FILTH
By Irvine Welsh
Detective-Sergeant Bruce Robertson of the Edinburgh police is not having a
very merry Christmas. His wife has left him, he has a nasty rash covering his
genitals, and the son of a diplomat has just been found bludgeoned to death. Will he ever get to enjoy that long-awaited week of drugs
and debauchery in Amsterdam?
You'd better believe it. Like the tapeworms that wind their way through his
guts, Robertson is a creature of pure appetite. And his appetites - including
drugs, violence, sex, or any combination thereof - are all addictive. Whatever
Robbo wants (cocaine, pornography, a promotion to detective inspector, that trip
to Amsterdam), Robbo is going to get.
Be warned: Filth is not for the faint of heart. Irvine Welsh, best
known for his hard-core debut novel Trainspotting, is not interested in
sparing the reader's sensibilities. Robertson is a man on a mission to exhaust
the known worlds of depravity and imagine new. If you are not the kind of reader
to find humour in scenes involving bestiality or sexual asphyxiation, then take
a pass.
If, however, you are looking for new writing that is inventive, challenging,
and (at times) hilarious, then Filth may be just what you've been looking
for. Welsh's style is alive with the music of obscenity. The language, which is
a swirl of Scottish idioms and urban slang, sounds like the delinquent argot of A
Clockwork Orange. And the cleverly nasty but pathetically ignorant
first-person narrator is as successfully handled here as it was by Burgess.
Best of all, Welsh is not afraid to experiment. Robertson's tapeworms, for
example, are long intestinal (turd-like) shapes that drop down whole pages of
text. They also have personalities and are capable of offering extensive
analyses of Robertson's subconscious. It may sound silly, but most of the time
it works.
The originality of the presentation also helps to cover up some of the
novel's failings. A lot of the book, and especially the end, lacks an air of
reality. Most of the time, Robertson appears to be wandering aimlessly through a
nightmare. While everyone is busy putting in overtime, nobody seems to do any
work. (This may be a blind spot for Welsh. In Trainspotting it didn't
matter because none of the characters were employed, but in this book it leads
to a lack of credibility.)
Missteps like these, however, are part of the price you pay for writing on
the edge. Irvine Welsh is a walk on the wild side, and with luck that is where
we will always find him.
Notes:
Review first published October 24, 1998.
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