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Summary: Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh: More than the movie.
Review: With the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel set to arrive in American theatres July 19th, and especially given the buzz and controversy the film raised in Britain, expect more than one feature article in newspapers and magazines to take up the obvious and play up the heroin use angle that both the film and book share. See the movie: it's quite good and dares to show people who, despite the detriment clearly shown, enjoy using heroin. See a slice of British life captured effectively in images and music.Then read the book and see all that fantastic stuff the filmmakers were forced to leave out. The film of Trainspotting is the story of Mark Renton. The novel takes on each of the films' characters and allows them, in their own words and dialect, to tell their stories. While many of the stories are told with a thick Scots dialect, readers will soon catch the flow of the language and settle in fine (I'd compare it to reading Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha...). From the ultimate revenge a waitress can show, to the harrowing incident in which an AIDS victim draws justice from the person who passed him the virus, this is truly a novel of the Britain the guide books or casual tourist will never see. It's one of the best books of the ninties to date. And you will want to re-read it with a pen and paper to jot down many of Mark Renton's incredibly on-target observations on life.
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Summary: Masterpiece - through and through!
Review: This is simply one of the best written, laid out, and especially entertaining books I've ever read. The best thing about Trainspotting is that it allows you, the reader, to see everything not only from Renton's eyes (as it was in the movie) but also all the other characters. And it's this that gives you that insight into how all the other characters actually think. So, when all these scottish people are talking to you they don't say, 'I drank down twenty beers and got drunk,' they say, 'Ah drank doon tweinty bevvs and got bevvied.' Other than the incredible writing, it's an overall cool story. The best part, is that it's not confined to one set plot. When hearing 'Trainspotting' you probably just thought about heroin. In truth, the book also has a whole lot about drinking in bars, getting along with 'yer mates' and just living. It's just a story about a bunch of guys, their problems, their needles, their beers and how they manage to get away with most of it. It's just a masterpiece! Also recommended: Survivor by Palahniuk, The Losers' Club by Richard Perez
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Summary: Great Story, Great Writing
Review: Trainspotting could be the best book I've ever read. The characters are fascinating and the story is exciting. Highly recommended.
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Summary: More Whacked Out + Rough Than the Film
Review: You've seen the movie, now read the book (or vice versa). Despite the phantasmagorical nature the film adopts at times, the book is even more whacked out--in a good way-- not to mention rougher in many senses. Although it flows chronologically, the novel is plotless, skipping from vignette to vignette, told by a wide range of people. The main characters from the movie are the main characters in the book, but there are a number of stories narrated by more minor characters as well. This makes the whole thing more impressionistic and loose, and of course, allows space for many more entertaining stories. There are a few scenes that get really nasty, such as a scene where Renton has sex with his just-dead brother's pregnant wife in a bathroom after the funeral. The guys are also a fair bit older than the movie makes them out to be, Begbie is a good deal nastier, etc... It's actually rather amazing they found a movie in all the stories in the book. In any event, don't be intimidated by the dialect and slang, it's great fun once you get into it.
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Summary: brilliant
Review: This is, quite simply, the most brilliant book I've ever read. Here's why.1. The Randomness. There is no plot. This is a book about real people, and real people have no plot in their lives. Especially not these people. And by switching POV, you get to see everything. The movie attempts this with Begbie's throwing-the-glass sequence, but it does no justice. 2. The Phonetic Spelling. Granted, this book is hard to read, incomparably. But this facet holds up the entire book. You can't get to know a person until you know how they talk - more than that, how they SPEAK each and every word. Also - the slang! You will talk better than any cat you ken, likesay? 3. The Personality. You really get to know at least 4 or 5 people in this book, and you like them. Renton the most, then probably Sick Boy, then Begs, then Spud, and the rest of the motley crew. The constantly-switching narrative never says upfront who's speaking, so you learn to identify the gang by speech tags - Hombre for Begbie, Catboy for Spud, the man Sean Connery in general for Sick Boy, and . . . well, let's just say that by the end of the book I could TELL when it was Rents talking. I knew his voice. 4. The Cult Nature. It's everywhere...underground. Lots of online fan bases. It's fun. 5. The Subculture. Face it, how many of us have shot up heroin in a moldy flat in the slums of Edinburgh? With a really intense accent? This book painstakingly shows you a whole new world, literally. And you come out knowing a lot more about drugs. 6. The Message. Trainspotting is a multiple choice question. Here's what happens if you do, here's what happens if you don't. The only judgements in the book come from the characters themselves. Irvine Welsh the author has successfully disappeared - if his skag boys are his "mouthpieces", then he's completely hidden that fact. In conclusion, read it. This book is the face of modern literature and yes indeed, it deserves to sell more copies than the Bible.
Rating: 
Summary: What did he say?
Review: I don't doubt that this is a treffic book with and message. But I couldn't over look the fact that I can't understand what the author is saying. Oppose to telling you the character has a thick scotish accent but writes with an accent. REad a few excepts, you can't understand what the characters are saying. I know I couldn't. I thought at first thta I could get use to it, but by the 50th page I only understood about 1% of what I read. I'm american and we have a more nasal accent. I simply don't understand this book.
