Filth, by Irvine Welsh Cape, 393pp, £9.99 in UK
To some, Irvine Welsh is the poet laureate of the chemical generation, a novelist from the Scottish lineage of Iain Banks and Alisdair Gray whose meshing of the existential with the earthy, replete with knowing nods towards club culture, have made him the one of the most popular and authentic postwar British novelists. There was little Welsh did to disabuse the public of their image of him - he took as much joy in selling a million copies of Trainspotting as he did in the fact that it became the most shop-lifted novel of all time.
As near to a popular celebrity as literature has ever thrown up, Welsh titles his books after drugs du jour (as in Ecstasy), hangs out with other middle-aged terribles such as Damien Hirst, and is not averse to the odd spot of techno DJ'ing. If Martin Amis was slumming it, Welsh was living, breathing and snorting it in his novels. Hipper than next month's edition of stylebible Face magazine, dropping all the wrong names in the right places and purportedly "shocking" the literary equivalent of outraged and disgusted denizens of Tunbridge Wells, Welsh was dubbed, rather flamboyantly, "the Dickens of the Council Estate". Pass the anti-hype serum.
Although there is no doubt that Trainspotting is a great novel, much of the media whirligigs that surrounded it were propelled by a publishing company who sold him as "a bit of rough" and a readership who naively thought that Welsh was doing for heroin use what Nick Hornby was doing to football. Since then, though, he has lost his footing on the pedestal; follow-up works such as The Acid House and Maribou Stork Nightmares have drawn his first "mixed" reviews, his sales figures haven't been sustained and his first play, You'll Have Had Your Hole, even suffered the ignominy of being called "boring" by one critic.
His new novel, Filth, comes blurbed with a rush of excitable adjectives - "dark, disturbing, corrupt, misanthropic, sleazy" and a promise that it will reveal Welsh as "a moralist and a storyteller". Part detective novel and part Gothic horror, Filth has for its protagonist an Edinburgh detective sergeant, Bruce Robertson, who is, perhaps, one of the vilest characters ever to have been committed to print since Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Robertson is an antiMorse detective - with a knowing wink, Welsh has him doing crosswords from the News of the World - and is also, in no particular order, a lying, cheating, thieving, wifebeating, prostitute-abusing, porn-obsessed, Fenian-hating, cocaine-ridden thug, who has a bad case of eczema around the genital area for added discomfort. He's also an upstanding member of the Freemasons but that, as you know, is just pure coincidence.
The first time we meet Robertson he's comforting a recently bereaved widow whose home has just been burgled; when she goes to make him a cup of tea, he steals the last remaining valuable possession in the house. Back at the police station, he's disturbed to hear of a murder investigation that he's supposed to head up - disturbed not because it threatens his week-long holiday in Amsterdam sampling the local prostitution but because the murder victim is "only a fuckin' coon". With his wife having received one broken limb too many and bailed out, with his cocaine habit spiralling out of control and a dramatic deterioration in his genital health, Robertson is not the happiest of campers.
Once you get beyond Robertson's hideous facade, there is evidence of Welsh's scabrous satirical powers at work. In many ways, the detective is the socio-economic mirror image of the smacked-up junkies in Trainspotting. Middle-aged, reactionary and Establishment, Robertson is dangerously close to becoming a parody: his dismissal of female colleagues who don't find him attractive as "roaring dykes" and his ogling over "Page 3 stunnas" is fairly standard issue and hackneyed in a "laddish" sort of way.
Fortunately, the plot and sub-plot are both gripping and audacious in execution. Ignoring the obvious irony of a racist cop trying to solve the murder of a black man, Welsh swerves and slides around the case, dropping hints and red herrings at every turn. There's also a compelling sub-plot to do with his hopes of promotion as he undermines the four other contenders for the job through nefarious means.
Robertson also suits Welsh's purpose in taking a few jabs at Political Correctness. However, it's all very clumsily done as the detective has to learn not to address female colleagues as "darling" and must attend an inter-racial awareness raising programme. This is old and inane territory, and for a writer like Welsh, who trades on being clued-in, is close to unforgivable.
Things take a surreal turn as the Detective is diagnosed with worms - worms who talk to him. Welsh then lays on some laboured childhood psychoanalytic material which is much at odds with the previous tone of a crime investigation. The denouement, which is eerily reminiscent of the final pages of Patrick McCabe's marvellous Dead School, doesn't do justice to what was, up until the talking worm episode, an entertaining read. Imagine Irvine Welsh writing an acid-enhanced episode of The Sweeney and you have it in one.