Porno

Rating:
Summary: Let's make a film
Review: Irvine Welsh is one of my favorite writers. His last few books GLue and Filth were difficult to get into, even though they were risky books to write. They were funny and strange. They were a walk in the fields. Porno is more in line with Trainspotting, Acid House, and Ecstacy. Porno even takes the characters of Trainspotting and meets them ten years down the road. Like Faulkner wrote about his little town and used some of the same characters, one gets a feeling that Welsh will be writing about Renton, Sick Boy, and Begbie until they die. In this book, Sick Boy and Renton are still up to their underworld lives. Sick Boy is making a porn film. Begbie is out of jail and seeks revenge. The comedy starts then. It is one of Welsh's best books.

Rating:
Summary: Losing it
Review: Irvine Welsh phoned this one in. 'Porno' is yet another bland offering from Irvine Welsh, rehashing the formula used in 'Glue' and 'Filth' and just about every other book he's written: Chapter in English, chapter in 'Scottish', chapter involving gratuitous sex, chapter involving extreme violence/murder, chapter involving rape, chapter involving...etc. No real character development, a lame attempt at a shocking 'twist'. Glad I borrowed it from a friend rather than waste my money.

Rating:
Summary: sick indeed
Review: It's a great book. I, personally, prefered Trainspotting because the dialogue was better and Renton makes a better main character. Sick boy loses a lot when you take away the mistery in him. Porno has a better structure story wise (and better English for that matter). It grabs you from the beginning and you always have something to look forward to. The first 100 pages you're waiting for the gang to get reunited. The next 200 pages you're wondering how are they gonna make the film and the last pages you're dying to see if Franco gets his revenge. The end is particularly striking as you realize nothing's changed.

Rating:
Summary: Fonetik spelln'
Review: It's my third Irvine Welsh so I must be finding some entertainment from him and I feel entitled to sound off about this business of phonetic spelling of dialect. Sometimes it works, in small doses,but it reduces intelligibilty and becomes irritating over over long stretches. This didn't matter so much in the earlier Welsh's because the sheer energy of the narrative and the shock of it all carried the me along. Here there's a more complex plot to be followed and the orthographic veil is obfuscating. He remains brilliantly funny and delightfully shocking at times.

Rating:
Summary: lots of laughs
Review: Most of the critical takes on Welsh revolve around the blow, smack & x which his characters ingest on an epic scale. I find all of this has been overrated. There are all these morons who want to trivialize him as some sort of party beast who ingests horse tranquilizers on a daily basis. Better living through chemistry. Well, if you think W.S. Burroughs was just a junky then you've reached the end of your choke chain. You are a functional illiterate. Time to buy a vowel. Sure, Welsh's characters swim in controlled substances just as sperm swim in semen. Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was very rarely sober. The point is that Welsh is the greatest prose stylist of the psychic landscape since old Germs Juice himself. Like Joyce, Welsh's command of the interior swamplands of consciousness is simply f-ing terrifying at times. Marabou Stork Nightmares & Filth (with the Pig on the cover) were key examples. I was in an altered mental state for a month after reading those two. It wasn't pretty, but it felt real. And yet Welsh has such a command of dialogue that this psychic miasma becomes a sort of exterior monologue- when he wants it to. It makes you want to cheer- that the apparently impossible expression can actually be articulated, at least in the books. Maybe this seems easy to you, but it's not. That's the brilliance of it, making it feel really natural. It's like DeNiro- the trick is in the ease & elegance of it, the flow of talk. Porno is a riot- a true comic novel- I laughed myself sick & kicked my cat without really meaning to, it was so funny. I am an American, but I learned Scottish just so I could read Irvine Welsh...go on with it, mate.

Rating:
Summary: Psychic Offense
Review: Most of the critical takes on Welsh revolve around the blow, smack & x which his characters ingest on an epic scale. I find all of this has been overrated. There are all these morons who want to trivialize him as some sort of party beast who ingests horse tranquilizers on a daily basis. Better living through chemistry. Well, if you think W.S. Burroughs was just a junky then you've reached the end of your choke chain. You are a functional illiterate. Time to buy a vowel. Sure, Welsh's characters swim in controlled substances just as sperm swim in semen. Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was very rarely sober. The point is that Welsh is the greatest prose stylist of the psychic landscape since old Germs Juice himself. Like Joyce, Welsh's command of the interior swamplands of consciousness is simply f-ing terrifying at times. Marabou Stork Nightmares & Filth (with the Pig on the cover) were key examples. I was in an altered mental state for a month after reading those two. It wasn't pretty, but it felt real. And yet Welsh has such a command of dialogue that this psychic miasma becomes a sort of exterior monologue- when he wants it to. It makes you want to cheer- that the apparently impossible expression can actually be articulated, at least in the books. Maybe this seems easy to you, but it's not. That's the brilliance of it, making it feel really natural. It's like DeNiro- the trick is in the ease & elegance of it, the flow of talk. Porno is a riot- a true comic novel- I laughed myself sick & kicked my cat without really meaning to, it was so funny. I am an American, but I learned Scottish just so I could read Irvine Welsh...go on with it, mate.

Rating:
Summary: a wee bit ay editin' would've bin barry
Review: Nice to see the gang back, but 420 pages was entirely too long. Trainspotting's brilliance lay in it's tightness -- nothing was wasted. Here, entire chapters cruise by with little being accomplished. Welsh is a brilliant writer, and he has his moments here -- notably as he writes through his most horrific creation, Franco Begbie -- but the pace is too languid to provide the energy and brilliance of his earlier work.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and Fun!
Review: Porno, Irvine Welsh's highly entertaining sequel to the cult classic, Trainspotting, reunites the gang as they pursue another get-rich-quick scheme. Before reading Porno though, it would probably help to have read Trainspotting and/or Glue. Porno is a direct sequel to Trainspotting, bringing back virtually all the characters from some ten years earlier, and adding some of the characters from Glue into the mix, most notably 'Juice' Terry Lawson and Rab Birrell. If you're a fan of Welsh or, if you have no aversions to reading about degrading and disgusting situations, and narratives liberally littered with expletives don't faze you, you'll love this book.....if'n ye kin make oot whit a' they gadgies is spraffin' aboot likesay, ken? Also recommended: Fan Man by Kotzwinkle, The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

Rating:
Summary: Another shining example of Welsh's mastery
Review: Possibly the best sequel book ever written. Welsh has and continues to amaze me with his wonderful books. I am proud to say that I have read every novel of his published in the US and will continue to do so. Each book lets the reader escape into a world apart and sucks them into the point that you nearly have to be reacclaimated to the real world when your through reading.

Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: probably not welsh's best, but a fun read. if you liked trainspotting you'll like this one as well.