288 pages, Vintage
Review by Pat Black
You all know Trainspotting, the novel
that launched a thousand careers. This is Irvine Welsh's follow-up, once again set
in a Leith without sunshine… and somewhere else.
Marabou Stork Nightmares is Welsh’s
first proper novel – Trainspotting and The Acid House being short story
collections. It tells the story of Roy Strang, who shares many of the same interests
as Trainspotting’s Renton - a resident of Edinburgh's housing schemes, a fan of
Hibernian FC, and a highly intelligent working class man.
Roy spends most of this novel in a
coma, having come to some unspecified grief. His confused and sometimes unreliable
thoughts take us from recollections of his childhood, an examination of his
life and where it went wrong, and then the weird element… his hallucinations,
where he is hunting the feared giant Marabou Stork in South Africa, helped by
the enigmatic Sandy Jamieson.
It is a caustic view of working class
life in modern Scotland. Although Welsh's trademark black humour is present
throughout, his treatment of family relationships and social groups is near-psychotic.
Roy Strang's mother is well-meaning but thick, while his father is ignorant, uneducated
and bombastic; one brother is a womaniser, the other gay and flamboyant with
it, while the younger sister has a vast sexual appetite. Roy's chief reaction
to them all is disgust. Even the family dog is a despised creature.
He's not without prospects, and indeed
his father refers to him as "university material". But that
description grates. There's something of a betrayal of his roots in going to
university, you feel, an idea that he's going somewhere he doesn't quite
belong. Perhaps there's an element of "choosing life" to that.
Instead, Roy chooses violence,
dominance, to plunge headlong into the jungle of macho pecking orders.
Stylistically the book is interesting.
Welsh, a big fan of messing around with typefaces in his early days, really indulges
himself with the hallucination scenes. Sometimes it approaches concrete poetry,
at others it’s wanky guff. As standard, the Edinburgh demotic is employed
throughout. Neither should be seen as a hindrance to the reading experience, as
Welsh at least takes the trouble to be original, and the speech patterns fall
into a rhythm if you take the time to engage with them.
The tensions of life in a housing
scheme were adroitly handled. There are stresses and anxieties even to simple
matters like going to the shops, which some people will simply have no concept
of. One section, where Strang is sent by his father to the chippie for a
late-night snack, to run the gauntlet of every drunk in the vicinity who feels
similarly peckish, sparked chilling memories for me.
After drifting into a job with the
insurance company Scottish Spinsters - one of several clunking references in
the book - Roy becomes a football hooligan, a "top boy" with the
feared Capital City Service.
This is where I ran into some problems
I have with Welsh's writing. Welsh seems to assume that being a football casual
was a "way of life" for young men in the 1980s, cut out of the
reckoning by Thatcherism. Looking for identity, without work or social
structures to hold them in place. Later, Strang drifts into rave culture,
finding happiness and belonging in the clubs thanks to ecstasy.
This notion has become
quasi-mythological; the football violence-as-escape notion has been endlessly
parroted, repeated almost verbatim on the internet and elsewhere. To read this,
you would think every young white male in Scotland was getting himself into
organised violence over football matches. While I don’t deny that there was –
and is – hooliganism, I simply don’t believe it was anything like as widespread
as it is portrayed to have been. It’s sub-cultural, much like dropping out and
injecting heroin. It wasn’t so much a political reaction to Thatcherism as much
as nihilism, drink, dominance.
This cultural bleed seems childishly
egocentric. Certainly these things were part of the social fabric, but not in
the way Welsh seems to think they were. A bit like a fondness for Iggy Pop, Welsh’s
conceits have been propagated as mainstream concepts, but they’re not really
reflective of Scottish society as a whole. They’re just reflective of the
interests of Irvine Welsh.
Iggy Pop, in particular, has lots to
thank Irvine Welsh for. The guy was reduced to molesting stuffed toys on
Saturday morning kids’ TV in the UK in the mid-80s for a bit of attention; now
you can see him doing his stuff at festivals (not to mention selling car
insurance).
Welsh took heroin as a young man, but
so far as I'm aware he's never been a football casual. There's one section
where Roy goes into the home crowd at Celtic Park with a knuckle-duster and
breaks one fan's jaw, which seems like pure wish fulfilment to me. Welsh is
never slow to have a go at the “soapdodgers” on the west coast; I presume punching
Glaswegian football fans is acceptable recompense for watching your team getting
taken apart on a regular basis. What can I tell you? It must be frustrating
being a Hibbee.
