The Blade Artist
By Irvine Welsh
(Jonathan Cape, €16.99 h/b)
You
all remember Begbie, don’t you? That’s right, Frank Begbie, the hard man from Trainspotting, portrayed so memorably by
Robert Carlyle in Danny Boyle’s filmisation. There’s usually one in every
teenage gang: the one everyone winds up embarrassed by and wants to disown, in
this case because of his thuggish, psychopathic antics, and just plain
wrongness. Well, Begbie’s back, and you wouldn’t recognise him.
Jim Francis is now a successful artist,
living the good and tranquil life in southern California with beautiful, art
therapist wife Melanie, and their two young daughters Grace (5) and Eve (2). The
happy couple met when she was in Edinburgh for a year, working on an exchange
programme between the Scottish prison service and the California correctional
system. Guess who was inside? As Welsh has said, the only future he could
imagine for Begbie beyond Trainspotting
was either death or prison. Under Melanie’s tutelage, however, a hitherto unsuspected
talent begins to flourish.
He does portraits and busts of celebrities,
adding ‘implausibly creative mutilations’. Think wide boy/wide girl Damien
Hirst/Tracey Emin style Brit Art, to understand how he might find a foothold
and fit in. His new profession proves lucrative too, apparently extending to
private commissions: ‘ – But Nicole wants a bust of Tom, with a very specific mutilation,
strictly confidential…And Aniston’s people want to know when the Angelina will
be ready.’ He’s now strictly teetotal too, and has white omelette, spinach and
green tea for breakfast (by all accounts echoing the lifestyle of his creator).
This idyll is interrupted when a phone call
comes from Jim/Frank’s sister Elspeth in the old country, informing him of the
death of his first born son, Sean. Jim has three children he hardly knows in
Edinburgh, from previous relationships: Sean and his younger brother Michael,
with June; and River, whose mother is Kate. He packs his bag to head back for
the funeral, and when it emerges that Sean was murdered, you just know things
are going to go downhill fast.
Despite providing a rollickingly panoptic and
page-turning view of the exile’s return to Edinburgh, with a huge cast of
characters, the novel is not without its flaws. Attributing Begbie’s former
rage and stupidity to undiagnosed dyslexia seems both patronising and
uncharacteristically politically correct; after all, not all dyslexics develop
a taste for ultra violence. There’s an ongoing riff around cell phone problems,
which serves to limit communication between Jim and Melanie, but doesn’t seem
credible to anyone remotely tech-savvy. Are there really no iPhone chargers to
be had in the Scottish capital? And why does the relatively affluent Jim buy
the cheapest Tesco mobile when his iPhone (in)conveniently pops out of his pocket
and down a drain while he is out jogging? While Jim thankfully avoids the
obvious cliché of going back on the bottle, he still has a barely controlled
nasty streak. However, this is motivated less by revenge, and more because he
just simply enjoys inflicting suffering, which make his sadistic outbursts seem
gratuitous. But maybe that’s the whole point, and I am missing it.
Irvine Welsh remains a very good writer, both
fictionally and otherwise. Indeed, as his op-eds around the Scottish
Independence Referendum demonstrated, had he not made it as a novelist, he has
a career manqué as the shrewdest of
socio-political commentators to fall back on. He has also, notwithstanding his
subject matter, become a much more straightforwardly traditional storyteller
than he started out as, perhaps realising that experimental novels a lá William Burroughs wouldn’t butter
any tatties these days. However, suffice it to say that he still will not prove
very popular with the Edinburgh Tourist Office.
Resurrecting characters is always fraught
with pitfalls, but can also, given the passage of time in their lives, and the
author’s and ours, prove rewarding. Although not perfect, Begbie’s return is a
good yarn, well told.
