This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed.(May 2019) |
Author | Irvine Welsh |
---|---|
Publisher | Secker & Warburg |
Publication date | 1993 |
Publication place | Scotland |
Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
Pages | 344 |
ISBN | 0-7493-9606-7 |
OCLC | 34832527 |
823/.914 20 | |
LC Class | PR6073.E47 T73 1994 |
Followed by | Porno Marabou Stork Nightmares |
Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first published in 1993. It takes the form of a collection of short stories, written in either Scots, Scottish English or British English, revolving around various residents of Leith, Edinburgh, who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are effectively addictions. The novel is set in the late 1980s [1] and has been described by The Sunday Times as "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent". [2] The title is an ironic reference to the characters’ frequenting of the disused Leith Central railway station.
The novel has since achieved a cult status and served as the basis for the film Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle. [3] Two sequels, Porno , and Dead Men's Trousers were published in 2002 and 2018 respectively. A prequel, Skagboys , was published in 2012. [4]
The novel is split into seven sections. The first six sections contain multiple chapters from various perspectives; the final section contains one chapter. The novel's plot is nonlinear.
Most chapters are narrated in first-person, stream-of-consciousness style in some combination of Scots and Standard English. Some chapters are written from a third-person omniscient stance to convey the actions and thoughts of several characters in a scene.
While watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme video, Mark and Simon (a.k.a. Sick Boy) decide to go buy heroin from Johnny Swan (also called "Mother Superior") since they are both feeling symptoms of withdrawal. They cook up with Raymie and Alison. After being informed that he should go and see Kelly, who has just had an abortion, Renton goes home to finish his video instead.
Mark tries to come off heroin by acquiring a bare room and all the things he will require when coming down (canned soup, headache medicine, and pails for vomit). When withdrawal begins to set in, however, he resolves to get another hit to ease the decline. Unable to find any heroin, he acquires opium suppositories which, after a bout of diarrhoea, he must recover from a bookie's lavatory. Simon attempts to pick up girls while being annoyed by Mark, who wants to watch videos. Sick Boy eventually loses Renton.
An infant, Dawn, later dies. Her mother Lesley is a heroin addict and acquaintance of the group. The cause of death is unclear; characters speculate that it may have been a cot death or caused by neglect. The Skag Boys are unsure of how to respond. Sick Boy becomes more emotional and distressed than the others and eventually breaks down, stating he is kicking heroin for good. Simon does not explicitly state that he was the child's father. Mark wants to comfort his friend, but is unsure how and cooks a shot for himself to deal with the situation. A sobbing Lesley asks him to also cook her up a hit, which Mark does but makes sure he injects himself before her.
After an argument with his girlfriend Carol, Second Prize meets Tommy in a pub, and Tommy confronts a man who is punching his girlfriend. They are shocked to find the woman supports her abusive boyfriend instead of her would-be liberators by digging her nails into Tommy's face, inciting a brawl. While the couple slips out unnoticed, Tommy and Second Prize find themselves taking the blame for the whole affair from the pub locals.
Spud and Renton, who have been assigned interviews as part of their job-seeking benefits, deliberately fail to get jobs, while attempting to obscure that it is deliberate.
Renton, Begbie and their girlfriends meet up for a drink before going to a party, but it ends when Begbie throws a glass off a balcony, hitting someone and splitting open their head, setting off a pub brawl.
Tommy visits Renton's flat (shortly after Renton relapsed) after being dumped by his girlfriend. Renton reluctantly gives him heroin, setting off Tommy's decline into addiction, HIV/AIDS, and later, death.
Later, Renton's brother Billy and his friends Lenny, Naz Peasbo, and Jackie are waiting for their friend Granty to arrive for a game of cards, as he is holding the money pot. They later find out that Granty is dead and his girlfriend disappeared with the money, prompting them to beat Jackie, whom they knew to have been sleeping with her.
Begbie and Lexo pull a crime, so Begbie decides to lie low in London with Renton.
Spud kicks heroin, and visits his grandmother, where his mixed-race uncle Dode is staying. Dode has had many troubles with racism growing up. One day, he and Spud went to a pub and were assaulted by skinheads. This abuse led to a fight, which left Dode hospitalised, where Spud visits him.
