Irvine Welsh
A Decent Ride
[Jonathan Cape]
The issue with reviewing Bukowski-ish novels of this kind is that things can quickly devolve into identity politics whereby any negative sentiment on the part of the reviewer is deemed due to being middle class/female/snobbish/prudish, etc. And indeed the publisher’s copy clarifies that, although ‘misogynist’, the central character is ‘oddly […] decent’—a kind of proleptic self-awareness which will defang the aforementioned variety of detractors. In any case, perhaps due to my identity and perhaps due to a range of factors enumerated below, I thought A Decent Ride was generally crap.
To begin with, Welsh is an incredibly repetitive writer. The oddly decent character has corkscrew curls which are mentioned almost as frequently as female genitalia, although admittedly in less colourful terms. His characters’ monomaniacal focus on their respective interests – usually sex, booze, drugs; frequently a combination thereof – reads like a lad mag-turned-fiction. There is also the Scottish phoneticisation (‘Ah’m back tae Gorgie n check in at The Pub Wi Nae Name’), which I personally find irritating beyond all measure. Add to this the constant and smug commentary on the Scottish national character, which pontification is deeply uninteresting to a non-Scot, and possibly indeed to other Scots, and you have a book which is essentially just more of the same Trainspotting material, plus 20 years of age and minus 20 years of relevancy.
Words: Aisling O’Gara
