Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

"The sweat wis lashing oafay
Sick Boy; he wis trembling."

Rated 10/10

Irvine Welsh's controversial first novel, set on the heroin-addicted fringe of working-class youth in Edinburgh, is yet another exploration of the dark side of Scottishness. The main character, Mark Renton, is at the center of a clique of nihilistic slacker junkies with no hopes and no possibilities, and only "mind-numbing and spirit-crushing" alternatives in the straight world they despise. This particular slice of humanity has nothing left but the blackest of humor and a sharpness of wit.

My Thoughts:  Trainspotting is essentially a gritty collection of experiences through the eyes of various different people - laced with drugs and booze and sex and the blackest of wit throughout. I found myself alternatively repulsed and smiling right the way through to the last page.

And the characters are just brilliant, I don’t think that my descriptions could do them any kind of justice; they are violent and dirty and obsessive and I found them to be likeable and shocking at once. Each of them struggles with addiction, their own moral conflict and with each other; some manage to clean up and others don’t. I know that other readers felt differently, but they are relatable. I love that each of the characters in this book has a saving grace no matter how brutal they are.

The honesty with which Welsh writes is simply stunning (quite literally: some of it I couldn’t believe he would put on to paper) he’s obviously a talented observationalist with a lot of life experience under his belt and the power to make us stop and think about our own actions and thoughts towards society, class, gender and addiction.

This is a book that can be read on so many levels and has a lot of depth to it. No doubt I could read it again and again and get something completely different from it each time. It is definitely worthy of the endless amount of positive reviews that have been compiled by readers over the years and one to add to the reading list.

Hard Landing - Stephen Leather

"Trish Elliott ran her hand across
her stomach for the hundredth
time since she'd left the doctor's
surgery."

Rated 7/10

Dan 'Spider' Shepherd is used to putting his life on the line. Working for an elite undercover squad he has lied, cheated and conned in order to bring Britain's most wanted criminals to justice."

My Thoughts: Hard Landing is a fast-paced read packed with action and tension. The concept of an undercover officer being stationed inside a high security prison is one that instantly had me hooked, and you really get a feel for the inmates’ life behind bars. I love that this is a British crime thriller and I couldn’t put the book down once I had started it. The book reminded me somewhat of a Nick Stone thriller.

I had a slight problem with the over-usage of logos and colours to describe the inmates’ attire; I know that clothing would be important in a prison, but it could have been done a little more sparingly to make the text flow smoothly and to get a little more detail than “He was wearing a white Addidas tshirt” and such. Similarly, his descriptions of the food was always a repetitive and off-hand "It was awful, but he ate it anyway" job.

The book is clearly plot based and I think that Leather has just about scraped by on the descriptions of protagonists that he gives the reader. He has imagined some real larger-than-life characters and should have fleshed them out a bit more so that we can really connect to them. I didn’t feel shocked or upset when protagonists died or were killed, and I know that I could have been if I’d been introduced to them more thoroughly. Dan Shepherd didn’t have any depth to him and didn’t really do it for me (though he’s an ex SAS hard man so he should have);  Ironically enough I found myself sympathising more with the antagonist at one point as he was well-rounded in comparison, even Carpenter’s family were more relatable than Shepherd’s.

The heat really builds during the last third of Hard Landing, when there’s a bit of a twist in the plan of action and things don’t work out quite as you would expect them to. I did find myself skipping pages towards the very final conclusion of the book to get to the ending, as I knew what was going to happen by this point and didn’t need to read the build-up. Having said this, I was desperate to finish, and it was full of action right up until the very last page!  

All in all a great read. I don’t think I’ll rush out to get the next in the series, but if it lands on my bookshelf somehow then I’ll read it.