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Summary: Ah the corruption
Review: I'm not sure what made me want to read this book in the first place, but I'm glad I did. The scottish slang and phonetically spelled dialogue made the characters really come alive. For a previously uncorrupted person I found this book delightfully enlightening. This book is not just for those who can relate to the lives of the characters! I am as far from Edinburg as possible, literally and figuratively, but I found this book extremely entertaining, funny and totally messed up. Definately worth a read, and many more.
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Summary: who needs reasons
Review: It's a hard book to understand. The English is really bad, you don't know who's saying what, half of it is cursing and is basically a bunch of non related stories. So why is it so good? The dialogues. Renton is the typical smart guy disenchanted with life. We've all know him even if he didn't have this sincere and truthful junk habit. His rants are the best and most of them aren't even in the movie. By the way, the book has nothing to do with the movie. There are hundreds of characters that don't make it to the big screen (Rents brother, Second Prize, etc, etc.) Also, Tommy isn't such a clean guy in the book and Dianne is just a small character. In the end the message is the same: people do drugs because it's the only good time they have even if it destroys them. (...)
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Summary: Scotland Takes Drugs In Psychic Defense.
Review: Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, first published in Great Britain in 1993, is not only intelligent, but also vastly entertaining--a hard combination to find these days in the waste land that constitutes our popular culture. At three hundred and forty-four pages, I finished this book in less than two days. I wanted to read it all the time, and, even though there was never anything really "happening," it managed to keep me interested until the very end--I even felt a little sad when it was all over. Trainspotting revolves around a group of heroin addicts living in the tenements of a city in Scotland. Their lives are completely consumed with the heroin--it is all they can think about, dream about or talk about--everything else in the world, honestly, is second-rate to their obsession. The characters of Trainspotting open confess to viewing life as consisting of nothing more than a "ride" and a "score"--and not even in that order. Scoffing at [but fearful of] the capitalistic mindsets and assured masculinity they are expected to soon adapt--getting married, keeping a steady job, having children, being responsible, etc.--the characters drown themselves in the drugs in attempts to forget about everything: "Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defense'; only he changes 'America' for 'Scatlin', and defines us mair accurately in a single sentence than all the others have ever done..." The lot of them live in filthy tenements with little money and, when they run out of cash, sometimes they sit in train stations and pretend to be war veterans, collecting money from the passengers coming and going. In the Irish slang-to-English glossary provided at the end of the novel, a definition of "trainspotting" is included--to be a "trainspotter" is to be one obsessed with the arrival and departure of trains. Divorcing themselves from society and the capitalistic world--a world with no meaning and little substance, they hold--the stars of the novel mock their country's citizens and government--creating in themselves a subculture of nihilists who, unfortunately, have more in common with the consumer culture--which they scorn--and who suffer more from commodity fetishism than they might like to think: "Ah've goat every album Bowie ever made...Tons ay f**kin bootlegs n aw. Ah dinnae gie a f**k aboot him or his music. Ah only care aboot Mike Forrester [a drug dealer], an ugly talentless c*nt whae has made no albums." Welsh is a very good writer--as it clichéd as it may sound [even through his meager explanations], the reader feels as if they, too, need to seek solace or refuge in the drugs to escape far greater and more inexplicable problems. Welsh uses the absolute minimum linguistically, but, somehow, can get his points across better than most very descriptive and expressive writers. The novel is written in a heavy, urban, Scottish vernacular, and though you might think that this would distract from the narrative after four or five pages the dialect goes without notice and you begin to like it, even. In closing, Trainspotting is one of my favorite novels--one of the best books I've ever read. On a lighter note, although I think Trainspotting was very good, I don't entirely agree with the review by Rebel, Inc. in huge typeface on the back of the novel, which reads, "The greatest book written by man or woman...deserves to sell more copies than the Bible."
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Summary: Welsh's masterpiece of contemporary British literature
Review: Finally. I no longer have to worry about buying a new paperback copy of this book every three months or so; this has always been a book that I've frequently enjoyed going back to multiple times after finishing...and now we've finally got a version that is built to last. Most likely you've already seen the movie before deciding whether or not to read the book. Be forewarned, however; John Hodge's screenplay is a masterful job of bringing continuity to a series of stories that are in fact only loosely related. The book "Trainspotting" is comprised of a series of short stories previously published independently in various periodicals over a stretch of time...the stories deal with the same core of characters, but that is really all that ties them together. You will probably find that Danny Boyle's job of directing the "Trainspotting" movie looks even more impressive after reading even a quarter of the book. The book does focus on a set of wrong-side-of-the-track friends involved with drugs, alcohol, petty crime, and anything else they can find to take their minds off their completely unfulfilling lives. An added challenge (and a fair extent of the book's charm) is that the book's dialogue and first-person narrative are written in the author's native Edinburgh dialect, making the book perhaps more accessible to Robert Burns scholars than the average non-Scots English speaker. However, there is a glossary in the back of the book that is rather helpful...and my personal recommendation is to read the book out loud whenever possible (I don't know why, but whenever I did this, the written words made more sense when heard as an audible accent). If you liked the movie at all, the book is for you. As with most books that are adapted to the screen, you'll find a level of depth in the book that the film simply could not attain due to time and budgetary constraints; Spud onscreen is presented as a cross between Spud and "Second Prize" in the book, and there are book characters who aren't even introduced in the film (yet who also bring added depth to a world that is portrayed as rather one-dimensional in the film). Choose life, choose a job, choose a career..but most importantly, choose this book. It will add a whole 'nother level of appreciation to the "Trainspotting" experience.
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