Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION WEL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION WEL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Marked by Irvine Welsh's scabrous humor and raw Scottish vernacular, Skagboys transports us to 1980s Edinburgh, where the Trainspotting crew is just getting started. Mark Renton has it all: the first in his family to attend university, he has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But when economic uncertainties and family problems intervene, Rent succumbs to the defeatism--not to mention the drug use--that has taken hold in Edinburgh's tougher quarters. His friends are responding according to personality. Laid off, Spud Murphy is paralyzed in the face of long-term unemployment. Sick Boy, supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, is scamming and hustling for money and drugs. And meanwhile, psycho Franco Begbie is scaring the hell out of everyone. Darkly humorous, Skagboys gives a gritty and gripping portrait of a time, not unlike ours, when money was scarce, unemployment was high, and drugs seemed the answer.
Author Notes
Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh on September 27, 1958. After leaving school, he lived in London for awhile, but eventually returned to Edinburgh where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He received a degree in computer science and studied for an MBA at Heriot Watt University.
His first novel, Trainspotting, was published in 1993 and was adapted as a film starring Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle in 1996. He became a full-time writer in August 1995. His other works include The Acid House (1994), Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (1996), Filth (1998), Glue (2001), and Porno (2002). He also wrote the plays Headstate (1994) and You'll Have Had Your Hole (1998).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Built upon 100,000 words set aside in the process of writing Trainspotting comes this prequel set in gritty early '80s Leith, Edinburgh. The familiar voices of Mark "Rent Boy" Renton, Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson, Danny "Spud" Murphy, Frank Begbie, Matty Connell, and Alison Lozinska crowd the pages of this sprawling narrative. Mark, who goes off to Aberdeen University, plans a rail tour of Europe with the girl of his dreams, Fiona Conyers, and seems poised to leave behind old mates like Ali, who secures a cushy job assisting efforts to eradicate the Dutch elm disease ravaging Edinburgh's trees. On her first day at work Ali accompanies her boss to a pub and meets his brother, who is secretly smuggling industrial grade heroin out of the local pharmaceutical plant, inadvertently unleashing another ravaging early '80s disease, AIDS (Welsh details both in newsy "Notes on an Epidemic" chapters). Meanwhile Matty, Simon, Frank, and Danny idly wander the streets in pursuit of pints, skag, lassies, brawls, and kindness. But after Mark deceives Fiona about his own drug use, and his disabled little brother dies, he joins the downward heroin-fueled trajectory of his disaffected peers. Parental intervention, arrests, and even rehab can't change the course of their addiction as they become increasingly cynical and uninterested in anything other than the next fix. Their combined experiences twist together the fading London punk scene, the declining power of the proletariat, hooliganism, neo-Nazism, and the AIDS epidemic that characterized Thatcherite Britain. Careening between boisterous, belligerent, hilarious, and maudlin emotional registers like a drunk at a party, this novel has a dizzy energy in spite of its aimless plot and general corpulence. As with much of Welsh's oeuvre, it's not for the uninitiated-the prose is dense with Edinburgh dialect, disturbing sexual encounters, explosive violence, and much sorrow. Agent: Jenny Chapman, Jonathan Cape. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nearly 20 years after Trainspotting, Welsh delivers a stunning prequel that shows us how his characters got hooked on heroin. The opening sets us firmly in the Thatcher era, with college student Mark Renton joining a union protest, thinking he'll score some street cred; in the bloody melee that follows, he acquires both a cynical eye and a nagging back complaint. Welsh provides continued social context by interleaving dry, factual Notes on an Epidemic that chart Edinburgh's exploding heroin use and, subsequently, AIDS cases. (A subplot about the city's swift response to Dutch elm disease suggests misplaced priorities.) All this reminds us that the personal tragedies of Trainspotting were part of a much larger story, but, as before, it's the remarkable characterizations that give this work such devastating impact. Though Welsh's characters are younger, he is older, and his writing has become even more nuanced. Renton's psychic pain, Sick Boy's Casanova complex, the gentle natures of Spud and Tommy, and Begbie's terrifying violence are richly and heartbreakingly rendered. Their descent into addiction is made real and horrifyingly inevitable: they know it's bad for them, we know it's bad for them, and neither of us can stop it. A haunting and important book that deserves serious attention.