Porno [Paperback]

This book will probably be heralded as Welsh's return to form but I doubt whether he left it in the first place.
This, the sequel to trainspotting has many welcome continual traits. Drug abuse, scheming, cheating, violence-all the themes that highlight the worse sides of human behavior are all here, that give us that sick kick. However Porno is not as black nor foul as it's predecessor and this is coupled with warmer relationships and a more sedantry pace. The frenetic drug fuelled core to trainspotting has given way to the slow sleaze of porn. The focus on sickboy is fresh and the return of the other characters not tired nor rinsed. Porno is an accomplishment yet what will the critics say? Don't let their consistencies get in the way. This book cannot be agenda setting. Trainspotting has done that already but it is still a well crafted, revealing and most importantly, worthy successor. Roll on film.

Before you read this book, you definitely must first read Welsh's first novel Trainspotting, and you should probably also read his last one, Glue. Porno is a direct sequel to Trainspotting, bringing back virtually all the characters some ten years later, and it's a semi-sequel to Glue, adding some of that book's characters into the mix, most notably "Juice" Terry Lawton and Rab Birrell. Porno will lack a great deal of depth and resonance for readers not familiar with those earlier books and their characters and settings.

And therein lies both Porno's attraction and minor disappointments. If you loved Trainspotting, reading Porno is very much like the experience of having seen a great band in a tiny club when they were just starting, and then seeing the same band ten years later in a large venue when they are more popular. They may still be amazing and play your favorite songs, but inevitably they've mellowed a touch, the intensity is isn't the same, and you get a little wistful. And to a certain extent, that's exactly what the book is about, aging, maturing, and getting over one's past. It's totally unfair to expect another Trainspotting from Welsh, an author can only write that passionate and electric a book once, and it's usually the first book they write. In any event, readers have had ten years to get used to reading Scots dialect and it's hard to conceive of what Welsh could write about that would be equally shocking as his heroin underworld.

In any event, Porno is a carefully plotted and constructed story, told in alternating first-person chapters by Sick Boy, his new lady Nikki Fuller-Smith, Spud, Begbie, and Renton. The central character is Sick Boy, who's seeking to reinvent himself as post-millenium entrepreneur, starting by making a porn film with his circle of acquaintances. Eventually this intertwines with the reappearance of Renton and the question of what went down in London ten years ago when he cheated Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud on a heroin deal and skipped town. Cynics will no doubt say that Welsh is looking to ride the sequel bus to potloads of money, which is, again, unfair. Clearly the Trainspotting crew were the characters closest to his heart, so of course he's going to want to revisit them and it seems churlish to suggest that an author who uses characters twice is a sellout.

Foe most part the characters are exactly as they were in the earlier books, although to varying degrees, most realize they're getting older and need to change. In this regard, Spud's story is the most poignant and affecting of the lot. And of course Renton's attempt to settle the past and lead a normal life is hard not to empathize with, which is why mad-dog Begbie is such a menacing presence throughout the book. Ultimately however, this is a comedy, lacking the darkness of Trainspotting, or Welsh's severely underrated Filth. It's a wonderful sentimental adventure full or wacky hi-jinks, and comuppances aplenty.

Porno, as everyone should know by now, catches up with the characters from Trainspotting 10 years on. In the books since then (namely, Ecstasy, Filth, and Glue, with the exception of the criminally under-rated Marabou Stork Nightmares), the rascals have turned up in one guise or another so it's no real surprise that Welsh has returned to them. While it does help to create Welsh's own world, his fictional equivalent of Edinburgh as a closed environment. The cynic might say that this makes life easier for Welsh as all he has to do when he requires is let Begbie (or Larry Doyle, or Lexo, all previous creations) pop up.

This time there is no authorial narrative; the story is all told be the various characters. Welsh is superb at voices, and conveys the mindscape of Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud, Renton with no little skill. He also adds a new character, Nikki Fuller-Smith, a highly attractive female student from Reading, who meets Sick Boy and agrees to his scheme of making a porn, which forms the spine of the novel.

Welsh also understands and skillfully evokes the changes and developments of the four ex-Trainspotters superbly. He has a razor-sharp eye for social detail and uses this to great effect. It's one of the sad things in life that while youngsters from different backgrounds may start out on similar paths, eventually these differences alter their lives fundamentally. So Spud is getting nowhere fast, drifting through life and barely coping on a day-to-day basis; Sick Boy fears the onset of age as a user like him would no longer be able to blag it ("I need product" he says); Begbie, newly released from prison, continues on his inexorable path towards death or jail; while Renton, clearly Welsh's alter-ego, is an upwardly-mobile working-class intellectual. How their life trajectories have changed since Trainspotting is the real interest of the novel, rather than the porn fim itself, which sometimes seems like an excuse for some transgressive writing, on the pros and cons of anal sex for instance.

Porno is nowhere nearly as good as Trainspotting, but that was perhaps to be expected, for that has a white-hot intensity that can never be recaptured. It's like a punk band laying down their first album; there's a joyful euphoria to it, even if the material is edgy and bleak. Subsequent works are more professional maybe, but there is never the same focus and intensity. It's the difference between "Appetite For Destruction" and the "Use Your illusion" albums. The philsophical subtexts in Trainspotting (the use of Kierkegaard for instance) and the multiple narratives of Marabout Stork have similarly never been repeated, so Welsh's recent work lacks the literary qualities which once made it so exceptional, and seems fixated rather on the sex, drugs and violence.

Also, there's an unfortunate predictability - Nikki gets a flatmate, and who should it be but Dianne, from the "The First Shag In Ages" chapter in Trainspotting, and you can imagine what happens when Renton returns to Edinburgh. The climax, too, where Renton and Begbie meet, after just missing each other for some time (as you do in a city of 250,000 people) is dreadful. Perhaps it's an ironic joke to have a book called Porno have such an anti-climax, but sadly I don't think so. It's just so disappointing.

Nonetheless, there are many things to enjoy about this book: the humour, the narrative verve, the insight and detail, the characters, the cultural references are all good fun. But the book isn't a literary novel; it's popular fiction, and that's the difference between Irvine Welsh being great and him being quite good.