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It’s possible to
argue that the lifestyle depicted in Irvine Welsh’s breakout novel Trainspotting was so dead-end
that a sequel could only prove depressing and, ultimately, useless. Who wants to read
about a bunch of hapless, scamming junkies, ten years after they’ve (all but one)
blown their big chance? To advance such an argument is to discount the resilience and
determination of the hardcore scammer, something Welsh understands. So in Porno, he’s taken the reader back to
Edinburgh, and re-connected all the Trainspotting characters, added a few side
players, and put together one of the most absorbing pieces of semi-mainstream fiction
around.
Porno is primarily
narrated by Simon “Sick Boy” Reynolds, who’s fueled by a mixture of
resentment towards Mark Renton, the guy who ripped him and everyone else off at the end of
Trainspotting, and the insatiable desire to make
money, preferably by scamming someone else. Reynolds seems to firmly believe that a
score’s not a score unless someone else has been taken. It’s not enough for him
to win; others, especially those who’ve come to trust him, must lose. He’s a
sociopath.
Two other characters from the
first book, Begbie and Spud, have problems of their own. Begbie’s newly released from
prison and hot on Renton’s trail in search of bloody revenge. Spud’s still a
junkie, but he’s developed ambition from somewhere and is attempting to write a
history of lower-class Leith, as much to prove to his estranged girlfriend that he’s
a worthwhile human being as to see his name in print. Renton, for his part, is living in
Amsterdam, unhappy with his girlfriend but a successful club-owner.
Porno gets its title from Reynolds’ latest
scam: he’s bought a pub and—while convincing the local authorities that
he’s going to clean it up and attempt, almost single-handedly, a gentrification of
Leith’s downtown—is filming porn videos in the back room, starring a cast of
local amateurs and a college student, Nikki Fuller-Smith, who (for the moment) is in love,
or something like it, with him. Of course, she’s got her own reasons for getting in
front of the camera. In Irvine Welsh’s world, everybody’s got the motivation
they display to others as well as the creeping, often vaguely criminal ambitions that hide
in their dark hearts.
Welsh, as before, allows each of
the major players to narrate chapters in turn. Only Spud and Begbie continue to rattle on
in the phonetic, sometimes nearly incomprehensible Scottish slang that marked the first
novel. Two things are helpful with these chapters: reading them aloud (as long as no one
else is in the house) and using Reynolds’ and Renton’s chapters as Rosetta
stones of a sort, as they tend to lapse into slang only at moments of high agitation.
Porno is an exciting book. It moves quickly, and
the threat of violence that hovers over so much of its plot—Renton has come back to
Leith to invest in Reynolds’ porn film, but can he get in and out of town without
Begbie catching him?—makes it more of a straightforward thriller than the first book,
which tended to feel like a bunch of stoners sitting around telling stories. Welsh’s
point seems to be that while it is possible to move forward, it doesn’t take much at
all to haul people back to where they came from. And indeed, by the time the book ends,
everyone is, to one extent or another, back where they started. But it’s been a hell
of a ride in the meantime.
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