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TWENTY years ago, Irvine Welsh roared onto the British literary scene with "Trainspotting," a first novel that traced the exuberant depravities of Scottish drug fiends. What marked the book as original wasn't its subject - artists have been mining the manic energies of addiction since well before the age of Hogarth - but the unlikely poetry of its language, a droll brogue Welsh transcribed in precise phonetics. A few years later, the filmmaker Danny Boyle adapted the book for the screen, and a franchise was born. Welsh has spent the balance of his career channeling the lowlifes of his native Edinburgh, morally adrift young men led about on the short leash of their appetites. The titles of his subsequent books - "Filth," "Porno," "Crime" - will suffice as plot summaries. His eighth novel, "Skagboys," takes up the story of the "Trainspotting" crew in training. It's a sprawling effort, the author's attempt at a social epic worthy of Dickens. The story he wants to tell, at least intermittently, is that of the urban poor in the age of Thatcher, how union busting, mass unemployment and the shredding of the safety net - combined with ready access to cheap opiates - led the young and restive astray. But because Welsh shuns the traditional tools by which novelists dramatize such Big Themes (i.e., plot, character development, shrewd narration), this history comes at the reader mostly uncut, in brief jags of journalistic prose. The other 500 pages amount to one long hit of nihilistic mayhem, narrated by a rotating cast of wastrels who are vain, manipulative, self-pitying and almost entirely blind to their own sadism. Welsh has written a book, in other words, that's all Fagin and no Oliver. Consider Sick Boy, the Lothario of the pack. When not shooting up, he spends his hours seducing, robbing, impregnating and jilting women. His crowning achievement is to insinuate himself into a troubled family, bed their 15-year-old daughter, get the girl hooked on heroin and begin pimping her out for drugs. He eventually allows the man who murdered her father to rape her as she lies in a narcotic stupor. The true injustice of the situation, Sick Boy notes, is that callous officials who specialize in keeping down the "lower orders" failed to convict the killer. Who better to offer socioeconomic class critiques than a genuine sociopath? As he did in "Trainspotting," Welsh proffers Mark (Rent Boy) Renton as the guiding light of the lot. He's an utterly opaque confection, a spoiled brooder who abandons college and a gorgeous girlfriend to shoot smack, who reads "Ulysses" when he's not prowling for his next fix and who cites Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Welsh test-drives a number of possible motivations for Renton's behavior - including the death of his severely handicapped teenage brother, whom Renton used to masturbate routinely as an act of charity, one that probably qualifies him for sainthood given his peer group - before letting his Mensa junkie cough up this profundity: "Sometimes ye jist dae it cause it's thaire n that's wey ye are." A note to American readers: Most of the book is written in dialect, and it does not come with a glossary of terms. Welsh can still dependably locate lyricism in the rough gusts of slang, but even devoted fans might struggle upon encountering a line like this: "He went intae the club mingin eftir bein oan the peeve aw weekend," which translates to "He went into the club stinking after drinking all weekend." Far more exasperating is the absence of a central narrator. In his frantic pursuit of immediacy, the author plunges into one point of view after another without any sense of who's speaking, or where, or what's at stake. But Welsh fails to build any sense of rising action. The larger forces of the world never impinge on his pack of feral whelps. They just self-destruct on their own, and are granted women to defile. Even trapped in rehab, they do no more than glance at the damage wrought by their sins. Toward the end of the novel, Welsh makes a halfhearted effort to tie up the scattered plot strands. Renton figures out that the heroin they've been using is produced in an Edinburgh pharmaceutical factory, and launches a doomed expedition to retrieve the goods. This late spasm of daring feels jerry-built. Like Renton, the reader is left "cursing the folly of all that pointless exertion." WELSH clearly wanted to write a book that looked beyond the squalid terrain of drug dens and council schemes. But because so much of it takes place within the minds of addicts programmed to pursue sensation, the story feels cramped and spiritually bereft. Only when he abandons the skagboys does his prose grow expansive. The best chapter offers the perspective of Renton's father, an unemployed ship-builder who wanders the streets of Edinburgh, heartbroken at the desolation of the shipyards and factories and unable to face the ruin of his son. He repairs to a pub where he and a callous Thatcherite nearly come to blows. Stunned to the point of tears at his own rage, he ponders, "What had happened to this country?" It may be the only genuine question the book poses. The women in "Skagboys" serve as badges of masculine narcissism and recipients of their abuse. The lone exception is a part-time user named Alison, who is haunted by her encounter with the violent psychopath Begbie. "His was the devil's voice," she observes, "permeating all the other sounds; the grinding of cars down the street, the shivering of the bare trees in the wind, the guffaws of drunk girls, the shouts of men weaving in and out of the public houses." It's actually disheartening to come across such moments of pathos, which affirm Irvine Welsh's fierce vision of working-class despair. Rather than deepening that vision, "Skagboys" confirms him as the British equivalent of Chuck Palahniuk, another one-hit wonder whose ambitions as a prose stylist and social critic are continually undone by his need to enthrall and disgust. Steve Almond's latest book is the story collection "God Bless America."
