FICTION:The author of 'Trainspotting' is still struggling to match the power of that massively successful novel - but he's getting closer, writes John Connolly.
WHEN IT WAS sometimes suggested to the late Joseph Heller that he had never written a better novel than Catch-22, he would generally reply that neither had anybody else. Whether that was true or not hardly mattered; it was Heller's way of dealing with the fact that he was one of a small, possibly cursed band of writers whose entire output has been overshadowed by a single book
Irvine Welsh is similarly afflicted, in his case by his 1993 novel Trainspotting. That book came to be associated with a particular stage in British cultural life, the Cool Brittania era of the mid- to late 1990s: Britpop; Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit on the cover of Vanity Fair draped in a Union Jack bedspread; and assorted film, music and literary types all "'avin it large". To be fair, that connection wasn't entirely Welsh's fault. His novel was a daring, funny slice of drug noir, heavy with the argot of Leith, unflinching (and, let's be honest, rather rejoicing) in its depiction of the depths to which its heroin-addicted central characters were prepared to sink for a fix. When it was filmed by Danny Boyle, Welsh's fine work became inseparable from the movie's orange-and-white advertising campaign, its ubiquitous soundtrack of Iggy Pop and Underworld, and an overall cultural legacy that has dated badly.
In the years since, Welsh seems to have struggled somewhat with the legacy of Trainspotting, as any writer would. He attempted a sequel, Porno, and is now rumoured to be working on a prequel, but everything that was admirable about the earlier work was missing in its successor, and all that was worst about Welsh's writing came to the fore. Porno was squalid and genuinely nasty where Trainspotting was hard-edged and visceral, and while there have been interesting books since then, particularly Filth, they've been easier to admire than to like.
Now comes Crime, which takes a relatively minor character from Filth and pushes him to centre-stage. Ray Lennox is a burnt-out Edinburgh copper who travels to Florida with his fiancée after a particularly disturbing case involving a paedophile and his murdered victim. In Miami, Ray, still struggling with his demons, not least those of his own troubled youth, finds himself protecting another little girl, a 10-year-old named Tianna, from an organised band of sexual predators. As Ray himself would put it, pretty soon he's knee-deep in nonces.
This is, as its title announces, a genre experiment, tinged with a little irony, like naming your latest brand of soup simply "SOUP". As Lennox comments of a British gangster movie: "It was nonsense, of course, like most crime in fiction and on television, but it kept the action moving along. It entertained."
Genre conventions offer literary writers both significant advantages (structure, momentum and, frankly, the promise of some hard cash in return for increased sales) and potential pitfalls, the latter usually a result of their failure to take the genre in question seriously. Occasionally, though, their literary credentials liberate such writers from the expectations that readers might have of a more mainstream genre novel, allowing them to create something startlingly different while remaining, for the most part, within the structures of their adopted form.
WELSH DOESN'T MANAGE to do anything particularly interesting or innovative with the form, but Crime is still his most entertaining book in years, if that's the right word for a novel that deals with paedophilia, even if it does so with admirable restraint. There is a sweetness at the core of the book that one might not have immediately associated with Welsh, and the scenes between Lennox and his pre-adolescent charge are both touching and funny, despite Tianna never quite sounding like the child she is supposed to be.
Crime also manages to be gripping, but that is despite, rather than because of, the writer's best efforts, for the pacing is repeatedly undermined by his compulsion to show off his literary credentials. The economy of style required to sustain tension does not come naturally to him, and his reluctance to use one word when there are 10 much longer words available tends to cause the narrative to sag under the additional weight. This problem is compounded by his decision to write all of the flashback chapters in the second person singular, and then to insert them at often inappropriate moments, most irritatingly immediately after Ray sets out to confront the predators at their lair. Finally, his ear for American speech is slightly off - he commits the common error of using the phrase "y'all" when referring to an individual - so that only the Scottish characters really seem to come alive on the page, while some of the American dialogue veers close to parody.
This is far from being a bad novel, but it is a frustrating one. What is done well in the book has been done just as well by genre writers, but they would not make the mistakes that Welsh has made in terms of pacing and overwriting. It is, in its way, the very definition of a literary crime novel: a mystery with too many words.
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John Connolly's latest thriller, The Reapers, was recently published by Hodder & Stoughton
Crime, By Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Cape, 344pp. £12.99