"Ecstasy" by Irvine Welsh

This is a collection of three short novels. In 1996 is went straight to number one in the bestseller lists, presumably on the strength of the author's first book Trainspotting.

Lorraine Goes to Liverpool muddles up the story of a romantic novelist who has a stroke and is cared for by nurse Lorraine in a hospital where dead bodies are routinely interfered with by a knighted TV star from Somerset (a thinly veiled portrait of Jimmy Saville) and the historical romance the novelist is writing. The novelist discovers her husband is spending all his money on pornography and prostitutes; at this her own writing veers off into historical pornographic fiction. 

It's weird.

Moments:

• "A world free from the reality of eight-hour backshifts on geriatric wards, looking after decaying, incontinent people who had degenerated into sagging, wheezing, brittle, twisted parodies of themselves as they prepared to die." (Ch 2)
• "He detested writers; they were invariably tedious, self-righteous, fucked-up bores. The ones who had artistic pretensions were by far the most unbearable." (Ch 15)

Fortune's Always Hiding is much more typical of Welsh's style; it is much better. Written in a number of voices, including a wonderfully vernacular West Ham football hooligan and house breaker, it interweaves the stories of said football hooligan with Samantha, a female victim of Tenazadrine (Welsh's pseudonym for thalidomide) and other people, some of whom are the drug company bosses on whom Samantha has vowed revenge. 

Rge delight of Welsh's prose is how he hits the inner monologue of his characters: "My head's fucking dizzy as my much just pumps and pumps into the melon. A few imaginary seconds in Opal's crapbox does it for me. God blass ya, my gel." (A Slag's Habit)

The Undefeated tracks Lloyd, a devotee of the club scene, getting by on selling dodgy drugs, doing drugs, and dancing, and Heather, the bored wife of boring young executive High, who discovers there is more to life when she takes ecstasy on a night out. Their stories alternate and, eventually, intersect.

It is written in Edinburgh vernacular: "Aw ah wanted tae dae was tae blaw ma muck and git the fuck oot ay thair." (2.22)

The description of Lloyd on a trip is a masterclass in writing. It goes on for pages, mixing articulate and astute observations with repetitive and meaningless drivel. A very short extract: “Just enjoy the reverb of the red and white and watch the brown carpet in the room change into polished, speckled-marble floor tiles and extend luxuriously into infinity and doing this, just indulging the whim ah see myself moving it away from Amanda and Claire on the couch ... and ah drop the strawberry and the room assume something approximating is normal dimensions and they look round at me and Stevo puckers his lips which look like huge strawberries and Clair laughs even more loudly causing me to emit gasping, fractured, machine-gun laughter ...” (1.10)

I particularly enjoyed the originality and appropriateness of some of the similes:

• “Then it's ma main man on the decks, and he's on the form tonight, just pulling away at our collective psychic sex organs as they lay splayed out before us and ah get a big rosy smile off this goddess in a Lycra top, who, with her tanned skin and veneer of sweat, looks as enticing as a bottle of Becks from the cold shelf on a hot, hot muggy day.” (Prologue) 
• “Ah’m just lying their watching her orgasm like ah was watching her score for Hibs.” (Prologue)
• "I'm looking at Bill's flies. I decide that opening them and looking for his prick would be like opening a knotted binliner and rummaging through its contents: that fetid stench in your face as you grasped the limp, rotting banana." (2.17)

There are moments of philosophy:

• “Nae point in huvin yir cake if ye cannae fuckin well scran it back, eh, no?” (Prologue)

There are some devastating character critiques: 

• “Davie not so much played to the strength of his big blue eyes, as put all his eggs into the one seductive bucket.” (1.3)
• “She was a curator of dead souls.” (1.6)
• “Bobby had a split personality. One side of him was pure evil, the other completely cuntish.” (1.6)
• “I don't want a baby. Hugh’s ready. He's got the wife, the job, the house, the car. There's something missing. He thinks it's a baby. He doesn't have a great deal of imagination.” (1.9)

Other great moments:

• “The cunt had claimed to have seen God after two Supermarios and two snowballs at the outdoor Rezurrection.” (1.4)
• "Her face was drained of colour, but her black hair looked well washed, had a kind of sheen to it. Her face, though, looked rough, scabby and dehydrated and its contrast with the health of her hair made her look like an old hag wearing a wig." (2.16)
• "Since ah met her last week ah've started to shower every day and brush my teeth twice a day. Ah've also taken to wearing fresh pants and socks on a daily basis which is a killer at the laundrette. Usually one pair ay Y's lasted during the week and the other pair did for the clubbing. Most crucially, ah've been scrubbing under the helmet meticulously." (2.22)

The power of the third stories makes up for the indifference of the first.

August 2020; 276 pages