Trainspotting

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Trainspotting

By: Irvine Welsh

Narrated by: Tam Dean Burn

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About this listen

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f****n junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total f***n embarrassment tae the selfish, f****d-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

Dark Humour

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Literature & Fiction

Urban

Funny

Witty

Scary

Thought-Provoking

Comedy

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If you get to this novel via Danny Boyle film adaptation, with its fabulous soundtrack, memorable drugg-addled characters and grim humour, be prepared for something quite a bit darker in the literary source.

If you haven't come across it: this novel is about drug addicts in Edinburgh in the 1980s.
The structure of the book is very episodic because there is really no coherent story to their lives: they move from 'scoring' to 'scoring'; from prison to dodgy deal and back to prison, from kicking the habit to relapsing, from casual sexual encounter to the next, from pub brawl to skanky flat and back to the pub. So the loose structure of the book mirrors the aimless drifting that is the result of drug dependency. This episodic structure is composed of characters talking or thinking. It's not always immediately clear who is talking, but it really lends a grim authenticity to all the voices. One of the main benefits is also that there is no overriding, omniscient narrator who would pass moral judgment. That's neither necessary nor desirable: the characters bare their soul in such a matter-of-fact way that you feel you are overhearing conversations or monologues. The book has a larger and looser cast of characters, who are still memorable and have their nicknames, but they are more spread across the narrative rather than in control of it. No one is in control of anything. Above all, this is not a buddy-story. Friendship has no place in a life that is ruled by drugs. It's one of the main differences to the film, and it is perhaps the grimmest truth of the book, that the drug-infused fantasies and sensations which the characters crave always leave the possibilities of reality behind, whether it is the true rewards of friendship, family or love. This is a gradual revelation rather than some sort of moral stamp impressed upon the reader.

Be prepared for quite a lot of violence and physical detail about the reality of drug abuse; AIDS features, miscarriages, pimping, and quite a lot about bowel movements, and very grim deaths. The decay of 1980s Scotland is palpable without this being a social-problem novel: there's simply nothing to go 'clean' for. It makes the film look like a commercial mass-product that makes decline somehow cool; the book has a harsher edge.

If you are squeamish at all about four-letter-words liberally scattered across every sentence in lieu of more imaginative adjectives or nouns, you'll have to give this a miss. What makes this audiobook outstanding is that it really helps with the Scottish vernacular, pronunciation, drug slang, etc etc. I found it virtually impossible to read the book since it is often written in a phonetic transcription of this language - but having Tam Dean Burn make it come alive in his melodic voice really made a difference. You still have to focus quite hard to follow but you can follow and it's really engrossing. I came out of this quite pensive, and in need of something upbeat, but I am very glad that I listened. It is a fantastic achievement in terms of performance and a real tour de force of a book.