36-432: The Acid House is a 1994 book by Irvine Welsh , later made into a film of the same name . It is a collection of 22 short stories, with each story (between three and 20 pages) featuring a new set of characters and scenarios. The 1998 film, The Acid House , directed by Paul McGuigan , dramatizes 3 of the 22 stories from the book - "The Granton Star Cause", "A Soft Touch", and "The Acid House". This article about
72-454: A 15-minute film for Gene 's song "Is It Over" which is taken from the album Libertine . In 2006 he directed a short film to accompany the track " Atlantic " from Keane 's album Under the Iron Sea . Welsh directed his first short dramatic film, NUTS , which he co-wrote with Cavanagh. The film features Joe McKinney as a man dealing with testicular cancer in post Celtic tiger Ireland. It
108-567: A carpet salesman; he died when Welsh was 25. Welsh left Ainslie Park High School when he was 16 and then completed a City and Guilds course in electrical engineering. He became an apprentice TV repairman until an electric shock persuaded him to move on to a series of other jobs. He left Edinburgh for the London punk scene in 1978, where he played guitar and sang in The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13. A series of arrests for petty crimes and finally
144-455: A collection of short stories published in the 1990s is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1958) is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name . He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films. Irvine Welsh was born in Leith ,
180-507: A coma. One day, the gang's rape victim visits him in the hospital. She tells him that she has been murdering her rapists one by one, and now she has come for him, revealing that he was by far the most brutal. She then cuts off his penis and stabs him to death. In his final moments, Strang realizes that the only person he has ever really hated is himself, and makes peace with everyone he has wronged and who has wronged him. The novel's other, more stream-of-consciousness narrative, intertwined with
216-440: A few months later when he meets a woman and genuinely feels love for the first time. Around the same time he begins to take ecstasy , and befriends his gay half-brother. His happiness is short-lived, however; the memory of what he has done continues to haunt him, and his depression soon completely engulfs him, taking him away from his lover and his drug-driven escapism. He attempts suicide by asphyxiation, but survives, putting him in
252-498: A grim tale of thugs and schemes in sub-working class Scotland and a hallucinatory adventure tale set in South Africa. His next book, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (1996), became his most high-profile work since Trainspotting , released in the wave of publicity surrounding the film. It consists of three unconnected novellas : the first, Lorraine Goes To Livingston , is a bawdy satire of classic British romance novels ,
288-713: A nerdy co-worker. In 2007, Welsh published If You Liked School You'll Love Work , his first collection of short stories in over a decade. Welsh contributed a novella called Contamination to The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa . Welsh, Ian Rankin , and Alexander McCall Smith each contributed a short story for the One City compilation published in 2005 in benefit of the One City Trust for social inclusion in Edinburgh. In Crime , Ray Lennox (from Welsh's previous work, Filth )
324-443: A problem with energy, wit or compassion. Finding the right form for all this incendiary talent might prove trickier." Tonkin suggests that Welsh does not know what to do with his fatalism, but that the story "gives a shockingly funny shape to that impasse". As in many of Welsh's novels, there are many allusions to music and underground youth culture, especially rave culture , punk rock , comic books, and football hooliganism. There
360-538: A series of linked short stories, the book is also interspersed with brief commentaries on contemporary British politics. In particular, the consequences of the destruction of industry in the northern cities are drawn for the young working class. His eighth novel, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins , was published in May 2014 and his ninth novel titled A Decent Ride was published by Vintage Books in April 2015. The latter work featured
396-579: A suspended sentence for trashing a North London community centre inspired Welsh to correct his ways. He worked for Hackney Council in London and studied computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission . Welsh returned to Edinburgh in the late 1980s, where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He then studied for an MBA at Heriot-Watt University . Welsh has published eleven novels and four collections of short stories. His first novel , Trainspotting ,
SECTION 10
#1732876575451432-512: Is an experimental novel by Irvine Welsh , and his second novel, published in the UK in 1995. The book's narrative is split into two styles: a conventional first-person account of the past and a more surreal , stream-of-consciousness account of an otherworldly present. Like many of Welsh's novels, it is written in Edinburgh Scots dialect . The plot consists of the memories and hallucinations of
