Pages: 496
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Released April 2015
Reviewed by Melanie Page
I have had a somewhat quiet literary love affair with
Scotsman Irvine Welsh since 2004, when I first read his debut novel, Trainspotting, set in Edinburgh. If
you’ve seen the movie of the same name, bravo; if you haven’t read the book,
though, you are missing out of some of the most gawd-awful and disgusting
moments you would think possible. But with Irvine Welsh, things can always get
worse, more depraved, more disgusting. If the movies were absolutely true to
the books, they couldn’t be released in theater. Welsh’s most recent novel, A Decent Ride, which takes readers back
to Edinburgh, stars “Juice” Terry Lawson, cabbie, occasional drug delivery guy,
occasional porn actor, and always-all-the-time sex maniac with a huge penis.
Terry is told by doctors that his heart is under too much strain and that he
cannot stress it, or he will die. This includes no sexual activity of any kind!
While the synopsis of the novel
suggests this is Terry’s story, Jonty, too, plays a big role. Jonty is a dopey
“slow” guy trying to get through life, happy with his McNuggets, painting
houses, and girlfriend, Jinty. But then, Jinty takes too much cocaine in a pub
bathroom, heads home to their apartment across the street, and promptly dies on
the couch. I agonized over which was the case: Jonty is too stupid to know
she’s dead, or he knows she’s dead and is pretending it’s not the case. There
are many subplots in the novel that are not hard to remember, but keep the
novel from getting one-track and predictable.
No matter
where you turn in a Welsh novel, there are no good people. None. You simply
look at the principles of the characters and find the ones that do less evil.
For instance, Terry has fingers in ever shady part of society, but he doesn’t
have sex with minors, he never pays for sex, he never forces women into sexual
activity, and he (almost) always wears a condom on account of the AIDs epidemic
of the 1980s (a topic Welsh covers in Trainspotting).
Granted, he has four kids (at least four the government has pinned on him) from
going “bareback” a few times, but if you imagine this guy who has sex with
multiple women every day, it’s not so bad, right?! Your brain gets twisted by
Welsh into thinking this makes Terry a good person.
Sometimes readers get a kick in the
shins to remind them that Terry’s a bad guy, like the time he describes what
lengths he would have gone to to abort those fetuses (it’s disgusting). He
“tries” to connect to his kids when their moms yell at Terry. He takes the two
youngest, Guillaume and the Ginger Bastard (he doesn’t even tell us this kid’s
name), to see Up, the Disney film,
and Terry is all complaints (and also fricken’ funny):
“Ya cunt,
ah wis nearly fuckin greetin when the auld bastard wis talkin aboot ehs
deid wife n how they wanted bairns
n couldnae huv them! Ah felt like telling um, shoutin at the screen: take these
two wee fuckers, cause ah’m n wantin thum! Popcorn, hoat dogs, ice cream,
Twixes, the fuckin lot, the greedy wee cunts!”
Did I mention most of the book is written in dialect? No?
I’ll get back to that. Basically, Welsh lets readers believe that some of the
horrible things his characters do are normal--to a surprising extent even--but
then brings us back by making us feel bad occasionally, often in situations
involving children.
Jonty, due
to his slow mentality, is a character you feel bad for the whole way through.
He has standards, too: no drugs, especially “the devil’s poodir”; no doing bad
things; and no making people feel bad. He’s so simple that you want things to
go right for him. After Jinty is clearly (to the reader) dead, Jonty goes to
the McDonald’s a lot. He thinks his McDonald’s is the best, and even tells a
millionaire later on that the McDonalds’ in New York City can’t be nearly as
good as his. As if anyone cares about the quality of a McDonald’s! When the
fast food chain stops selling the “After Eight” McFlurry (a flavor not found in
the U.S.), Jonty is upset. The lady at the counter tells him it was promotional
food, to see if there is interest. Jonty wants to know how he can express his
interest in having more, and the cashier doesn’t know. He wants to fill out a
form or something to get his ice cream back. Meanwhile, I’m rooting for this
simpleton, even though I know that interest is show in the number of people who
bought the product while it was available. But, no Welsh character is a good
person. Here are just a few of Jonty’s other activities:
●
Bombing
●
Necrophilia
●
Incest (he’s not the only one in the book who does it)
●
Grave exhuming (not legally, not the only one)
●
Hiding a dead body
I wrote to Welsh on Twitter, who had something to say about
Jonty:
Irvine Welsh’s language gives the novel nuance and brings people to life. Fans everywhere wet themselves when Welsh sets his books in Edinburgh, possibly because it means we are guaranteed to read some dialect. But the voices aren’t all the same. Jonty, originally from the countryside, has a much more muddled-looking dialect than Terry, who is from the city. Sick Boy, a main character from Trainspotting who is a minor character in A Decent Ride, is from Scotland, but has lived in London for over a decade, so he speaks in a more standard English. American businessman Ronnie, who we’re basically told is a fictitious Donald Trump, speaks in standard English, but that doesn’t mean he’s the “correct” speaker. When he tells people where he is, it’s spelled “Edinboro,” which is exactly how I say it (and now I’m positive I say it wrong and stupidly).
Now, if you struggle in general
with dialects, you’ll definitely feel frustrated with A Decent Ride. I know there are copies of Welsh’s books that come
with a Scottish slang dictionary in the back, but my library copy of A Decent Ride does not. Here’s a test of
whether or not you need a dictionary: “Ah ken how she feels cause studyin must
be awfay hard. Like whin ah wis at the skill. Ah found it hard tae concentrate,
n that’s whin a wis thaire!” Did you get that Jonty was thinking, I know how she feels because studying must
be awfully hard. Like when I was at school. I found it hard to concentrate, and
that’s when I was there!
The last thing, which I’m sure
every reviewer will mention, is Welsh’s treatment of women. In A Decent Ride, you’ll find few women
(despite all the sex) because they are prostitutes, cab riders with no names,
Jinty (a prostitute who almost immediately dies), a couple of horrible mothers
in minor roles, “Suicidal Sal” (a girl who’s going to kill herself but is cured
by Terry’s giant penis), and fat Karen (also cured with penis). What does this
mean? It reassures me that Welsh is a boys’ club sort of writer, making his
immersive, hilarious, revolting novels my dirty secret.
Melanie Page has an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is an adjunct instructor in Indiana. She is the creator of Grab the Lapels, a site that publishes book reviews and interviews of folks who identify as women at grabthelapels.com.
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