Novel
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh · 1993
Synopsis
Edinburgh, in the districts the tourists do not see. Mark Renton and his gang live on heroin, theft and benefits. They get clean, relapse, steal from one another, go to funerals. AIDS arrives in the shared needles. A baby dies in a flat where no one was looking after it. Renton goes to London, comes back, tries a cure, returns to the pub. Each chapter is told by a different member of the group, in his own voice.
Context
The book appeared in 1993 from a small London publisher and at first sold from hand to hand. It is written almost entirely in the speech of Leith transcribed phonetically, which makes it difficult even for English speakers and means it has to be read aloud. This choice is political as much as literary: it places the reader on the side of those who speak, and not on the side of the one who observes them. The AIDS epidemic it describes was real, Edinburgh having had the highest infection rate in Europe in the mid-eighties.
Who it is for
Three hundred pages in a transcribed dialect, translated into French with a slang-heavy approach that is debated. The book is harsh and spares nothing of what it describes.
Prizes and reception
The best-selling Scottish novel of its century, translated into some thirty languages.