468-740: Is currently available on ITV and ITVX. As well as fiction, Irvine Welsh has written several stage plays, including Headstate , You'll Have Had Your Hole , and the musical Blackpool , which featured original songs by Vic Godard of the Subway Sect . He co-authored Babylon Heights with his screen writing partner Dean Cavanagh . The play premiered in San Francisco at the Exit Theatre and made its European première in Dublin , at The Mill Theatre Dundrum , directed by Graham Cantwell . The plot revolves around
504-464: Is dominated by the question of working class and Scottish identity in the period spanning the 1960s to the present day. Within this, he explores the rise and fall of the council housing scheme, denial of opportunity, low-paid work, unemployment , social assistance , sectarianism , football , hooliganism , sex, suppressed homosexuality , dance clubs, freemasonry , Irish republicanism , sodomy , class divisions, emigration and, perhaps most of all,
540-580: Is imposed over the top of the protagonist's own internal monologue (the worm's host), visibly depicting the tapeworm's voracious appetite, much like the "Climax of Voices" in Gray's novel 1982, Janine . Welsh married Beth Quinn in 2005, and in 2018 announced that they were divorcing. They had lived together in the Lakeview neighbourhood of Chicago , USA, since 2009. Prior to Chicago, he lived in Dublin. In 2018, he
576-501: Is jailed for the violent assault of a taxi driver and his uncle is killed in a terrorist bombing, the Strangs are forced to return to Scotland, a mere 18 months after they left. Strang grows into a violent, misogynistic thug. He maintains a full-time job as a systems analyst for the fictional investment group, "Scottish Spinsters" (a reference to Scottish Widows ). He joins a gang of football hooligans who are attached to Hibernian F.C. ,
612-428: Is known for writing in his native Edinburgh dialect of Scots . He generally ignores the traditional conventions of literary Scots, used for example by Allan Ramsay , Robert Fergusson , Robert Burns , Robert Louis Stevenson , and James Orr . Instead, he transcribes dialects phonetically. Like Alasdair Gray before him, Welsh also experiments with typography . In the novel Filth , the tapeworm's internal monologue
648-571: Is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. The story takes place in Florida. Welsh's prequel to Trainspotting , titled Skagboys , was published in 2012. Set in Leith in the early 1980s, it introduces the Trainspotting characters and follows them as they fall into heroin addiction. Given as
684-545: The Capital City Service , and led by the fearsome Lexo. Strang enjoys his life as a "top boy," feared by the entire town, until the gang kidnaps a young woman who rejected their advances and gang rapes her; Strang is horrified but also takes an active part in her rape, justifying it to himself by contemplating how the gang would turn on him if he didn't. The gang evades prison, but Strang is stricken with guilt and withdraws completely into depression . He briefly revives
720-502: The marabou stork . When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" ( local authority housing ) in Muirhouse , Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. When Strang is 12, he and his family relocate to apartheid -era South Africa, where he is repeatedly molested by his uncle. After his father
756-492: The behind-the-scenes antics of a group of Munchkins on the set of The Wizard of Oz . The production included the use of oversized sets with actors of regular stature. Cavanagh and Welsh have also collaborated on screenplays. The Meat Trade is based on the 19th-century West Port murders . Despite the historical source material, Welsh has set the story in the familiar confines of present-day Edinburgh, with Burke and Hare depicted as brothers who steal human organs to meet
SECTION 20
#1732876575451792-557: The demands of the global transplant market. Wedding Belles , a film made for Channel 4 that was written by Welsh and Cavanagh, aired at the end of March 2007. The film centres around the lives of four young women, who are played by Michelle Gomez , Shirley Henderson , Shauna MacDonald , and Kathleen McDermot. Wedding Belles was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA and was subsequently sold to TV channels in Canada and Europe. Welsh has directed several short films for bands. In 2001 he directed
828-855: The humour, prejudices and axioms of the Scots. Sam Leith , writing in the Financial Times , argues that: "Welsh's concerns are with sin and salvation, with the exercise of free will and with the individual soul. He's much more interested in teleology than sociology." Welsh's novels share characters, giving the feel of a "shared universe" within his writing. For example, characters from Trainspotting make cameo appearances in The Acid House , Marabou Stork Nightmares , Ecstasy , Filth , and slightly larger appearances in Glue , whose characters then appear in Porno . Welsh
