Trainspotting: The Finale

If you're my age and have a certain Gen X hipster sensibility, you probably love Trainspotting. The book AND the movie. The characters are the archetypes of your mates:


Renton: the scheming, slightly ambitious, slightly amoral, easily influenced, cynical mainstay, with the capability too (almost) fit into normal society.

Sick Boy: the lecherous womanizer

Spud: the slightly daft, but always loyal and kind whipping boy. The gang alternately tortures and takes care of him.

Begbie: the psychopath.


The last chapter of this saga is on sale on Amazon Kindle for $1.99.

Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh.

It's not a great book, but if you're stuck in quarantine and feeling a little nostalgic for wilder times, it's not bad.

The gang is middle-aged, estranged, and scattered about the world. If the book just took a look at the lives of some ex-addicts and how they've managed to fit into our modern society, that would be interesting . . . but it wouldn't be an Irvine Welsh novel.  Instead, we get the gang in their full glory and a plot that is a hodge-podge of weird sex and wanton violence and soccer and venereal diseases and stalkers and murders and art exhibitions and EDM music and the criminal underground and an illegal kidney racket.

It's a farce and a mess.

I still had fun reading it: you get to hear narration from all the members of the gang. There's plenty of action . . . too much really, it gets surreal, and while this worked for a gang of heroin addicts on the scam, in Trainspotting, it doesn't so much for a bunch of middle-aged adults.

But if you want to read about realistic middle-aged adults, you can read a Jonathan Franzen novel. This is something different. And now I think I'm done with Irvine Welsh and the gang, but it's a fitting end to the cynical, misanthropic, nihilistic tone of the '90s.

The youth today are much more compliant and socially aware. And anxious.

For example: for the most part, young people seem to be obeying all the Covid-19 social distancing rules, even though this is mainly to benefit their elders. If the Trainspotting gang were asked to hole up to protect the over 60 population, they'd just laugh and head out to the club to score.