech marks, a handwritten font in places, and switching back and forth between various first-person perspectives. There are also passages presented in the third person. Despite the risks associated with this highly ambitious approach, the author succeeds in creating a compelling story that, with the exception of some rehab-related diary entries, never feels turgid.
This reader was mesmerised by the lurid descriptions, dark humour, diverse prose, and the memorable, amoral characters. He would highly recommend Skagboys to all fans of the transgressive genre.