Guardian Review
There are basically two types of Irvine Welsh novel. There are the deeply felt and vividly evoked stories about young men going to the bad on the mean streets of Leith (Trainspotting, Glue). Then there are his silly, sick ones, whether the genre is tapeworm-infested police procedural (Filth), evil-double gothic (The Bedroom Secrets of The Master Chefs) or psychedelic thalidomide revenge fantasy (Ecstasy). This is a simplification: the desire to shock runs deep in Welsh, and all his books are at least slightly sick and sensationalistic. But when it comes down to brass tacks, Welsh has one great story to tell; and much of the rest of his career has been spent failing to find another one in ever more desperate and revolting ways, apparently feeling that he's letting the side down if there isn't a hemorrhoid-scratching scene or a ruptured penis or child being dismembered every few pages. I was really looking forward to Skagboys, which falls clearly into the first category. The prequel to Trainspotting, it is billed like most of his novels as his best since then. It begins in 1984, and it follows Renton, Sick Boy and Spud as they become heroin addicts, and Begbie as he graduates from Leith bully to fully-fledged Edinburgh-wide psycho. The prologue, in which Renton joins his father's union on the picket line at the Battle of Orgreave during the miners' strike, sees Welsh at his sweary, eloquent best. It kicks off in convoluted standard English before liberating itself into broad housing scheme Scots. Renton is beaten up by the police, and left with back pain and a sense that there's no future: "Ah'm thinkin that we've lost, and there's bleak times ahead, and ah'm wonderin: what the fuck am ah gauny dae wi the rest ay ma life?" At this point, the book seems to be shaping up as a blunt but powerful anti-Thatcherite epic. Spud is laid off from his job as a removals man. Renton finds himself doing de-skilled carpentry work for "the kind ay small businessman Thatcher loves; a grasping, spiritually dead, scab-minded cunt". There are mini-essays about the Tories' failure to devolve power to Scotland, and about the spread of HIV in Edinburgh; there are sub-plots set in the pharmaceutical factory from which high-grade heroin is flooding on to the streets. But ultimately, it's a more confused and personal book than that. Renton has all the chances a place at university, a lovely girlfriend but blows them all, owing, it seems, to his torment over his "spazzy" younger brother, and to something like an identity crisis: "That's ma problem; ah'm too fuckin poncy tae be a proper Leith gadgie n too fuckin schemie tae be an arty student type." In the end, the blame for the gang's wasted lives is shared between Thatcher, class, screwed-up families and something else: original sin, maybe. Coming back to Trainspotting nearly 20 years after it was published, it still seems like one of the more interesting British novels of recent decades. It's a sort of hellish social comedy, in which a whole subculture is artfully compressed into 44 fragmented chapters. You sense that Welsh knows the terrain like the back of his hand; that he knows where every minor character went to school, and how they got their nickname. Along with a great ear for dialogue and local detail, Welsh has a powerful wider political story to tell: how the country's industrial communities were hollowed out in the 1980s ("the substitution of drugs for jobs in the poorest parts of Britain", as he has put it). But he tells it in an exhilarating style that makes the traditional social realist model for such stories think of Ken Loach or early James Kelman look earnest and plodding. Perhaps Welsh was able to do all this because he had in fact written an entire unpublished novel's worth of background. When the sequel, Porno, came out 10 years ago, he said that he had written "a huge amount more of Trainspotting than went into the book, but I didn't want to rehash that". Well, now he's done exactly that, and the result isSkagboys. Presumably this is why it reads like somebody's interesting but confused first novel: nakedly autobiographical, stylistically uneven, with some fascinating passages and a fair amount of earnest and plodding social realism. Welsh appears literally to be finding his voice, ranging from student-pretentious ("the lines from that classic Dylan Thomas poem resonated in her") to Penguin Classic ("Ronnie turned to George, estimating that his younger brother was more likely to be a peer of this boy who had disgraced their sister"). Only in some sections does he hit