If You Liked School, You'll Love Work
Irvine Welsh Cape
Irvine Welsh's new collection of fiction, five substantial stories with a wide variety of settings, may have been intended to show off his versatility, but it comes close to demonstrating the opposite. He badly needs home ground if his writing is to have any vitality.
In the first story, 'Rattlesnakes', three young Americans go into the Nevada desert to take the drug yagé, but find themselves at the mercy of some passing embittered Latinos when their truck breaks its axle. This is exploitation-movie territory, rendered in tough-guy prose ('It was hot. It was goddamned hot.'), except that there's a stubbornly literary feel to the sordid proceedings, with Welsh inserting a series of flashbacks and point-of-view changes into his climactic scene of forced fellatio and voyeurism.
Under the stoner slang the language is oddly pedantic and British-sounding. 'Injurious snub', 'vengeful tenacity', 'perilous yearning stare', 'bitter despondency' - all these seem wrong for the context. Unless a side-effect of yagé is to bring out the prissy Brit in everyone ('despite his wastrel behaviour and occasional bohemian affectations, his big, strong, athletic build did not encourage vacillation in girls...').
A similar problem mars the title story. This time the hero, Mickey, is an expat running a bar in the Canary Islands, and the dialect speech of Irvine Welsh on offer is mockney: 'This was the woman I'd kipped with every bleedin' night, barring accidents (usually happy ones as it happens), for sixteen farking years.'
The model here seems to be Martin Amis, and particularly his brilliant story 'State of England', but as a performance If You Liked School, You'll Love Work isn't in the same class. Even when Amis channels an underclass voice, he sticks to his own stylistic code, so that the impersonation is constantly being transformed from inside. Having chosen a dim protagonist, Welsh is always chafing at the limitations he's set himself ('Good? What is farking good? I find myself squelching through a swamp of moral relativism every day, as the geezer on the Discovery Channel said the other night'). His ear seems bafflingly off, and the result is neither convincing nor much fun: 'Course, anybody can play Emperor within the Enlightened Realm of Retrospect, just as we can all play Cunt in the Kingdom of Trouser Wood; that ain't the bleedin' issue.'
The next two stories revert to American settings. 'The Dogs of Lincoln Park' describes the trivial doings of three young women in Chicago, friends who never miss an opportunity to do each other down. Again, the language is tired, in a way that can't be blamed on the characters ('Kendra seldom wearied of proclaiming that it was she who had unearthed this culinary pearl'). The tone is would-be satirical, but satire calls for real knowledge, not just callow riffing on stereotypes.
In 'Miss Arizona', Welsh has chosen a warmer, brighter character as his protagonist: Raymond Wilson Butler, an aspiring film-maker researching a book on his hero Glen Halliday (writer and director of The Liars Of Ditchwater Creek and a number of other low-budget classics). Butler interviews Yolanda, Halliday's second wife, allegedly Miss Arizona in the distant past, now a blowsy dipsomaniac. Over time he begins to see another side of her, and is inspired to rewrite the central character of his screenplay Big Noise, incorporating his new insights into female experience.
Welsh, who has himself renounced alcohol and the other drugs of distortion, makes Butler a recovering boozer, sustained by the love of his young musician girlfriend Pen. Perhaps it's intentional that his passion for her is expressed in the mawkish tone of country-and-western lyrics: 'We kissed long, hard and hungry, then softened it up and it tasted real fine and I could measure the goodness in life in the sweetest drips from those red lips.' It can't be intentional, though, that the story should come across so much as a retread of Sunset Boulevard, with plot assistance from Roald Dahl's famous tale 'The Landlady'.
The last story, 'Kingdom of Fife', is set in Cowdenbeath and accounts for almost half the book. The hero is Jason King, a failed jockey (and promising table-football player) living with his old-school socialist Dad and stalking a couple of posh girls he sees riding their horses. His name makes possible a discreet Peter Wyngarde joke - Department S for Shagging - for the over-forties in Welsh's readership. The presence of horses makes possible endless innuendos about 'riding'.
In an Afterword, Irvine Welsh refers to Scotland as being 'spiritually vast', but it would be hard to extract a sense of this from the text. Welsh seems intoxicated with - and impressed by - the squalor of his characters. Jason's IQ fluctuates as the progress of the story demands, but his occasional highbrow moments can be attributed to the influence of his Dad. Irvine Welsh is confident enough of his grip on this little world to play games, so Jason listens to Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman, while his father is a devotee of gangster rap in general and 50 Cent in particular.
There is no mood, event or activity in this world that can't be turned into a prostitute analogy. 'Darkness faws like a workin hoor's keks: sudden but yet predictable.' The Fife accent surfacing in the speech of a native returned from abroad is 'sneaky as a hoor oaf a shift into a morning oafice cleaning job.'
Even the water in the Forth estuary gets the treatment: it's described as 'calm as a well-shagged, wedged-up hoor wi hur purse in her drawers'. When a whore analogy breaks off in the middle (a drowning dog's head 'gaun up n doon like a...') it can only be a mark of respect, the equivalent of doffing one's hat.
The dialect is certainly colourful (though there's mainly the one colour), but it makes for slow reading. The transliteration is sometimes perverse, with 'ay' representing 'of' ('metters ay discipline') but 'ays' meaning 'us' ('away fae ays'). Welsh also favours the continental style of introducing speech, with a dash. (It was Joyce's hatred of 'perverted commas' that made this emblematic of both modernism and the Celtic.) There's a disadvantage involved, though, without a symbol to indicate the end of speech. A sentence like this is hard to understand unless you know that the speech ends after the first five words: '-Thir's nae danger ay that, ah goes, n ah ken it's just phone lines n thir aw the same, but ah git a wee hunch eh's a wee bit closer thin Spain.'
Not all of the story is in Welsh Lallans. Some of it is told from the point of view of Jenni Cahill, one of the girls stalked by Jason. This element of the novella starts off shakily, but ends up working rather well. The lurches of tone between literary posing, angst and infatuation are plausibly Jenni's rather than her author's - a surprising success in an area, female first person, where Martin Amis has always had trouble. It helps, of course, that there's plenty of maudlin sentiment lurking under the corrosive cynicism, and happy endings in store for all.
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