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Review [published March 1999]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall
When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground
publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked
cultural event, Irvine Welsh was
described as a spokesman for a generation and the most
exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language
and setting was something of a novelty first time round,
Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits the same ground
as everything else he’s ever written. We have deviant
sex from The Acid House, Tarantinoesque musings on
rock records from Trainspotting, half-arsed attempts at
psychology and social comment from Marabou Stork
Nightmares and, of course, lots of swearing. As with
most recent Welsh product, it’s also a shambolic and
incoherent mess.
Filth tells the story of Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh
policeman whose life resembles Harvey Keitel’s in
Bad Lieutenant. Racist, misogynist, homophobic and
psychotic, Robertson devours hard-core pornography
whilst mentally and physically abusing himself and
everybody around him. Despite his appalling personal
hygiene supplemented by a genital rash and an attack
of tapeworms (more of this later), he nonetheless man-
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
ages to have sex with almost every female he meets,
in between setting up colleagues for queer-bashing or
driving others to the brink of suicide.
Robertson isn’t really a bad person, though. As his
tapeworm explains in the latter chapters of the book –
yes, the narrator is quite literally talking out of his arse –
Robertson has had a tough time. He came into the world
as the result of a violent rape, his adoptive stepfather
made him eat coal, and the first love of his life died. The
section describing the death of his first girlfriend is the
only funny part of the book as Welsh goes massively
over the top, piling on the pathos as he recounts how
the poor crippled girl is struck by lightning in a scene
that could have come straight out of an Airplane movie.
Unfortunately this bit is supposed to be serious.
The book runs to about 400 pages and fully 300 of
them repeat the same endless catalogue of sex, violence
and hatred with little in the way of variation. Some of
the scenes are evidently supposed to be funny, such as
the set-piece where Robertson attempts to make a video
of a prostitute being penetrated by a dog or when he
sleeps with a colleague’s wife after framing her husband
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