Comparing...

the book to the movie, part 3:
Trainspotting.

I finally read this book, and it's fantastic. It made me appreciate the movie even more. It's not really a novel, but a collection of related stories, mostly told in the first person and entirely in a crazed Scottish hipster slang dialect; e.g. "Ah didnae ken what the wee radge cunt was on aboot, likesay," etc. If anything, it's even filthier and more perverse than the movie, which is really saying something considering that the most notorious image in the film is of Renton sliding headfirst into, then emerging from, (The Filthiest) Toilet (In Scotland). But the way the movie trims the fat and ties the stories together in a cohesive whole, with an post-modern (anti-)moral, is sheer genius, and packs an emotional punch mostly absent from the book, for all its other virtues.

So now I'm totally into this Irvine Welsh gadge and I'm reading Porno, which is sort of the sequel to Trainspotting, set ten years further on. Word on the 'net is that this will likewise be made into a film by the same team that made Trainspotting. If so, the chapter "Tension in the Heid," wherein Begbie confronts a blinged-up hip hop kid breaking into his new girlfriend's apartment, is an almost foolproof classic scene waiting to happen. I haven't yet decided whether Welsh is a major lit'rary-type figure or just a talented s(c)h(l)ockmeister, but I'm digging the hell out of these books.