Reviews

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

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gobrien420's review

adventurous dark emotional funny lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I read this after seeing the movie, one of my favourites, and really enjoyed it. I think the most educationally important aspect of this book is the setting: Leith in the 1980's. A port town with many impoverished denizens who turned to heroin and other drugs. This book does a wonderful job in creating lifelike characters who would have existed in that time and place, most likely drawn from Irvine Welsh's personal experience.

I had a chance to visit Leith, and some of the locations mentioned in the book, and it really made the reading experience much more meaningful to see, and feel, those places in person. The movie is a fantastic adaptation of the novel, but it somewhat replaces the authenticity of the book with its stylized cinematography. I would highly recommend the book, if you enjoyed the film and want to explore it at a deeper level.

hahahahywel's review

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dark funny sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

shaetea's review

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

1and8pence2much's review

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5.0

My initial motivations towards reading this book, to be totally honest, were the fact that it mentioned Frank Zappa. Needless to say, fourteen-year-old me was not disappointed (Frank Zappa is indeed mentioned quite a few times!) though I felt greatly confused by the end of it: I loved the characters a lot and found quite a few parts of the book very entertaining, but I could not understand many parts of the book, especially those concerning politics and sectarian violence. My love and understanding of this book has grown tremendously since and I have a lot to say.
I do not like treating this book as a book about drug use because only a fraction of this book, though, inarguably, a large one, concerns it: in my opinion, the main theme this book portrays is addiction. Addiction encompasses much more than drug use: one can be addicted to sex and violence; mending a friendship that is breaking apart can also be addictive; even the idea of being a drug addict can cause dependence (the protagonist of this book, Mark, has this issue!) I greatly like the fact that the book deals with addiction as such: firstly, the fact that it goes further than encompassing just the characters’ heroin addictions and alcoholism makes this book very interesting and, secondly, this generalised portrayal of addiction makes the book relatable.
This book concerns characters who are in a friendship I greatly loved reading about: Mark, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie actually reminded me a lot of that of Stanley and his friends in “A Streetcar Named Desire”! Sick Boy and Begbie are very dominant of the group due to respectively being libidinous and violent (and that is very interesting, as they are all lower class people living under a conservative government and therefore cannot show power through money), Mark is confused, as he knew these people since their schooldays and feels that leaving them will cause serious consequences on his behalf, yet still has opportunities to leave, and Spud stays out of extreme loyalty (the fact that his honesty and kindness had actually gotten him into a worse situation friendship-wise and how desperate he is made me feel very sorry for him and also made him, to me, the most interesting of the four). I have been in such situations before (though, thankfully, with no sex or terror present) and felt really happy reading about this twisted friend group as I could, unlike many relationships in other books I have read, understand it.
Though this book, inarguably, does not have diverse characters, the way Irvine Welsh uses language in order to create unique narrative voices for each of them is incredible. Though I struggled reading the chapters written in anglicised Edinburgh Scots when I first read this (one of my biggest fears is accidentally writing an essay in that exact narrative style: after I read it, I begin to think in it), I find it really fun that each character has a certain degree of how Scots-like their English is and which specific words they use. I found it really fun figuring out who the narrator of each chapter was. Another detail I greatly liked is that the characters, like most young people, have specific preferences in music and sport: I greatly enjoyed listening to their favourite musicians as I read and the music they listened to made me relate to the characters more as I myself listen to most of it (Joy Division and Frank Zappa are great!). The fact that the book has multiple narrators also made its nonlinear plot progress very well. I mean, this book ends five years after its first chapter and I must say that that must be quite difficult to write (though, Irvine Welsh can be more extreme than that: “Glue” ends three decades after it starts!)
I already talked about how the political situation in the Scotland at the time when this book is set impacted the friendship portrayed in this book, but there is another reason I find it greatly important to it (though, if one really wants to read about how horrible the British government was in the 1980s, one should read “Skagboys” too!) as I do all of the other traumatic themes discussed in this book. Although I found the book much more light upon reading it for the second time, the amount of misery and terror it contains makes the comedy in the book sound very morbid. For example, there is a chapter in this book where two of the characters are in court after stealing books. When asked whether they stoke the books in order to sell them, a very funny antithesis occurs when they say “yes” or “no” simultaneously. At the end of this chapter, one of the characters celebrates the fact that they did not go to jail in embarrassment. I found this scene very funny, but then considered the fact that shoplifting, for these two people, would have been a sole means of meaningful profit and the fact that this, probably, had happened to the author of this book at some point of his life made me horribly miserable. I do not usually like black humour as such, but I can admit that this book uses it incredibly well!
As well as humorous moments, this book has plenty of very horrible ones. After finishing the book, I am certain the typical reader would lose faith in most of the characters, feel sorry for plenty of them, be completely disgusted by some of the chapters and end it with a sense of impending disquiet. One of the first times I ever cried over something that happened in a book was when I was reading this one! I usually consider myself a greatly sensitive reader, but I actually greatly enjoyed seeing how I would withstand this book because I felt that nothing in the book felt unbelievable, as the issues it targets outside of addiction, such as sexism, racism, homophobia, sectarian violence, rape and death, are very much still present in Scotland and elsewhere: every single occurrence just left me with a painful sense of “this happened and this happens.” I like this book for this a lot because I feel the film really missed that point: aside from the fact that its complete removal of the political themes in this book made it an obvious product of the film industry of the 1990s that believed that poverty was a style that could be glorified through its depiction in film, I felt that the film rarely considered what else could have upset people aside from drug addiction and tense relationships in the 1980s and 1990s, which made it feel very flat.
I cannot really express how much I like this in words, but I feel I have expressed that this is my favourite book for a lot of reasons clearly enough and how much I like that.