Trainspotting

Trainspotting is a one-time comfort read of mine that has completely fallen by the wayside.

Back when I had a heavy courseload and a heavy reading list (roughly, 4-5 full-length novels per week), I just didn't have a whole lot of non-academic books on my shelves, and Trainspotting was one of those few. Its vignette structure was ideal for casual re-reading, and although the material was often brutal, it was easy to skip over certain sections, or put it down and pick it up again randomly.

Trainspotting was also the first movie I saw after moving to a city from my parents' rural house, when I was nineteen. I decided to check it out based on multi-page, glowing reviews and previews in Details magazine (of all places). I saw it twice within a month, both times by myself, once in a first-run theatre downtown, and once in a second-run theatre in a seedier part of town. Probably, I bought the book after seeing the movie. My copy's cover is movie-branded, at any rate, with Ewan McGregor front-and-center, and the orange-white-black-silver colour scheme.

The movie was the better narrative, but the book is much richer in details. The movie tended to conflate certain characters--I dimly remember that the movie's Tommy combined at least two separate characters' storylines, for example. Other narrative threads and characters were dropped entirely. Hence, Renton's disaffected teenaged Goth cousin and his brother, who enlists in the army and is killed in Belfast, are both missing from the movie. Other characters are allowed to appear in the movie but are stripped to the bone, their interiority and often basic identifying details gone.

I liked the movie's Spud, but felt a greater affection for the book's Spud, with all his 'catboys' and 'catgirls,' and his general goodwill or at least harmlessness. I also liked a narrative thread missing from the movie, about an HIV infected character struggling to reveal the diagnosis to his family. This excised material is often my favourite part of Irvine Welsh's world, the source of a few glimmers of warmth in a bleak place. (The movie's Spud was the sole character to carry this burden in the movie, in my opinion.)

I couldn't even guess how many times I read my copy, but I do know it's been years, maybe even ten, since I last read it. Because of the context of my first reading of the book, it's hopelessly dated for me--to the mid-nineties, rather than the book's actual setting in the eighties. It's a relic and not enough time has passed for me to be able to revisit it.