Dead Men's Trousers

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The book is further enhanced, in my opinion, by the best audio book reader I've listened to. Tam Dean Burn is absolutely superb and I couldn't imagine listening to an Irvine Welsh book that was read by anyone else. His delivery of the book both brings it to life and, if it is possible, makes the story even better with his geniune Leith accented delivery. He truly is a genius of an audio book reader. My favorite quote is an updated version of the "Choose Life" monologue, which completely fits our current era: I Have Your Wife: Symes keeps Spud's dog, Toto until he goes through with the second kidney delivery. Not to mention, this new novel also directly takes place after the solo Begbie novel Blade Artist which feels like required reading now. Then there's that novel Glue, featuring characters such as the perverted Juice Terry and DJ N-Sign--who have also been in more novels.

Organ Theft: Spud gets a kidney removed to make up for the one he was supposed to deliver but was eaten by his dog. Global commercialism has compelled the Scots tae pretend tae like Christmas, but we're genetically programmed tae rebel against it. Begbie, as we learned from The Blade Artist, is outwardly apparently a reformed character and is now Jim Francis, artist and sculptor living in California with his wife and two young daughters. Begbie, now going by the name of Jim Francis, meets Renton on a plane, and surprisingly does not try to kill him. It seems that the psycho has mellowed, and is now an acclaimed arstist with a devoted wife and two lovely children.Job-Stealing Robot: When Andrew talks about Spud getting laid off, he says in five or ten years his job as a lawyer will be made redundant by artificial intelligence. Gone are most of the things which made Welsh great in the first place - the original cultural references, the Scots dialect, the counter-culture/drugs scene, basically anything distinctively to do with contemporary Scottish life. Dead Men's Trousers, like The Blade Artist, feels extremely Americanised (or at least obviously written by an author who no longer spends his time with the people and places he writes about - someone who is out of touch, to say the least). I think this might be one of the bigger reasons why his more recent work fails to hit the mark. The most crazed and vicious of the four, Begbie had appeared in other Welsh works — "coming out of jail for violent cameos" — but Welsh says he had to “completely reboot him and give him a second life.” While comparisons can be made to the first sequel novel Porno, which was about gentrification after coming home to the ol' scene, suddenly all our old friends are middle-aged and very successful. I suppose it has to do with the author's journey himself. But Begbie as a rich artist, Rents as a globe-trotting music manager, does it work? I don't know. Somehow, it does seem to diminish the brutality of our first impression all those years ago. At least Spud is still a loser. You can always tell the status of a Welsh character by the blondness and waist measurement of his girlfriend

Welsh, 60, knows of what he writes, admitting to fairly prodigious use when younger. He still uses occasionally, but says, “You just get to the point where you’ve done enough physiologically and psychologically, they don’t work in the same way. The intoxication gets less and less and there’s the tiredness and the lethargy and the comedown.”Another entry in the Trainspotting saga had my hopes high that Welsh might have returned to form after the slew of forgettable books he's churned out in the past decade or so. I was disappointed. If it wasn't for Skagboys, I might well be considering the idea that Trainspotting was indeed ghostwritten by Spud Murphy. Hell, maybe this is Welsh trying to tell us something? Unfortunately, this also has me questioning whether the other books are as good as I remember them being - a question which I'm sure will answer itself in due course. Right for the Wrong Reasons: Spud has a dog called Toto which he named after the band and didn't realize there was a dog called Toto in The Wizard of Oz. There are other problems. It’s still very male-focused, not to say misogynistic. It might be plausible to depict an entirely male friendship group of 1980s junkies, but Renton and Begbie now work in gender-balanced fields, and the women in the novel are almost exclusively trophies, victims, or whores. You can always tell the status of a Welsh character by the blondness and waist measurement of his girlfriend.

Then he runs into his old partner in crime, Frank Begbie, from whom he'd been hiding for years. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist in Los Angeles, and doesn't seem interested in revenge.

The same goes for “ Dead Man’s Trousers,” out Tuesday, Feb. 26, the fourth and final book in the series. It features the same four protagonists and hits the same high/low marks as “Trainspotting” did. The tale is appalling, transgressive, politically incorrect, spit-take funny, and, in some sobering ways, an examination of misogyny and toxic masculinity. The book cover for "Dead Men's Trousers." (Courtesy) Off the Wagon: In contrast to his recovery and finding religion in Porno, Second Prize appears in a single scene and looks so worn from drink that he appears almost dead. Never Suicide: Begbie drugs Harry and hangs him from the ceiling hoping to make it look like a suicide, but the roof collapses.