Eighteen years ago, in a pub in Darlington, someone I associated with fashion and clubbing but not anything as sedentary as reading told me she had just read the best book ever written. I had never heard of Trainspotting. It had been published the previous summer, and was still in the early stages of its journey from cult status to ubiquity. Soon afterwards I too found myself improbably mesmerised by Irvine Welsh’s often squalid tales of young heroin addicts from Leith, Edinburgh’s blustery, downtrodden port, in the late 1980s. With its needles and cravings, its bare junkie flats and shivery withdrawal scenes, its hovering premonitions of HIV and death, Trainspotting in some ways resembled a government anti-drug ad campaign. Yet the book had energy and black humour and a teeming, three-dimensional quality that drew you quickly through its long, bloody chapters and made them linger in the memory.

LRB 10 May 2012 | PDF Download