But that’s the Celtic fan in me
talking. Appropriately, then, what I found to be more on-the-money is the
reflection of a dark part of Scottish culture based on violence, male
dominance, pride, bullying and control. This reaches its apotheosis in The
Marabou Stork Nightmares with the ultimate expression of men taking what they
want.
The book is laced with sexual violence,
perversion and guilt. First of all, Roy is molested by an uncle during a
disastrous move by the Strangs to start a new life in South Africa; then, there
is a gang rape.
When it comes to sex, death and
perversion, Welsh must be viewed as a descendant of William Burroughs -
anything goes, here. But in the rape scene, I have to say that I wondered about
Welsh's motivation.
Even when they're portrayed as strong
and confident, women are viewed through a prism of disgust in some of Welsh's
books. In Trainspotting, when Diane deals with the braying idiots in the
restaurant, she uses her menses as a way of taking revenge – no doubt
satisfying, but something the fools won’t be aware of as they slurp their soup.
No lesson is learned.
Surely it would have been more
cathartic if she had confronted the men in the restaurant, told them to stop
behaving badly, or ordered them to leave? Instead we get a sideshow involving
her blood and faecal matter. All of a sudden, Diane's effluent has become the
focus of the story, and not a confrontation in a restaurant. Then there's
Renton's encounter with his pregnant sister-in-law in the toilet at his
brother's funeral, with her memorable "powerful ivy smell".
The men in Welsh's books disgust us,
sure, but only the women can be disgusting.
The rape just goes on and on, depravity
piling on depravity, as a good looking, confident woman who spurns the advances
of the hooligans is trussed up and repeatedly violated. Arguably there's no
subtle way to write about sexual violence, but this is where Marabou Stork
Nightmares nearly came off the rails. The gang ends up in court for it, but the
outcome is a surprise - something that simply would not have happened in real
life. And then Welsh decides to hammer us with images from an advertising
campaign which I remember from the early 90s, using a massive "Z" as
a symbol - for Zero Tolerance of rape and domestic violence.
I can understand Roy Strang's guilt,
but why does Welsh feel the need to clobber us with this image? Isn't the
horror of what's happened to their victim enough?
As one interesting side note, Welsh has
said that he receives less complaints about the rape scenes than he does for
another episode where a dog gets killed.
The "Zero Tolerance" poster
was one nod to the times in which Welsh was writing. The other comes from the
mythical quest to hunt down the Stork, in the dream reality, with Sandy
Jamieson.
If you thought Scottish Spinsters was a
clumsy reference, Sandy Jamieson isn't much better. Sandy is a thinly-veiled
fictionalisation of Jimmy Sandison, a former football player with Airdrieonians
FC. In 1991 – when this book is set - Airdrie reached the Scottish League Cup
semi-final, the same year that Hibs won the tournament.
Airdrie were a goal ahead of Dunfermline,
with the match going into injury time. The ball came to Jimmy Sandison in the box,
and he quite clearly chested it away. But the referee blew the whistle to award
a penalty kick, thinking that Sandison handled. Dunfermline scored the penalty,
going on to win the match. It was a big deal at the time, seen as a massive
sporting injustice. It was curious to me that Welsh chose this player, and
indeed that injustice, for one of the defining moments in this book.
Welsh tells us that - like Strang - some
people simply have no chance in life. You can look forward to bad luck at any
time, and in any circumstances. But without the right start, some people do not
have a prayer. And even when they're close to a reward for their efforts – like
Sandison - there's the referee, whistle poised, ready to take it all away.
This view was curiously at odds with
another of the book's big conclusions, as the hunt for the stork reaches its
weird climax in the dream world: sometimes, the enemy is within. You cannot
blame anyone but yourself.
The converse of this is that the key to
success, achievement and dragging yourself out of a bad situation lies solely
with you, too.
That's Thatcherism. Which is odd.
Because one thing Irvine Welsh is not is a Tory.
Marabou Stork Nightmares sounds like a difficult but valuable read. It's hard to write a great dream/hallucination sequence and it's sometimes a challenge to read one. That said, free-floating prose can be inspiring. This review certainly makes me curious about the novel.
ReplyDeleteCatherine Stine’s Idea City
Hi Catherine - it's certainly tough going, particularly in terms of the content and some of the sex and violence, but a worthwhile read. The dream sequence is well handled; it comes off as a sort of Boy's Own adventure story, then it gets very grim. A lot of people say it's Welsh's best book, and I would recommend it to anyone, but it's harsh. If you're not familiar with Welsh's work, The Acid House collection is a good place to start.
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