BOOK REVIEW: KEVIN POWERreviews Reheated Cabbageby Irvine Welsh Jonathan Cape 275pp, £18.99
CARDS ON the table: I've never read an Irvine Welsh book before. And Reheated Cabbage, his new collection of short stories, may not have been the best place to start. Most of the pieces offered here were originally published in "those toe-curling Scotsploitation or drugsploitation anthologies that prevailed in the nineties," as Welsh himself forewarns. There is one new novella, I Am Miami, which, in its careening mishmash of styles and themes, manages to dramatise the problems of the volume as a whole. The remainder of the stories veer between the amusing and the semi-coherent, and there is a clear dividing line: when Welsh writes in his Scots brogue, his ear is unparalelled; when he writes ordinary third-person English prose, things get problematic.
The opening story, A Fault on the Line, is an impeccable black comedy done in Edinburgh patois. A wife nags her psychopathic husband until he brings his family to the pub. He's anxious to get home in time to see Hibs play Hearts. The family cross the railway line; the wife's legs are severed by a speeding train. "Jason!" the husband yells at his distraught son. "Dinnae jist fuckin stand thaire, pick up yir ma's legs! Git a hud ay thum!" At the hospital, the husband watches the match in the waiting room, and reflects on his wife's misfortune: "It was her ain fault as well, the fat fuckin c*** . . .
Not thit the game wis anything tae write home aboot, mind you, another fuckin nil-nil draw, bit, eh.”
Most writers are fanatical about removing from their prose unintentional rhymes and assonances – collisions like “the cook took a look at the book”, “the rain in Spain”, etc. But Welsh is perfectly willing to write such phrases as “snaking painstakingly”, “he hissed at his Earth host”, “his easy, if slightly cheesy, grin”, “the frustrations of the situation” and (my favourite), “Mikey’s psyche.”
There are also tautologies – "a still trance," "a depressing sadness," "fraternal brothers" – and dangling clauses: the first sentence of I Am Miamigives us, "Sitting in the lush garden, Albert Black's eyes glinted as he sipped his glass of iced tea," which makes it sound as though Albert Black's eyes are sitting unaccompanied in a lush garden.
Whole paragraphs settle comfortably into cliche: “It had been so good with him, but it couldn’t last. They weren’t able to make the sacrifices they needed to, in order to be together; couldn’t make that commitment and the compromises it entailed that would enable them to move beyond a long-distance relationship,” and so on.
Some sentences need to be puzzled over: “Even as conditioned to its incremental development as he was, sometimes the nastiness of the arbitrary, incongruent nature of the locale jarred with him.” And: “Shelley Thomson convulsed appreciatively that only she could crack this secret code in these eyes . . .”
Nonetheless, there are a couple of decent gags to keep the whole collection ticking merrily along. In The Rosewell Incident, alien invaders derive their knowledge of Earth from one Edinburgh lunatic. Instead of saying, "Take me to your leader," they demand, "Whaire's yir top boys hing oot?"
Here, as elsewhere, it’s the Edinburgh demotic that saves the prose. Reheated Cabbage is an uneven book, messy and sentimental. Will I read more Irvine Welsh? Yes; but only if he sticks to what he does best.
Kevin Power's novel Bad Day in Blackrockwas published last year by the Lilliput Press