If You Like Irvine Welsh, You'll Love This
Saturday September 1, 2007 in books read 2007 |
I’ve been a latecomer to the fiction of Irvine Welsh. I didn’t really take much notice of him when he burst onto the literary scene in the last decade, and although I dutifully went to see the film of Trainspotting when it was released that was my one and only concession to the Welsh frenzy of the time.
With some authors I just like to leave them alone until all the fuss has died down. I did it with Louis de Bernières and I’m only just coming round to Iain Banks. Irvine Welsh didn’t get my full attention until last year, when I picked up the excellent Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. This year he has come up with a new collection of short stories, the eye-catching If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work.
In these five stories Welsh takes us to the desert, the Canary Islands, California, Chicago and his native Scotland. Diverse locations and diverse voices; the only thing these tales really share in common is their writer’s wit and imagination. The opener Rattlesnakes is a superbly crafted and slightly sickening story of three people caught in a dangerously compromising situation. It reminded me of Quentin Tarantino at his best – think of the Bruce Willis segment in Pulp Fiction and you’re in Rattlenakes territory.
The other stories are all worth reading as well. A missing dog and an enigmatic Korean chef. A serious misunderstanding by a cockney bar owner. An actor researching into a late film maker stumbles across something truly horrific in a tale-with-a-twist that gives Roald Dahl a run for his money. The last -and longest – is perhaps the least accessible in the collection but probably the most rewarding. The Kingdom of Fife is largely written in the Scottish vernacular, which put me in mind of the writing of the great James Kelman. It’s a funny, moving tale of an ex-jockey and his encounters with a couple of middle class equestrians.
It must be said that Welsh doesn’t pull any punches. If you shy away from anything explicit, namely sexual encounters and gritty language, this might not be for you. And it’s taken me a while, but Irvine Welsh now has a place on my reading list. If you’re new to him and want to try him out, this collection is a good enough place to begin.