A review by adam_mcphee
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

5.0

Ah fuckin hate the way some American cunts call lassies cunts. Fuckin offensive, that shite.

Better than Filth and Porno, just behind Glue and Skagboys.

I loved it. Though I can see why the critics don't, especially if they're expecting Trainspotting 3. It's Welsh's turn to the cartoonish that makes his books so great, that and the essayistic digressions disguised as stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Anyone expecting harrowing junkie trauma probably shouldn't have read Trainspotting in the first place.

The cartoonishness was best on display in the

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in the organ harvesting subplot, where Sickboy and a his Podiatric surgeon brother-in-law perform a warehouse kidney removal using a youtube video on a dying laptop as a guide; this after an unattended kidney on a train was eaten by a dog,

and then literally during the

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DMT sequences, where the novel suddenly cuts to comic book format to display the change in perspective of the drug users.

New definitive ranking of the novels of Irvine Welsh:

1. Skagboys
2. Glue
3. Trainspotting
4. Dead Men's Trousers
5. Filth
6. Porno
7. A Decent Ride
8. The Blade Artist
9. The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
10. Marabou Stork Nightmares
11. Crime
12. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

Highlights:

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Down to Dad’s gaff by the river. I stayed here for a couple of years after we moved from the Fort, but it never felt like home. You know you’ve turned intae a cunt with nae life, whose fetid arsehole is owned by late capitalism, when times like this feel an imposition and you cannae stop checking your phone for emails and texts. I’m with my dad, my sister-in-law Sharon, and my niece Marina and her infant twin boys Earl and Wyatt, who look indentical but have different personalities. Sharon has packed on the beef. Everybody in Scotland seems fatter now. As she fingers an earring, she expresses guilt about them staying in the spare rooms, while I’m in a hotel. I tell her it’s no hardship for me, as my dodgy back demands a specialist mattress. I explain that the hotel room is a business expense; my DJs have gigs in the city. Working-class people seldom get that the wealthy generally eat, sleep and travel well at their expense again, through tax deductables. I’m not exactly rich, but I’ve blagged my way into the system, onto the steerage class of the gravy train that bulldozes the poor. I pay more tax registered in Holland than I would in the USA, but better gieing it to the Dutch to build dams than the Yanks to build bombs.

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After the meal prepared by Sharon and Marina, we’re kicking back in the cosy cramp of this small room, and the drinks slip down nicely. My old boy still has a decent posture to him, broad-shouldered, if a little bent over, not too much muscle wastage in evidence. He’s at the time of life where nothing at all surprises. His politics have drifted towards the right, in a moany auld cunt nostalgia way, rather than intrinsically hardcore reactionary, but still a sad state of affairs for an old union man, and indicative of bigger existential distress. That leakage of hope, of vision and passion for a better world, and its replacement by a hollow rage, is a sure sign that you’re slowly dying. But at least he lived: it would be the worst thing on earth to have those politics at an early age, to be born with that essential part of you already dead. A sad gleam in his eye indicates he’s holding on to a melancholy thought. — I mind of your dad, he says to Marina, referencing my brother Billy, the father she never saw.

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— Aw ye need tae dae is fly tae Istanbul and a boy’ll pick ye up at the airport and gie ye a boax tae take tae Berlin oan the train. You git the package thaire, ye gie it tae another boy. Under nae circumstances, and the cat looks awfay, awfay serious, — dae ye try n open the boax.
— Sortay like that fulum, The Transporter?
— Exactly.
— But, eh, what is in it, likesay?
Mikey gies ays a grim smile. Looks around, lowers ehs voice, leans intae ays. — A kidney, Spud. A human kidney: for a life-saving operation.
Uh-oh. Ah’m no sure aboot this, man. — What? Is that no illegal, smuggling body parts, like the invasion ay the bodysnatchers n aw that?
Mikey shakes ehs heid again. — This is aw kosher, buddy boy. We’ve goat a certificate for it, the lot. Ye cannae open the boax cause it’s aw sealed n sterile, wi the kidney packed in ice or some frozen cauld chemical that isnae ice but works like ice.
— It isnae ice?
— Naw, but it works like ice. Like what they’ve invented tae replace ice.
— Replace ice … Whoa, man, no sae sure aboot that. Ice is pure natural like, well, it’s usually made artificially in fridges like, but in its natural state in the polar regions –
Mikey waves ehs hand n shakes ehs heid. — Naw, Spud. No in likes ay drinks n that, eh laughs, hudin up his pint. — But it works better freezin organs.
— Keeps thum tip-top till auld transplant, likesay?
— Bang on the money! Ye open the boax n the cunt starts tae deteriorate n it’s fuckin useless, ay?
— But the transportation ay this, man, is it no a bit dodgy?

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Carl’s been dragging his flight case ay records wi him, perspiring like a Thatcher Cabinet minister wi the education portfolio up for grabs, and looking dangerously red.

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the mornings, as I call the afternoons