Irvine WelshReviewJenny Turner revisits lost stories from the Trainspotting eraIn 1997, at the height of the Trainspotting craze, Irvine Welsh wrote a story called "The State of the Party" and published it - o tempora, o mores - in the Face. Vintage Welsh, you could call it, featuring Crooky and Calum, off their faces on acid, and Boaby, the dead junkie they find themselves carting round the streets of Edinburgh, dabbing on makeup to "make um look a bit less creepy".
It's a perfectly fine story, with streaks of vintage-Welshy evil genius: "Seems a nice lassie, like," says Calum of a girl. "Filled mair jars wi' abortions thin yir granny hus wi jam, ya cunt," is Crooky's winsome reply. But one bit stands out, glinting like a disco-ball over recent history. "'Ah used tae work in the bank, the head oafice,' Michelle said, as if underlining her inherent respectability. 'The Royal Bank.' She emphasised the 'Royal'. 'Ken the Royal Bank ay Scotland?'" It was just the gentility that used to be funny, and the slapstick of a polity so small having two separate banks with pretty much the same name. Back then, there was no HBOS or Fred Goodwin or Holyrood, no Tommy Sheridan on Celebrity Big Brother, to make the moment even funnier, in a bitter and black-hearted way.
Reheated Cabbage, as the title pre-emptively suggests, is a collection of fairly B-list stories from the late 1990s, previously published in vehicles now out of print. Like "The State of the Party", the stories are all perfectly fine - if you enjoy Welsh's melanoma-black body-horror humour - and some are more than that, lit up at least in places by tiny spinning mirrors. "A Fault on the Line", for example, is told entirely from the point of view of one still, small voice, worrying about how he'll ever manage to "ride" his wife again, given that both her legs have just been torn off by a train. "Bit it wis her ain fault because she kent that ah wanted tae stey in fir the fitba this Sunday; they hud the Hibs-Hearts game live oan Setanta."
In "The Rosewell Incident", the idea is that when Shelley Thomson says she was abducted by aliens, she's actually telling the truth - Mikey Devlin, formerly of the Hibs casuals, has moved in with the Cyrastorians on their spaceship, corrupting their youngsters with "snout" and "swedgin". The plot is deft and clever, a sort of Michel Houellebecq post-humanism done in the style of Doctor Who; the silliness of its arc works well with the harshness of the detail. Kids smash each other's heads in, self-anaesthetised with Temazepam. The dad in the story is a depressed, out-of-work former miner - "history had vindicated Scargill, sure, but that counted for fuck all".
Although, like everyone else, I love Trainspotting, I'm never sure about Welsh's subsequent work. Sometimes, I think this is because I am just too old, too posh and too square for it; sometimes I think it's because he is. Trainspotting goes on being a great book because, deep down, it's about real experience, forged into art the hard way, in the smithy of the writer's soul. And there are wonderful bits in much of what he has published since, but also much that is slick and routinised, a sort of lubricious housing-scheme pastoral, like what happened to Shameless after Paul Abbott lost interest in it.
Perhaps this is why Welsh keeps writing new stories about the Trainspotting characters - Porno was a sort of sequel, and he is apparently now at work on a prequel, to be called The Skag Boys. They're still the ones he knows and cares about most deeply. They're the ones he'll spend his life's work struggling to understand.
The one new Reheated Cabbage story tries hard to move things along a bit, but unfortunately, isn't great. It's set in a rich suburb of Miami - apparently Welsh now spends most of his winters there - and the protagonist is an elderly Edinburgh schoolteacher, sickened to the heart by the collapse of the old Presbyterian educational ideals, come out to visit his married son. So there he is, beset by bling, sexed-up beats, girls in thongs, when who should he run into but the 40-year-old versions of Carl Ewart and Terry Lawson, two of his worst-ever former pupils (and, you may remember, the heroes of the earlier novel, Glue.
When it became obvious that the plot was going to turn on a hallucinogenic teabag, I started fretting that this was going to be one of Welsh's sadistic revenge stories, but thankfully it isn't - except that it becomes cosy and redemptive, which is almost worse. There's evidence, in places, that Welsh once had grand designs for this story, to build a great vaulting convergence between the apparent hedonism of the drug culture and the most pleasure-hating Calvinism - "Children made us all sinners ... whether we aborted, raised or ignored them. You picked up a newspaper and saw evidence of the fucked-up place you couldn't fix." Only he gives it up and lets the story go for something easier, the sort of star-studded ensemble comedy that might get your programme on the cover of the Radio Times.
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