864-462: The impact of pornography on the individuals involved in producing it, as well as society as a whole, and the impact of aging and maturity in individuals against their will. The book is set just after the opening of the new Scottish Parliament. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), deals with a young, alcoholic civil servant who finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on his nemesis,
900-459: The port area of the Scottish capital Edinburgh . He states that he was born in 1958, though according to Glasgow police, his birth record is dated around 1951. When he was four, his family moved to Muirhouse , in Edinburgh, where they stayed in local housing schemes . His mother worked as a waitress. His father was a dock worker in Leith until bad health forced him to stop, after which he became
936-447: The protagonist, Roy Strang, making him an extreme example of an unreliable narrator . Roy Strang narrates the book from an (at first) unexplained coma, which he has been in for the previous two years. His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for
972-556: The returning character 'Juice' Terry Lawson (previously from Glue ). Welsh's tenth novel, released in April 2016, The Blade Artist , centres around a seemingly rehabilitated Francis Begbie now living in California with a wife and children. It was shortlisted for the Fiction Book of the Year at Saltire Literary Awards 2016. A sequel to The Blade Artist , entitled Dead Men's Trousers ,
1008-436: The same themes; a touch of fantasy is apparent in stories such as The Acid House , where the minds of a baby and a drug user swap bodies, or The Granton Star Cause , where God transforms a man into a fly as punishment for wasting his life. Welsh adapted three of the stories for a later film of the same name , in which he also appeared. Welsh's third book (and second novel), Marabou Stork Nightmares , alternates between
1044-424: The second, Fortune's Always Hiding , is a revenge story involving thalidomide and the third, The Undefeated , is a sly, subtle romance between a young woman dissatisfied with the confines of her suburban life and an aging clubgoer. A corrupt police officer and his tapeworm served as the narrators for his third novel, Filth (1998). The main character of Filth was a vicious sociopathic policeman. The novel
1080-455: The story of Strang's past, takes place in the fantasy world he creates for himself in the coma. At first a bizarre but rousing adventure, it gradually becomes darker as Strang reveals the uglier parts of his life and personality, involving surreal images of brutality and sexual violence. Boyd Tonkin at The Observer praises Welsh for the power of his fiction and writes: "Here was a voice, out of Edinburgh by way of Hades, that would never have
1116-441: Was adapted as a play, and a film adaptation , directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge , was released in 1996. Welsh appeared in the film in the minor role of drug dealer Mikey Forrester. Next, Welsh released The Acid House , a collection of short stories from Rebel Inc. , New Writing Scotland and other sources. Many of the stories take place in and around the housing schemes from Trainspotting , and employ many of
The Acid House - Misplaced Pages Continue
1152-435: Was adapted to a film of the same name in 2013. Glue (2001) was a return to the locations, themes and episodic form of Trainspotting , telling the stories of four characters spanning several decades in their lives and the bonds that held them together. Having revisited some of them in passing in Glue , Welsh brought most of the Trainspotting characters back for a sequel, Porno , in 2002. In this book Welsh explores
1188-475: Was living in Miami , USA. In 2022, he married Emma Currie, an actor and sister of Scottish musician Momus . In Welsh's early 20s, he was addicted to heroin for 18 months while playing in punk-rock bands moving between Edinburgh and London. Welsh is an avid supporter of Hibernian F.C. and of Scottish independence . Source: Critical studies Marabou Stork Nightmares Marabou Stork Nightmares
1224-413: Was published in 1993. Set in the mid-1980s, it uses a series of non-linear and loosely connected short-stories to tell the story of a group of characters tied together by decaying friendships, heroin addiction and stabs at escape from the oppressive boredom and brutality of their lives in the social housing schemes. It was released to shock and outrage in some circles and great acclaim in others. It
1260-425: Was released in 2007. Welsh co-directed "The Right to liberty", a chapter of the documentary film The New Ten Commandments , in 2008. In 2009 Welsh directed the film Good Arrows (co-directed by Helen Grace). It was written by Welsh and Cavanagh. The film is about a darts player who suffers from depression which causes him to lose his skill. As well as recreational drug use , Welsh's fiction and non-fiction
1296-402: Was released on 29 March 2018, and sees Mark Renton, Sick Boy, and Spud reuniting with Francis Begbie. In 2021, a TV adaptation of Crime was launched in the UK on BritBox as a six-episode series starring Dougray Scott as detective Lennox. Welsh worked on the project with Dean Cavanagh . This was the first TV adaptation of a book by Welsh. A second six-episode series has since been made and
#450549