Jamie Dobson

I just got back from a short run. It was hard. Please check this out for the details of last week.

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I am thoroughly enjoying Welsh’s Trainspotting. He wrote it, I am led to believe, here in Amsterdam. Distance lends enhancement, so sang Jonathan Fucking Pryce, in Evita, the dos cunt. The book is (obviously) richer than the film, which I loved at 20 but was sort of done with once I started to see it for what it was: snapshots for the ADHD generation. Too discontinuous. The thing about the book, again, obviously, is that the characters are richer, more complex, and there’s more of them. Tommy, Tam, for example, is not as much as a soft twat as the film makes him out, and he’s not clean, either, just not a smack head.

If Welsh needed distance to think about Edinburgh, I understand. In Hull, it was just what it was, away from Hull, the geographical and temporal distance gnawed at me, my focus cleared, and my outrage – and not the outrage that the working classes need to sustain themselves, either, but proper outrage – supernovaed, consumed me, then collapsed into a white dwarf that now sits in my gut. It’s the channelling of the white dwarf that enables Ryu and Ken to do Hadukens and that, maybe, helped Welsh with the novel. I just finished reading a section of the book where Begbie has battered some bloke on Rose Street and Rents’ date suggested that Begbie is unhinged:

Ah found masel lyin tae her, tae justify Begbie’s behaviour. Fuckin horrible. Ah jist couldnae handle her outrage, n the hassle thit went wi it. It wis easy tae lie, as we all did wi Begbie in our circle. A whole Begbie mythology hud been created by oor lies tae each other n oorsels. Like us, Begbie believed that bullshit. We played a big part in making him what he was.

Welsh, or Renton I should say, no – ahem – writer is ever their characters, goes onto give a long and insightful list of realities and their myths. Earlier in the day, I opened up a book called Lords of Creation, by Margaret Cook, which says on page 1,

Truth is not a difficult concept, nor even complicated, but it is often too painful to bear. This is because all living things learn very early the necessity for illusion and deception in order to survive, and humans are no different. The human problem, the distinction between us and other animals, is not a soul, but a massive brain. With this organ we have a capacity for understanding that far outstrips our power of handling it emotionally.

Welsh shows his readers what Cook tells them.

To me, there is nothing more interesting than the search for truth, which is often easy to find – Begbie: cunt – and how we handle or mishandle it. Of course, we digest truths about others easier than we do about ourselves.