Renton kicks heroin and is restless. He picks up a girl at a nightclub, Dianne, unaware that she is only fourteen. He is later forced to lie to her parents at breakfast the following morning. Despite his guilt and discomfort, he sleeps with Dianne again when she appears at his flat. Spud, Renton and Sick Boy take ecstasy and stroll to the Meadows where Sick Boy and Renton try to kill a squirrel but stop after Spud becomes upset, remembering Dawn. Mark is ashamed and Spud forgives him.
Renton and Spud are in court for stealing books. Renton gets a suspended sentence owing to his attempts at rehabilitation, while Spud is sentenced to ten months in prison. Renton relapses and has to suffer heroin withdrawal at his parents' house, where he experiences hallucinations of Dawn, the television programme he is watching, and the lecture provided by his father. He is later visited by Sick Boy and goes out to a pub with his parents, whose enthusiasm acts as a veneer for their authoritative treatment.
Renton's brother Billy dies in Northern Ireland with the British Army. Renton attends the funeral; there, he almost starts a fight with some of his father's Unionist relatives, and ends up having sex with Billy's pregnant girlfriend in the toilet.
Renton is stranded in London with no place to sleep. He tries to fall asleep in an all-night porno theatre, where he meets Gi, an old homosexual who lets him stay at his flat. Later, Renton, Spud, Begbie, Gav, Alison and others venture out for another drink and something to eat.
Spud, Begbie, and a teenager engage in a robbery. Spud later comments on Begbie's paranoia and how the teenager is likely to get ripped off by the pair. Gav tells Renton the story of how Matty died of toxoplasmosis after attempting to rekindle his relationship with his ex using a kitten.
The group attends Matty's funeral. Later, Renton returns to Leith for Christmas and meets Begbie, who beats up an innocent man after having seen his alcoholic father in the disused Leith Central railway station. He visits a former drug dealer, Johnny Swan, who has had his leg amputated as a result of heroin use, and he visits Tommy, who is dying of AIDS.
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Second Prize go to London to engage in a heroin deal and see a Pogues gig. Renton steals the cash and goes to Amsterdam. Renton thinks that he will send Spud his cut, as he is the only 'innocent' party.
Soon after publication, the book was adapted for the stage by Harry Gibson. The stage version inspired the subsequent film, and regularly toured the UK in the mid-1990s. This adaptation starred Ewen Bremner and later Tam Dean Burn as Renton.
The US stage premier occurred in San Francisco, California in 1996. It was produced and shown in the upstairs room (a tiny 50-seat theatre) at the Edinburgh Castle Pub, the small but legendary literary and arts bar. [5] The play was produced and directed by Alan Black, the head of the Scottish Cultural and Arts Foundation, which was an organization that held Scottish-connected events in San Francisco in the 90s. [6] The play was a huge success. It was twice extended and hundreds of hopeful viewers had to be turned away because of a lack of space in the tiny theater above the pub. [7]
The Los Angeles production of Trainspotting won the 2002 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Direction, [8] and the 2002 LA Weekly Theater Award for Direction, [9] for director Roger Mathey.
In 2013 In Your Face Theatre and Seabright Productions staged a new immersive production of Gibson's adaptation rebranded as Trainspotting Live. Directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Greg Esplin, this production has gone on to sell out at three Edinburgh Festival Fringes and played to critical acclaim in London, on several UK tours and in New York City.
The film was directed by Danny Boyle, with an adapted screenplay written by John Hodge. It starred Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner. Welsh made a cameo appearance as the drug dealer Mikey Forrester. The film was ranked 10th by the British Film Institute (BFI) in its list of Top 100 British films of all time. [10] It also brought Welsh's book to an international cinema audience and added to the phenomenal popularity of the novel. [11] In 2021, the novel was further adapted into a musical. [12]
Trainspotting was longlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize (and was apparently rejected for the shortlist after "offending the sensibilities of two judges" [13] ).
Welsh claimed that the book had sold over one million copies in the UK by 2015, and been translated into thirty languages. [14]
Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.
