Can a sequel ever live up to the original? In the case of movies, hardly likely. But novels aren’t films, and as long as it doesn’t get made into a movie, Irvine Welsh’s Porno is a satisfying, even gripping, continuation of the extravaganza that was Trainspotting.
We meet up with the Trainspotting crew—Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie, et al.—ten years after Renton’s fateful escape from London with the boys’ stolen money. Simon David Williamson, trying to live down his “Sick Boy” moniker in his struggle for a mature image, takes centre stage this time, both in terms of narration and plot. His multi-layered mess of schemes, revenge plans and seductions are what bring the old crew together—often against their wills—from hide-outs in London, Amsterdam or Her Majesty’s prison in Saughton.
The vice this time around is porn, although drugs have definitely not disappeared from Leith, the down-and-out Edinburgh suburb where these characters were hatched. The urgency of junkie need, where scams are short-lived because the need for cash is immediate, has given way to crimes with deeper, more ambiguous implications. As Nikki Fuller-Smith—a new character who ambitiously rises to be the porn star du jour—says, “if the word in the eighties was ‘me’, and in the nineties ‘it,’ in the millennium it’s ‘ish’… Substance used to be important, then style was everything. Now it’s all just faking it.” Especially in the case of Sick Boy, scams are no longer for making money, but to show that you are the new face of Leith, the essence of what the underclass should aspire to.
The move from “me” to “ish” slows down the pace of the novel. The characters are no longer driven by immediate greed and need, so the multiple first person narration—the same technique used in Trainspotting—now has a more introspective mood. An added ten years and a lessened reliance on drugs have heightened the characters’ awareness of their own weaknesses. Even Sick Boy and Begbie, the most selfish and immoral of the crew, have poignant moments of self-doubt.
Welsh skilfully uses these moments to draw the reader into a character’s frame of mind, only to be horrified by them moments later. The combination of sympathy and disgust is what keeps up the pace of this novel, making the characters real (and realistically unlikable). The action has slowed down with age, but the characters are simply so messed-up and interesting that you can’t put the book down.
Porno has its flaws: the new narrator, Nikki, is laden with the over-heavy burden of representing “woman”; the moralizing and socialism are at times overly explicit; and the toned-down Scottish accents simply aren’t as fun as in Trainspotting. But a surprisingly complex novel which is still such a fun read is a rare find. Sick Boy, Renton, Begbie and crew may let themselves down, but never the reader.