the confident, precise tone of Trainspotting, in which casually deployed official English collides with the vernacular: "You can operate fae the purest of motives but some fuckers will eywis misconstrue it to fit their ain twisted agenda." Skagboys is also just too long: it essentially goes over the same ground as Trainspotting, yet it's about three times the size. There is the same run of highs and lows, skag hits and funerals. Sick Boy shags and mistreats his way through the book, while Begbie batters and stomps and chibs. There are even reruns of famous passages from the previous novel, including a minor-key reprise of Renton's "choose life" rant about how he doesn't want a nine-to-five and a mortgage. The bits that deviate from the old routines often seem the most uncertain. There's a slack, meandering section set in a Hackney squat. And Renton's happy student days are a little insipid he even goes InterRailing! For all that, there are many unforgettable episodes, such as the visit to a squalid shooting gallery, where one large hospital syringe passes round the room from junky to junky, like the angel of death. Even at his weakest, Welsh performs the mysterious feat of making you think that his characters are real. But by the time, a few pages from the end, that Renton is heard saying: "it's no like some famous cunt's gaunny come along and make a film ay our lives, is it?", the reader has a vivid sense of a great talent tamely revisiting his glory days.
Kirkus Review
Once more into the ditch: Welsh revisits the economically depressed, heroin-sick slums of Edinburgh in this hefty prequel to Trainspotting (1993). Much like that book, this one is a collection of episodic stories that roughly cohere as a novel, written mostly in Scottish dialect and illuminating the despair of its characters as Thatcher-era Great Britain disassembles the nation's safety net. Again, the lead character is Mark Renton, a philosophical young man who seems poised to rise above his lower-middle-class station until heroin (i.e., skag) implodes him. Not long after he starts using, he's dropped out of university and wants to quit drugs but not very badly--in one heartbreaking scene he admits to his girlfriend that he's more interested in his relationship with heroin than with her. Shifting among various characters' perspectives, Welsh shows how rapidly addiction sank Mark and his friends, but Welsh is no moralist, and he's just as likely to mine their lives for humor as pathos. Desperate for consistent fixes, they pursue one harebrained scheme or other--a stint working as mules on a ferryboat goes particularly poorly--and their freewheeling banter shows that if nothing else, the drugs haven't erased their personalities. Welsh's themes are repetitive, and there is no reason why this book couldn't be half as long. But it's marked by some virtuosic set pieces. In one scene, an addict watches a group of boys drop a puppy down a garbage chute, and his distressing (and heavily metaphorical) trip into the dumpster encapsulates the junkie's journey with equal parts horror and comedy. And a lengthy rehab journal by Mark is a witty, fiery, joyously vulgar vision of life in detox, showing how his better self slowly emerges. But as we know from Trainspotting, such moments of redemption rarely last. Red meat for Welsh cultists, but a heavy load for anybody else.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Mark Renton should have been the first of his generation to make it out of government housing and do something with his life. Instead, a dalliance with heroin begins a long downward spiral. This prequel to Welsh's seminal 1993 Trainspotting shows how those characters first got into their dire straits. The story hops among multiple narrators and is filled with Scottish slang and phonetic spellings, which is at first disconcerting. Soon, however, the text develops a poetic rhythm similar to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. The author further establishes Edinburgh's bleak mood during the early years of Thatcherism by breaking up the narrative with straightforward factual chapters that describe how the Conservative government's policy of economic austerity and erosion of workers' rights engendered a desperation among the lower classes that made dropping out and becoming a heroin addict seem like an understandable lifestyle choice. VERDICT Recommended for fans of gritty European fiction and drug lit. [See Prepub Alert, 3/19/12.]-Peter M. Petruski, Cumberland Cty. Lib. Syst., Carlisle, PA, (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
