Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's been nearly two decades since Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie, Davie, and Tommy first gave a tour of an Edinburgh unrecognizable to the tourists strolling the Royal Mile, much of it narrated in a brogue so broad that, for some readers, anyway, it may as well be a Scottish Finnegan's Wake with swearing: Ah wanted the radge tae jist fuck off ootay ma visage, tae go oan his ain, n jist leave us wi Jean-Claude. In a series of vignettes that collectively have the depth and heft of a novel, the characters score and shoot heroin, kick and get clean, steal to score again, drink, fight, have sex, contract HIV, OD, die, and go to each other's funerals. Despite the obvious darkness of the material, it is both sad and funny, profane and poetic as well as brilliant and bracingly original. The 1993 novel quickly attained cult status, and then, fueled in part by Danny Boyle's boldly adapted 1996 film of the same name, the cult grew some more. The first U.S. edition, also in 1996, was a paperback movie tie-in. The book has lost none of its immediacy. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how rarely we hear a truly new voice in fiction and how long its echoes can last. It may be possible, for example, to trace the current craze for Tartan Noir, crime novels by the likes of Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Stuart MacBride, and Allan Guthrie, to this explosively urgent view of the seedy underbelly of Auld Scotland. Yes, other Scottish crime fiction preceded it, but surely this paved the way for the later books' acceptance over here. (Interestingly, when Boyle tried his own hand at an actual crime novel, called Crime (2008), he sent his Edinburgh detective to Miami.) This remains immersive, exhilarating stuff, its whip-smart observations delivered with stinging humor that can make you laugh, cry, and gasp in horror. But, above all, the author's keen intelligence suffuses every word, and his respect for his characters is evident on every page. The existential crises of college-educated Renton may be the most arresting, but Welsh treats all of them with care, accomplishing the remarkable feat of giving even his dimmest characters rich interior lives. Readers new to Welsh's oeuvre should still start with this one.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
