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I marked this "to read" years ago because I love Trainspotting and I love porn, but, as so frequently happens with me, other books pushed it from the "next" stack to the "soon" stack and from there to "some day." When I learned about the imminent release of T2, I scrambled to work Porno into my always-crowded to-read schedule. As it happens, T2 only lasted a week or two where I live and, busy grown-up and slow reader that I am, by the time I finished the novel, I had to drive thirty miles to see the movie at the last cinema still screening it, apparently, in the Mid-Atlantic region. Though based only loosely on Porno, T2 was good and I was really surprised that it closed so quickly. I'd've thought all the middle-aged adolescents I see at all the legacy rock shows would've kept it in theaters a little longer. I guess we only drag ourselves out of the house to see Bush at the tribal casino.
In my milieu, at any rate, Trainspotting was huge, unquestionably one of the most iconic movies of the nineties. I didn't read the novel until a few years and a few viewings transpired, so, while I found it, with its mordant, junkie reprobate's sensibility and its piquant if unyieldingly dense Scots narration, a thrilling read, my cinema memories inevitably bled into the reading experience. I have a hard time, from this vantage, teasing out what I specifically liked about the novel. Reading and viewing the two works so close together this time enabled close comparison with simultaneous mental distinction. Porno and T2, it seems to me, are both about the relative rarity of growth and maturation. Welsh would agree, I think, with my first therapist, who told me at our initial meeting that people don't change that much. For April (my therapist), the stubborn stasis is a function of inherent human limitation. I think Welsh ascribes at least some of it, though, to the despair and dope and pop culture in which alienated youth of late-stage capitalism are steeped. Like Trainspotting, Porno is told by multiple narrators, but the main point-of-view has shifted here from relatively-nice-guy-with-a-demanding-monkey Mark Renton to calculating manipulator Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson. Sick Boy was a charming cad in the first book, but irresponsibility and opportunism don't age well. I had a hard time liking him this time around, although we are, at least in part, I think, supposed to ascribe his selfishness and casual cruelty to his ravenous cocaine consumption.
The McGuffin of Porno is Sick Boy's plan to film and distribute a pornographic movie starring his friends and neighbors, and I was really impressed with Welsh for writing a book about porn that addresses the morally squicky aspects of dirty movies while avoiding sentimental, finger-wagging judgments. I think this is one of the few pieces of writing I've read by a writer willing to reveal a modern, media-saturated male human's inevitable familiarity with porn. Welsh, it is obvious, has watched a few wank flicks and he writes about them from the point of view of a real consumer and not some sort of asexual, detached, slightly disapproving social scientist. He is appalled, to be certain, by our desires and his own, but his disgust for the world of adult video is hardly greater than his disgust for the world in general.
I really liked Porno. Much better than I expected. The writing is ambitious and accomplished and, while the characters don't, on the whole, 'develop' a great deal, they are richly, recognizably human. Like the movie, it was a better retread than I expected. I might even return to the well for Glue and Skagboys. Apparently Welsh has, with his oeuvre, been constructing a heroin-saturated Caledonian Yoknapatawpha of sorts.