Scots Lit

Someday, I believe that Irvine Welsh will write a story that isn't about doing drugs.

Scottish cinema is a bear to get through. It's not that the stories aren't compelling so much that the actors are just completely indecipherable.

"Och, ay, git ays on oaer t' ma bairns, ya wee cunt."

Not only is that not proper queen's English, but it flies out of their mouths in a fraction of second, angry and slurred. I really felt that The Acid House needed subtitles.

Fortunately, this particular movie is based on a collection of short stories. I'm not a lit snob, so I'm not about to pretend that I read Trainspotting before Ewan MacGregor made women everywhere swoon over his on-screen drive to kick smack. I was hoping when I got my hands on the print version of The Acid House, that the text was going to be a groundbreaking insight into something higher than myself, something holy. When I finally picked up the book from my kick-ass KCLS, I opened it up to a page at random. It was the first page of "A Soft Touch". "Providence!" I shouted, holding the book high above my head with both hands, holding it in a bright beam of invisible light shining down upon us.

Turns out, Welsh just loves writing about people with drug problems.

But that's cool, because he's a good damned writer.

Not only does the "A Soft Touch" story differ slightly from the film version, but it shines a whole hell of a lot more light on the subject than that seductively poetic-sounding but entirely uninformative clicking noise that the Scots call "Aynglash". Neither ending is entirely acceptable.

The titular story in The Acid House is a brilliant tale about a man who drops acid and switches bodies with a newborn baby. I was delighted to see that Welsh uses many of the same techniques in multithreaded storytelling that Danielewski would incorporate into House of Leaves. I enjoy this story for a number of reasons, but they all pale in comparison to "A Soft Touch" for obvious reasons.

The rest of the book consists of stories about drunken fisticuffs, selling dope, and an inexplicably bizarre story about a squirrel named Rico, the boy who loves him, and the teenage sister who is just trying to get laid upstairs. Welsh writes exactly as his characters speak, which makes reading some of these stories as hard as watching them on the big screen, but with the benefit of being able to re-read a page until it starts to make sense. Ays give it a wee tip up oen seven tumbs up, nowt, ay mate, rot?