Irvine Welsh
Il lercio

I realized, so cruelly quickly, that I am in love more than anything with an author's immense ability to characterize the protagonist, the flesh that suffers and struggles in a wisely irrigated journey, where the author never lingers in depicting the features of his creature in relation to what surrounds him. In such cases, something strange happens, you realize that you have established a relationship with the protagonist of an immortalized sequence of his life and you are grateful to the genius who brought him into the world.

Filth is perhaps the author's most desperate scream against what represents the dull sense of obligatory decency that a man must face regardless. And it is here that he splashes in front of our eyes what we do not want to see, what could silence us. The complete work that best describes what it means to find oneself in a nightmare, a downward spiral that swallows without hesitation what is expected to be the brightest. 

Bruce "Robbo" Robertson, is a detective called to solve a murder case involving a freelance journalist, as well as the son of the Ghanaian ambassador. It seems like the plot of any crime fiction. But it is not. Because Robbo is the most heartfelt and best-conceived mixture to inject into a single body the most unbearable aspects in the world. Cynical, cocaine-addicted, Masonic, afflicted by a bitter hypersexuality, suffering from eczema that devours his genitals, as well as an almost natural sense of humiliating others, betraying, beating, and letting himself go helpless in the sea of vice, the detective is the tragic response to comfort; no longer reduced to a common cause against "political correctness," but as a true human limitation. In this case, it comes naturally to see such a character as something beyond the ink on paper, thanks to his ability to detach from it.

Describing the grayness of his personal drama, the abuses, and misfortunes that contributed to shaping his incalculable wickedness, Irvine Welsh mentions his dictatorial tendencies, dominating, without ever sliding into careless violence, which separates him from, for example, characters of other writers of the genre (I don't feel like naming names in this regard). These dramas are narrated by the tapeworm (his only lapse of humanity) he has inside him—we can see it "eating" the pages of the book—as it grows along with him while the reader consumes the work, a miracle. Successfully avoiding a chronology of such a violent character, the reader feels part of the darkest Edinburgh ever described. And for the record Robbo is never a limitation of brutality, even though it's very difficult to encounter such a cruel character, in him, one does not feel for even a second the inertia of an artist who might have created him with the intent to depict a horrible character lightly. There is a heartbreaking sense of survival that moves him until his dramatic end, which can be felt at the moment when we learn from the tapeworm/conscience about his childhood and adolescence, moments when we are given a glance at one of the darkest pasts ever described, where the altar of Bruce's true misfortune is raised; working in the mines of a village composed of sordid and empty beings, where the tragic events of his life forge his character, from which we learn about his main fault for which he was called "filthy," his only true love (Rhona), and the origin of his birth. 

Here, his "original" position starts to become uncomfortable for the reader, and they realize they have encountered at least once a similar character in their existence. They feel the need to want to cry for him and feel him incredibly close. But he has already detached from the paper. The feeling is not that of having read Filth, but of having, better said, met, hosted, understood him. So what you are reading is no longer a chronicle of the grotesque but the work of a germinative past, more than anything else human. It is the blood of a writer finally capable of stirring the composure of a common ideal now unable to conceive fiction as an extension of what is reality, being at the same time malign beyond the imaginable, ironically wicked (some of Bruce's "thoughts" are as bad as they are hilarious) and incredibly honest. Empathy is inevitable.