Out of Hours BJGP Library: Trainspotting

CHOOSE LIFE ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Trainspotting Euan Lawson Irvine Welsh Lancaster Medical School, Furness College, Vintage Publishing, 1994, PB, 448pp, £7.99 Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YG, UK. 978-0099465898 E-mail: [email protected] @euan_lawson

it is an all-pervasive profanity, wrapped up in a foul nihilism where control has been given up. It’s life with all the protective filters stripped away. Nothing is sacred. There are many people who won’t like Trainspotting, will despise it even. foul excrement of a bookie’s toilet to retrieve It wasn’t Trainspotting that took me into his suppositories; lovable Spud and his work in substance misuse services but, for amphetamine-fuelled job interview; psycho all the appalling stories, one can be beguiled There is nothing cosy or comforting about Begbie lobbing a pint glass into a crowd; by the drug counter-culture. Sometimes all Trainspotting. Published in 1993 it follows Spud and the fouled sheets bespattering I can do in the clinic is sit, spectating, on the lives of a collection of characters based his girlfriend’s family; the harrowing death another tale of car crash NHS care. Health in Leith, Edinburgh. Four main characters of baby Dawn; and the overdose scene care simply isn’t the same for them as it is shine through: Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, and with Renton and Johnny ‘Mother Superior’ for most of the population. Begbie. Mark Renton could be described Swann. There are other stories in the I regularly get asked by doctors why as an antihero: a junkie vegetarian who book that didn’t make it into John Hodge’s I work in substance misuse services. hates the world and hates himself in equal whipsmart screenplay: ‘Bad Blood’ is a grim The question is freighted with prejudice measure. Welsh portrays the junkie lifestyle HIV revenge tale; ‘Na Na and Other Nazis’ and ignorance but it goes some way to in full brazen technicolor complete with recounts the beating of Spud’s mixed-race explaining the stigma users endure daily. If vomitus, urine, faeces, and other excreta. uncle; and the experiences of characters doctors can’t imagine treating people with Trainspotting started life as a series of short such as the alcoholic Rab ‘Second Prize’ these problems then what hope is there? stories and its origins remain obvious. It McLaughlin — so called for his tendency to The characters of Trainspotting are still in skips around characters, backstory is often start fights and lose them. every town in the country, still overdosing, missing, and there’s no narrative arc, just There is no glamour here and violence still living with untreated hepatitis C, still the see-saw of relapse and abstinence, is always bubbling under the surface, stigmatised by society and healthcare abuse and misuse. There is misogyny, exemplified by the uneasy and dishonest services. racism, casual and senseless violence. It’s relationships with Begbie. Men and women They remain the undeserving sick. Fiction also bleakly comic but it tests the limits of are brutalised but the women call to mind it might be but don’t be fooled:Trainspotting black humour. all those seen in clinics: too anxious to leave is hard reading but reality can trump it. Trainspotting breaks many so-called their homes, beaten blind by their men, ‘rules’ of writing and there is much that pimped out by incestuous uncles; scarred Euan Lawson, will offend the casual reader. One chapter physically and psychically, and too often in Deputy Editor, BJGP; Director of Community may be written in the first person, the Studies, Lancaster Medical School, Furness thrall to violent men. As for the swearing: College, Lancaster University, Lancaster. next might be third person: sometimes in head-hopping omniscience, sometimes a single point of view. This is a book that DOI: 10.3399/bjgp16X684145 doesn’t let you settle. The Scots dialect is presented phonetically and even if you “It’s life with all the think Welsh has a good ear the reading isn’t always easy. Long-listed for the 1993 protective filters stripped Booker Prize, Trainspotting notoriously away. Nothing is sacred didn’t make the shortlist because it ‘offended the sensibilities of two female yet … the characters of judges’. Trainspotting is not a book that will Trainspotting are still in die wondering. Many of the scenes in Trainspotting will every town in the country, live long in the memory, and, in truth, it is still overdosing …” now difficult to disentangle the book from Danny Boyle’s film: Renton diving into the

154 British Journal of General Practice, March 2016