Just got sent Irvine Welsh by Aaron Kelly, one of Manchester University Press’ Contemporary British Novelists series and the first attempt at a complete critical study of all of Irvine Welsh’s fiction. I’ve just skimmed a couple of chapters this morning and I can safely say if you’re looking at Welsh from any sort of study context, you’ll need to have a read of this.
Not just because it quotes me on p145 or because it quotes Zoe Strachan’s great Queerspotting piece for Spike or Willy Maley’s You’ll Have Had Your Theatre article, but because Kelly has clearly put some painstaking effort into assembling a huge breadth of sources from which to pull together his analysis of Welsh’s work. (Let’s face it, if he’s citing internet articles about Welsh from an obscure online magazine, he’s clearly done his homework). Kelly’s prose does occasionally fall into the chasm of tortuous academic sentences which seem to be vying for space in Pseuds’ Corner (and reawaken nightmares of my own MA) - but in the main the couple of chapters I’ve read flow smoothly with a lucid balance of arguments and counterpoints and, crucially, a lot of quotes from Welsh himself. I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing and to maybe going back to re-read my two favourite Welsh books, Trainspotting and The Acid House. These two, especially The Acid House, are still head and shoulders above anything Welsh has written since, I reckon.
Welsh’s next book, incidentally, is going to be a romance. It’s all on IrvineWelsh.com. And, also incidentally, Zoe Strachan has subsequently had two novels published in the last four years - her debut Negative Space got rave reviews, as did Spin Cycle.
More on Irvine Welsh:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
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