by JULIET WATERS

A few weeks ago I caught Irvine Welsh interviewed on MusiquePlus about his latest novel, Porno. Asked why he’d waited so long to do a sequel to Trainspotting, Welsh claimed that he didn’t want to turn the story into some kind of Harry Potter thing. This seems like one Scottish writer taking a wee pot shot at another. The magic of a gang of slacker junkies will never quite rival the magic of a gang of prepubescent wizards. And frankly, during the first 100 pages of Porno, the first thoughts of any Welsh fan who trudged loyally through Filth or Glue will probably be that he should have done this sooner. Welsh is the perfect example of the fundamental rule of writing: a truly unique voice can break all the rules. But once that voice doesn’t seem so unique, one starts to notice how formulaic Welsh’s writing really is. His plots are often predictable, and his characters more fucked up than complex.

But if Welsh is exploiting his characters for fun and profit, no one reading Porno is likely to mind. If anything, it adds another rich layer of irony and liberates his writing from the tedious brutality of his last two books. Rent, Sick Boy, Spud, Juice, Franco—the boys are back in town and working in one of the most formulaic and exploitative endeavours known to mankind. Older and not much wiser, with kids to support and debts to repay, they’re moving into a slightly more legitimate and less dangerous arena than the drug trade—the sex trade.

When we last left Trainspotting’s hero, Mark Renton, he was ripping off his friends in a drug deal and vowing to pursue the straight life. Ten years later, clean and sober and living in Amsterdam of all places, he’s a successful, yuppie club owner, in a bad marriage with an ice-queen German wife. But Porno is really Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson’s story. After failing as a bartender/pimp in London, Sick Boy decides to take an aunt up on her offer to sell him her pub in Leith. Back in fried-Mars-bar land, he gets back in touch with Terry “Juice” Lawson who’s been doing the groundwork for a burgeoning amateur porn business.

Enter Nikki Fuller-Smith, an aspiring filmmaker who’s working her way through university giving hand jobs at the local sauna. With her post-feminist roommates along for the ride, she wants to help the boys on their quest for the Holy Grail, the porn script that’s good enough to keep people watching the movie all the way through. Whether or not she can accomplish this with Seven Rides for Seven Brothers, which aims to be a wicked story, all the while showing “our soft-porn heritage and the repressive nature of our censorship culture,” it’s a step up from Terry’s original script. What it lacks in dialogue isn’t quite redeemed by stage directions like: “The boy fucks the bird up the arse. The bird licks the other bird out.”

If the plot of brainy college sluts getting involved with amateur porn thugs seems an unlikely porn script in itself, Welsh balances it off with numerous other subplots. There’s the friends reunited story, once Sick Boy and Rent punch and make up. The sociopath sideline as Frank “Franco” Begby, in prison for manslaughter when the novel opens, plots his revenge on the person who’s been mailing him gay porn every week (it’s Sick Boy, but he thinks it’s Rent). There’s the tragic waste story of Spud, the only decent person in the group, but also the only one who just can’t seem to kick drugs. Welsh tangles these loose story lines just tight enough to sustain tension through 500 pages of his trademark Scottish beat prose.

It’s all a little out of control, but ultimately far more readable and enjoyable than recent Welsh. And yes, he leaves plenty of room for a sequel to this sequel. The ending is more Friday the 13th than Harry Potter. Still, can’t wait for the movie. :

Porno by Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Cape, pb, 483pp, $25.95