Before 'Trainspotting'

For his eighth novel, Skagboys, Irvine Welsh returns to the characters and setting of his debut novel, Trainspotting, and crafts a compelling lead-in to that work. The movie adaptation of Trainspotting became an underground sensation, capturing the zeitgeist of mid-‘90s “Cool Britannia,” but the novel is best seen as a dispatch from a grimmer place and time: the port of Leith in Edinburgh during the early 1980s under the Thatcher Administration. Skagboys starts with an overtly political tone, following principle narrator and protagonist Mark Renton as he and his father take part in a massive protest against an industrial plant undergoing privatization. Hundreds of union members and supporters arrive to find themselves outnumbered by a massive force of riot police trained and equipped, as one character notes, like an army ready to take on their fellow citizens. After a violent confrontation, Renton comes away disillusioned not only by the government’s actions, but also by the simmering undercurrents of Catholic versus Protestant antagonism found within the union ranks.