Filth

That’s the beauty aboot being polis: it doesnae really matter whether or not everybody hates you, as long as they’re civil tae your face and can put up a good front. You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.

That's about the longest "clean" quote you can pull from Detective Sergeant Bruce "Robbo" Robertson's filthy ramblings: he's a sexist, racist, womanizing alcoholic who only finds pleasure in "the games" (messing with people's heads) and "the craft" (his Masonic Lodge). Stewing in squalor since his wife and daughter left him, Bruce's body begins to eat away at him -- with creeping eczema below the belt and at least one tapeworm inside his belly -- and as the story progresses, his mind begins to decay, too. It's a wild and utterly filthy ride, and as with other Irvine Welsh books, I was completely onboard, from beginning to punch-in-the-guts end.

As Filth opens, the Special Crimes detective is meant to be solving the brutal murder of an African tourist (and son of a Diplomat) , but even though he is angling for a promotion to Detective Inspector, Bruce spends his days doing anything but policework (hanging out in bars and brothels, gorging on porn and baked goods) but feeling justified in filling out overtime forms for the time he spends pubcrawling in the evenings. He has the charisma and calculating skills of a true psychopath: every woman wants to be with him and every man wants to be him and Bruce uses his cruel gifts to ruin the lives of everyone around him. His language is crude and slang-filled but he knows how to edit and polish himself when the situation calls for it -- whether manipulating his boss or a lover, Bruce's brain and tongue make him the puppet-master.

Bruce is a bad, bad man, and yet…Welsh makes him sympathetic. As his body and mind deteriorate, as the tapeworm in his guts grows in size and self-awareness, it's the parasite that gets to the root of its host's misery and brings forward all of Bruce's repressed memories:

Can you taste it Bruce? Can you taste the filth, the dirt, the oily blackness of that fossil fuel in our mouth as you choke and gag and spit it out? Do you still hear his voice in your head urging you to eat? Eat, eat, eat. Your mother's cries. Do you hear them? You should be Bruce. Because I know that it's never left you alone. Now you can eat what you want to eat. For me, for you, for all the others. Now you can consume to your heart's content or your soul's destruction, whichever comes first. So eat.

And I must admit that in the middle of this book, the tapeworm parts seemed a little gimmicky, but by the end, I felt the book couldn't have been told any other way. This is the ultimate in transgressive fiction -- Bruce can't help but be who he is, and if society is appalled by what he is, then society must take responsibility for creating him. He's not a monster, but he is sick -- and no matter how much sex and drugs and food he greedily consumes, he finds no pleasure in any of it. Shopping at Christmas, Bruce has an existential crisis that I found touching and truthful:

And I feel the hand on my arm and somebody's asking if I am alright sir and I pull away and whip out my ID and snarl : --Police! please me like I please you…and then I move away through the house of the lord this great temple of worship to our God of Christian givingness spendingness consumer expenditureness competetiveness shop and cheat deathness and into the street where the excluded jakeys beg for pennies…

I love the richness of Welsh's storytelling and revisiting the Edinburgh dialect of Trainspotting (even if the "Jackie Trent" and "Dame Judi Dench" rhyming slang took some extra figuring out). And speaking of Trainspotting, anyone who has read that book (or been around during Margaret Thatcher's power years) would get the special irony of a coal miner's son becoming polis. The nonstop cursing might turn off some readers (and the sex and drugs, too, I suppose), but although I don't surround myself with people who speak this way, I was not personally offended. This was my fifth Irvine Welsh book and I look forward to dipping into some others in the future.

Same rules apply, mate.

It's always mind-blowing to me when I read two books at the same time that seem to be somehow linked. I was about to start reading The Rebel Angels for the Lit course when Ken pushed this book into my hand, and I more or less read them together. And who would have thought a book about a fusty Toronto graduate school would have had so much in common with one about a degenerate Edinburgh policeman?

Both books have an obsession with filth and Filth Therapy, overdrinking, controlling the "Wild Mind", examining stool samples, and confronting the Jungian Shadow (for what other role does the tapeworm here play than that?) Both have murder, kinkiness, and men in drag. Both have a character named Urquhart, and The Rebel Angels is written by Robertson Davies while the main character of Filth is named Bruce Robertson. Both speak of having a parasite kill its host. 

These may not seem like much, but reading these books together felt like a weird bit of synchronicity, as though they somehow meant to be read together.