Dead Men's Trousers (Mark Renton, 5)

Product Information

Irvine Welsh writes with style, imagination, wit, and force, and in a voice which those alienated by much current fiction clearly want to hear.”– Times Literary Supplement

That said, there's a lot of plot in latter-day Welsh. It's not just about the misery of the human condition by way of a decrepit Scottish junkie setting. This time, there are crazy imaginative scenarios organ transplants and various murders.

Retailers:

In this the latest and apparently last novel in the series, the gang, now all in middle age are thrown together for one last enterprise. There are other problems. It’s still very male-focused, not to say misogynistic. It might be plausible to depict an entirely male friendship group of 1980s junkies, but Renton and Begbie now work in gender-balanced fields, and the women in the novel are almost exclusively trophies, victims, or whores. You can always tell the status of a Welsh character by the blondness and waist measurement of his girlfriend. Perché, dato il loro stile di vita non proprio morigerato, era inevitabile che qualcuno della banda prima o poi ci lasciasse, e quando questo alla fine accade, ci si sente quasi come aver perso un vecchio amico. Gone are most of the things which made Welsh great in the first place - the original cultural references, the Scots dialect, the counter-culture/drugs scene, basically anything distinctively to do with contemporary Scottish life. Dead Men's Trousers, like The Blade Artist, feels extremely Americanised (or at least obviously written by an author who no longer spends his time with the people and places he writes about - someone who is out of touch, to say the least). I think this might be one of the bigger reasons why his more recent work fails to hit the mark.

You're nothing but a work-in-progress until that day you fall out of this world into the land ay dead men's trousers. Spud's character goes through a lot of shit in this novel. But the ending of this book suggests that the next book about these characters could be told from Spud's point of view, through his autobiography. I hope I am right. Frankly, I am such a big fan of these characters that I would read anything put out by Welsh.The stewardess, not the lovely Jenny I was chatting tae, but a low-rent, pleb-serving, varicose-veined battleaxe, bike-rode into decrepitude over decades by the few hetero pilots, without even a hint of a sparkler thrown into the mix, is right over, her crabbit pus rammed into my coupon.