My old man, your grandad, he used to say to me, 'If you like school you'll love work then live happily ever after.' She don't say nothing to that, just sort of rolls her eyes. I try to explain: – What I mean is that it's your start in life, so you gotta go in with the right attitude. You get out what you put in, don'tcha? She just shrugs and don't say nothing. And I suppose she's right to be a skeptic n all. The stuff about the old man, he said nothing of the kind, I just made that up. Churchillian-style motivational speech, that sort of thing. Reality was, the old boy didn't give a monkey's about what I got up to at school. Yeah, she's right, school was a load of bleedin bollocks.
I read a lot of Irvine Welsh before I joined Goodreads or started this blog, so there's no record anywhere of how much I loved Trainspotting and its prequel Skagboys (I didn't love the sequel Porno quite as much, but I did enjoy being in that world again), or how much I loved an earlier collection of Welsh's short stories, Reheated Cabbage. Kennedy, however, does know how much I love Mr Welsh and she bought me this book while she was in Edmonton, buying it from the used book shop that she knows her Dad and I used to frequent. I can really dig into transgressive fiction if it feels authentic to lived human experience and Welsh is the master of employing the shock of grit and muck to explore serious social issues. But that's not really what's on offer here in If You Liked School, You'll Love Work; a collection of four short stories and a novella, there's no deep dive into psychology or sociology; shocks come for shock's sake; and where Welsh swaps his trademark underclass Scottish dialect for the voice of Americans, he doesn't read as quite believable. Some of these offerings were just okay, some less so, and three stars is a sentimental rounding up. In any case, much love and thanks to Kennedy for picking such an appropriate gift.
The first story, Rattlesnakes, starts this collection off with a bang: A group of three young Americans are driving across the desert after a music festival when their car breaks down in a sand storm. When one is bitten by a rattlesnake ('nuff said about that, but the ensuing scene is classic, squirm-inducing Welsh), the tension is ramped-up. But then, two Mexican immigrants (brought to the States by their older sister to work as gardeners for the rich family she cleans for), who are on the run after the older of the two grows to resent and despise the lazy Americans who expect him to do the work they don't want to, come upon the broken down car and bring a different level of menace to the scene. I'm describing this plot in detail only to make the point that I bet Welsh now regrets making the only two Mexican characters out to be America-hating, gun-toting, could-be rapists and murderers.
The title story is about an ex-pat Scot who runs a bar in the Canary Islands and the various women he tries to sleep with, all while suffering an unexpected visit from his teenage daughter. It was fine. The DOGS of Lincoln Park is about a group of narcissistic young professional women living in Chicago, and I found the whole thing charmless. Miss Arizona is set back in American desert country, and while the plot of this story was a little more interesting (an independent filmmaker forges some surprising relationships while researching a possible film on his mentor), the social commentary was rather predictable:
I distrusted Phoenix, in much the same way as I did all them shabby sunbelt cities with their pop-up business districts, soulless suburban tracts, strip malls, used-car dealerships, and bad homes almost but not quite hidden by palm trees. And then you had the people drying out like old fruit in the sun, brains too fired by heat and routine to remember why they ever did come here in the first place. And that was just the poor. The wealthy folk you only saw under glass; in their malls and motor cars, breathing in the conditioned air that tasted like weak cough medicine. I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs.On a side note: I don't think Americans use the term “motor cars” (or, in an earlier story, refer to “the air con” instead of “the ac”), and slips like that were distracting for me. Also: while I did like the metaphor “this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs” (which is the only quote from this collection “liked” on Goodreads), it doesn't compare to the richness Welsh can evoke when he's writing in dialect:
Darkness faws like a workin hoor's keks: sudden but yet predictable.That last bit is from the book's concluding novella, Kingdom of Fife, and while I did like that one of the main characters, Jason King, narrated his story with a dense Cowdenbeath dialect, I didn't love that his voice alternated with that of Jenni Cahill; a rich local girl who narrates in plain English. Jason is a bit of a loser (twenty-six and unemployed, residing with his Dad, living for cadged Guinness and table-top football at the local), and Jenni is a nineteen-year-old princess of show-jumping (who in her candid thoughts and conversations with her best friend is as narcissistic and shallow as the women from The DOGS of Lincoln Park; I don't get the sense that Mr Welsh much likes the wee lassies of the upperclass), and the disparity of experience and of voice between the pair makes theirs the unlikeliest of love stories. Ultimately, however, Jason King is just a loveable enough loser that you can cheer with him when he and Jenni take a runner for Spain together:
Ah still think ay masel as the King ay Fife, but ah'm a king in exile, voluntary exile, n ah'm in nae hurry tae git back. Ye kin caw it the Kingdom ay Fife if ye like; ah prefer tae cry it the Fiefdom ay King, ya hoor, sir!I could have never read this collection and be no worse off for it, but I don't regret spending some vacation reading time with Irvine Welsh. At least now I know what this is and can put it out of my mind.
