Resolution by Irvine Welsh review: 'One of Welsh’s most enigmatic and intriguing characters'

The booze and cocaine guzzling ex-Edinburgh police detective Ray Lennox comes face-to-face with a dark chapter from his past in Irvine Welsh’s new novel, writes Malcolm Jack

A reminder of how much Irvine Welsh’s most famous work continues to inhabit the Scottish mind came this summer, when our football team was yet again unceremoniously dumped out of a major tournament and another characteristic ritual of self-flagellation began. Within minutes of the final whistle, the “it’s shite being Scottish!” meme from Trainspotting was trending on social media – a black-humoured coping mechanism broken out by Scots in moments of national psychic emergency like a fire axe from behind glass.

The Leith-born author’s star power and bestseller status has hardly waned these last three decades since publication of his million-selling 1993 debut novel. Even if Welsh’s subsequent books and short stories – all rooted in the same squalid world of drugs, crime and lowlife drudgery he came up among – have proven uneven in quality.

Welsh’s recent full pivot to crime-writing, the cash cow of contemporary fiction, has raised a few eyebrows, and got off to a mixed start in 2022 with The Long Knives. The belated follow-up to his 2008 novel Crime felt untidy and hastily written, with a TV deal already in the works. Both books have now been adapted to a functional police drama starring Dougray Scott, the second run of which aired on ITVX last year. This third novel in the series will surely follow suit.

Irvine Welsh PIC: Lisa Ferguson / The Scotsman

Resolution continues the industrially gritty travails of Ray Lennox, introduced as an inauspicious supporting character in the 1998 novel Filth. The booze and cocaine guzzling ex-Edinburgh police detective with a very personal side-hustle in hunting down murderous paedophiles is slowly developing into one of Welsh’s most enigmatic, enduring and intriguing characters.

Lennox has quit the force and moved to the English south coast to work in private security, while trying to get a grip on his demons through therapy. He’s fit, well off, relatively sober and in the fledgling stages of a promising relationship. But a chance encounter pushes him face-to-face with the darkest chapter of his childhood, and all hell quickly breaks loose.

There’s a focus to Welsh’s narrative and writing that’s been lacking in other recent work, as he largely resists temptation to go off on unnecessary tangents and lean into trademark provocative tropes. As Lennox seeks answers and, in turn, vengeance, while trying to ward off full collapse into the abyss of his addictions, pieces of the puzzle of a tragic life start snapping together, and he becomes somebody we can start rooting for rather than pitying or, at his lowest ebbs, despising.

Only so much is resolved by the end of Resolution, and that’s welcome. One wonders if Welsh might only now be truly getting started with Lennox.

Resolution, by Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Cape, £20