I first discovered Irvine Welsh, as I think many did, through Trainspotting, the film adaptation of his novel of the same name starring a young Ewan McGregor. But when I finally read Trainspotting earlier this year, I fell hard for Welsh’s incredible and inspirational use of language and dialect – a facility that seemed to challenge the very tenants of what is possible with prose.
I remember, years ago, feeling frustrated by the limitations of words – a strange feeling to have as a writer, but something that, I think, is understandable for anyone who has ever tried to convey the surreal in writing. Words must, after all, be made up of 26 letters; they are finite for as long as the writer wants to remain comprehensible. But like Lewis Carroll or William Shakespeare or Anthony Burgess, Welsh is not confined by the English language; he is spurred by it.
The Acid House is a collection of 21 short stories and one novella, ranging from somewhat banal (but no less intriguing) explorations of the lives of junkies and partiers in Edinburgh to far more surreal stories on par with Kafka or Carroll.
I enjoyed some of them immensely, particularly the story for which the collection is named and the novella, titled “A Smart Cunt.” And yet, I’m somewhat ashamed to say, it took me some time to get through this collection; a few of the stories plodded a bit, and when combined with Welsh’s use of Scottish dialect – a tantalizing, gripping, world-upending talent in some stories but a distraction in others – it meant that often I laid down this collection and didn’t pick it up again for weeks. But when these stories are good, they’re really good: angry, belligerent, visceral, and, most of all, real: and that goes double for the ones that are told with a heaping dose of fantasy.