Book review: Skagboys by Irvine Welsh

It is now almost 20 years – and millions of copies sold – since the publication of Trainspotting. In that time, Irvine Welsh has been involved in a wide variety of literary and other projects, including Porno, where the core group of Leith boys, Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud, returned from various forms of exile, dix ans plus tard, to make dirty movies and settle old scores. Yet, tempting as it must have been, given the enormous success of his first novel, what Welsh has not done, until now, is to put out a prequel.

There could be many reasons for this: he had other books to write, and probably did not want to get tagged as the author, à la Catch-22, of one monolithic work; besides, after years of cynical abuse by the commercial film industry, the very notion of the prequel is deeply suspect. Still, whether he held back for these or other reasons, the appearance of Skagboys more than makes up for the wait. For this book is, quite simply, a masterpiece. At least as assured and vibrant in its characterisations and language as Trainspotting, Skagboys is even more on the money politically and, for anyone who was working class and Scottish in the 1980s – that sorry decade when Thatcher/Reagan laid the foundations for the great corporate and banking rip-offs that followed – this novel, more than any other, (including its brilliant predecessor), stands as our spiritual and moral history.

Skagboys begins in 1984, at the Battle of Orgreave, where a young Mark Renton has travelled by coach to the picket line with his father, and Welsh brilliantly captures the mixed emotions (and the mixed loyalties) of that fateful day. It is a fast-paced, at times heart-rending, opener that makes its political points on the fly, while still undercutting any romanticisation of “working class folk” (as the battered and bloody pickets retreat from the field where they had been deliberately lured into a vicious police trap, some of the Scots contingent strike up sectarian songs, to the disgust of Renton’s father). This initial scene sets up the political background to the entire novel, one of whose epigraphs is Margaret Thatcher’s notorious remark, “There is no such thing as society”, and the book is shot through with the day-to-day consequences of her disastrous policies, as various characters get laid off from already ill-paid jobs, and the fabric of working class life crumbles almost to nothing.

Meanwhile, in a series of short chapters entitled ‘Notes on an Epidemic’, Welsh catalogues the horrifying impact of Thatcher’s shock doctrine on a generation, beginning with the sharp increase in youth unemployment – “one factor remains incontrovertible: hundreds of thousands of young, working class people in the UK had a lot less money in their pockets and lot more time on their hands” – through the sly suggestion of deliberate policies to encourage heavy drug use in the schemes and estates of Britain, just as America had done in Black and Hispanic ghettoes during the 1960s – “Conspiracy theorists point out that this glut of heroin importation occurred shortly after the widespread rioting of 1981, in many poorer areas of Britain” – to poignant inventories of HIV+ cases in the greater Edinburgh area – “Julie Mathieson, 22, Edinburgh North, drama student, mother of one, intravenous drug user”. Did Thatcher’s government allow cheap drugs to flood into the working class areas of our cities? Did it fail to support clean needle and rehabilitation programmes? Welsh lets us make up our own minds, but his characters provide a hurt, shocked and sometimes moving counterpoint to Thatcher’s antisocial dogma.

Yet while Thatcher’s bloody-minded programme for the eradication of society provides the political anchor to Skagboys, the other epigraph, taken from Herman Melville’s Hawthorne and His Mosses, proves to be its existential grounding.

The quote Welsh uses: “That Calvinistic sense of innate depravity and original sin from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always wholly free”, is only part of a greater whole, in which Melville considers the “blackness, ten times black” that he sees in Hawthorne’s finest work, alongside “the Indian summer sunlight on the hither side of [his] soul”, before concluding that “few men have time, or patience, or palate, for the spiritual truth”.

What Melville is praising in Hawthorne is a moral and existential rigour that was often overlooked in both authors by their contemporaries, but the observation is also highly appropriate in our own venial times, especially when applied to a novelist whose linguistic élan and deft humour have often been made to overshadow his moral power.

What Melville went on to say, in his remarks on Hawthorne, was that “no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance” – and it is this sense of something “somehow like” original sin that makes Welsh both a great writer and the kind of moral gadfly whose uncompromising, non-PC pursuit of spiritual truth reportedly cost him the Booker two decades ago. Now, Rents, Simon, Spud and Francis James Begbie are back, a little younger than when we first met them, but just as opportunistic, sexist, violent and reckless as before.

In short, they are the same boys who, growing up in a world that somebody else owns, throw away the paltry consolation prizes that world offers them, with a mixed defiance and despair that is the only honourable response to Thatcher’s non-society. That refusal takes in work, career, aspirations, the temptations to betray both class and self; it also, in the end, includes romantic love.

When Mark Renton first meets Fiona, a fellow-student from Newcastle, he observes, “maist lassies ah’d been wi back hame were silent, wily and formless, precisely, ah realised, because that’s exactly how ah wis wi them”, and he quite genuinely falls in love with her, because she has “a voice”; later, however, addicted to heroin and realising that Fiona is, essentially, a “straightpeg”, whose plans run to a flat together, “then graduation, nine-to-five jobs and another flat wi a mortgage. Then engagement. Then marriage. A bigger mortgage on a house. Children. Expenditure”, he takes a dark, self-excoriating pleasure in sending her away – and this is one of the many points where the political and the existential merge in Skagboys, as the righteous defiance of a corrupt social order acts as enabler for the emergence of “something like” original sin, which is more, here, than just Scots-Presbyterian self-loathing.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the ending of Skagboys is a dark nightmare of poignant, partly unwitting betrayal and, ultimately, existential collapse. We know, of course, what comes next, but that does not matter in the least. Skagboys is too vivid, insightful and passionate a book to be seen as a mere ‘prequel’ and the characters we follow in its pages are not characters we already know, but their funny, hopeful and sometimes tender precursors, hungry and vivid individuals who are inevitably, and quite casually, sacrificed to the whims of a non-social order whose failures we continue to endure and whose sins Welsh so incisively dramatises.

• Skagboys

by Irvine Welsh

Jonathan Cape, 548pp, £12.99