Trainspotting is a 1996 British black comedy-drama film directed by Danny Boyle, and starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle and Kelly Macdonald in her film debut. Based on the 1993 novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh, the film was released in the United Kingdom on 23 February 1996.
Porno is a novel published in 2002 by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, the sequel to Trainspotting. The book describes the characters of Trainspotting ten years after the events of the earlier book, as their paths cross again, this time with the pornography business as the backdrop rather than heroin use. A number of characters from Glue make an appearance as well.
Marabou Stork Nightmares is an experimental novel by Irvine Welsh, and his second novel, published in the UK in 1995.
Filth is a 1998 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It was adapted into a 2013 film of the same name, directed by Jon S. Baird with James McAvoy in the lead role. A sequel, Crime, was published in 2008.
Ewen Bremner is a Scottish actor. His roles have included Julien in Julien Donkey-Boy and Daniel "Spud" Murphy in Trainspotting and its 2017 sequel T2 Trainspotting.
Junk, known as Smack in the US, is a realistic novel for young adults, written by British author Melvin Burgess and published in 1996 by Andersen in the UK. Set on the streets of Bristol, England, it features two runaway teenagers who join a group of squatters, where they fall into heroin addiction and embrace anarchism. Both critically and commercially, it is the best received of Burgess' novels. Yet it was unusually controversial at first, criticised negatively for its 'how-to' aspect, or its dark realism, or its moral relativism.
The Acid House is a 1998 Scottish film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's short story collection The Acid House directed by Paul McGuigan. Welsh himself wrote the screenplay and appears as a minor character in the film. All three sections are independent, but are linked by the setting of Edinburgh and the reappearance of incidental characters, in particular Maurice Roëves, who appears variously as an inebriated wedding guest, a figure in a dream, and a pub patron. All three of his parts symbolise a human manifestation of God.
Cables Wynd House, better known as the Leith Banana Flats or the Banana Block because of its curved shape, is a nine-storey local authority housing block in Leith, Edinburgh. The building, in fact, has ten storeys. The ground floor is called Cables Wynd and the nine floors above constitute Cables Wynd House. This often leads to confusion in postal and other services.
Mark Renton is a fictional character who appears as the protagonist in the novels Trainspotting (1993) and Porno (2002) written by Irvine Welsh. He also appears in the 1996 film adaptation of Trainspotting and its sequel T2 Trainspotting (2017), in both of which he is portrayed by Ewan McGregor.
Leith Central Railway Station was a railway station in Leith, Scotland. It formed the terminus of a North British Railway branch line from Edinburgh Waverley. The station was built on a large scale, and it included a trainshed over the platforms.
Scott Nisbet is a Scottish former football player, who is best known for his time with Rangers.
Skagboys is a 2012 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is a prequel to his 1993 novel Trainspotting, and its 2002 sequel Porno. It follows the earlier lives of characters Renton and Sick Boy as they first descend into heroin addiction.
Reheated Cabbage is a collection of short stories by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It was released in the United Kingdom in July 2009.
The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins is the ninth novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, published in May 2014.
T2 Trainspotting is a 2017 British black comedy drama film, directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge. Set in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, it is based on characters created by Irvine Welsh in his 1993 novel Trainspotting and its 2002 follow-up Porno. A sequel to Boyle's 1996 film Trainspotting, T2 stars the original ensemble cast, including leads Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, and Robert Carlyle, with Shirley Henderson, James Cosmo, and Kelly Macdonald. The film features a new character, Veronika, played by Anjela Nedyalkova, and includes clips, music, and archive sound from the first film.
The Blade Artist is a 2016 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. The story follows on from Welsh's previous novels, Trainspotting and Porno, catching up with Begbie's past and present.
The Sir George Robey was a mid-19th century public house and later a music venue on Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, North London, England. It was named in honour of the music hall performer Sir George Robey (1869–1954) in 1968.
Ruaraidh Murray is a Scottish actor, writer, and comedian.
Dead Men's Trousers is a 2018 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is a sequel to his earlier books Trainspotting, Porno and Skagboys. Set in 2015, it follows the characters Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie as they meet up again as middle-aged men.