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Rating: Enjoy the Ride
In this novel you will find: sex with a corpse, urination into an IV bag, the painting and entombment of a girl inside a pylon, the exhumation of Alec, and the explosion of an obese body inside a crematory oven.
What ties these scenes and the various subplots together is the story of Terry, a taxi driver by profession and a porn actor by talent. While a hurricane looms over Edinburgh, Terry is hired as a part-time guide by Ronald Checker. Ronny is an American billionaire who has come to the Scottish capital to buy all three bottles of the most expensive whisky in the country. In addition, not long after, Viktor Syme, a local criminal in exile in Spain, entrusts Terry with the supervision of one of his brothels.
As he carries out these jobs, Terry’s life intersects with a human fauna of various backgrounds, all engaged in a struggle for life filled with difficulties and fears. This fine balance within his life, which constantly provides him opportunities to display his amorous talents, is shattered when, after fainting, he discovers that his old heart, just like Mark Renton's, can’t stand any effort: Terry may not have even one more sexual encounter. And Terry will have to find something more interesting than sex to survive.
The novel boasts many of the qualities of Welsh’s previous works. An external narrator and several internal ones (Terry, Ronny, Jonty and Jinty) show us how these individual battles intertwine within the story, narrating them in a funny and grotesque, honest and cynical way. This polyphonic writing of Welsh that initially immerses the reader in the self-exonerating worldview of the characters, at the same time puts them in communication with the essence of the characters, which—without words and between the lines—condemns them.
In this entertaining novel, however, what doesn’t quite convince is the resolution, which fails to follow its own internal logic, watering down all the other enjoyable courses it has to offer. Welsh had accustomed us to grotesque dishes spiced with dark humor to feed us a truthful nihilism, but here the dishes veer towards comedy with glimmers of hope for all the characters.
A fun novel, then, but one that doesn’t manage to be truly authentic to the end.
Rating 2.5/5
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