Ifeyinwa said:
Your thoughts and feelings of Trainspotting. It was a dark comedy which portrayed junkies, in a realistic light i thought. Not gratified, nor sympathiszed. Just raw, the real deal. To show that when you're a drug addict, nobody is your friend. You are purely selfish and serving heroine.
I loved it!
I read 'Trainspotting' and found it a bit of a struggle.
I don't dislike dialect writing, or for that matter, the wildly shifting POV and multiple first-person narrators. I love 'As I Lay Dying,' for instance.
To me, it fell under the category of an 'important' book, a hard, honest look at a ghetto culture that steps out of the inevitable race issues that cloud an American tale of the same.
I also thought Welsh made a great case against the 'Drug War' (whether that was his intention or not). Just the opening sequence, fishing the suppositories out and reinserting them: what can the law do to a junkie that's worse than what a junkie will do to himself?
But I can't say it was an enjoyable read. Having a more cohesive plot might have helped, as opposed to a bunch of vignettes that seem to have little to do with each other at many junctures. Also, just because you're writing in dialect, it doesn't mean you can't use more conventional dialogue attributions. It's not only difficult for an American (who doesn't know the fine points of Scottish dialects) to tell WHO is telling the story, but even in a given segment who is saying what, and what is an after-thought or interior narrative.
None of these things by themselves would be a problem, but the overall effect was a lot of work for the payoff in my view.