John Mullan on the role of morality in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting
Look at the websites where fans of Irvine Welsh's novel discuss the book, and you will find sentiments such as this: "You may feel that the characters are total scum, but you can't help but empathise with them." A paradox, it seems. Yet we can take any amount of bad behaviour from characters in novels, provided some of them understand what bad behaviour is. Welsh's characters do understand. "The score is ah'm looking eftir numero uno," Sick Boy tells Mark, but few can sincerely stick to this Hobbesian philosophy. Indeed, each character's baseness seems designed to offend the sensibilities of another. As Mark hears Sick Boy, desperate for drug money, negotiate the sale of a junky girlfriend's sexual favours to a disgusting old drunk, he discovers the cowardice of conscience. "Ah felt sickened at what he'd come tae, what we'd come tae." Mark, Welsh's main narrator, is notably ready with moral distinctions. "Ah've done loads ay things in ma time thit ah'm no proud, ay, but ah've nivir hit a burd," he tells us, unnecessarily.His narration often offers odd sentiments to accompany what you might think low behaviour. At the wake for his brother, killed as a soldier in Ulster, he has sex with his brother's pregnant girlfriend. "If only Billy could see us now, ah'm thinkin, but in a surprisingly reverential way." This seems in earnest, as if he catches himself in the pursuit of solace rather than appetite. The consciences of the narrators are always catching them out. An early episode describes the cot death of Lesley's baby, Dawn. Mark and his fellow addicts, lying around the flat, dimly recognise through the heroin haze what has happened and struggle not to hold themselves responsible. There is no clear indication that the baby's death is exactly their fault, but recollections of it haunt their narratives later in the book. Only Begbie's narration is truly amoral.
No wonder that Welsh invents the terrifying Begbie, a character next to whom all others seem hampered by scruples. We know that he is entirely without compunction or sympathy because he tells us so in the portions of narration allotted to him. When his heavily pregnant girlfriend begs him not to leave her, she gets what she should expect. "Ah punches it in the fuckin mooth, n boots it in the fuckin fanny, n the cunt faws tae the flair, moanin away." He is always there to do something that others flinch from. He sends even the dim-witted Spud into spirals of moral disgust. He expends so much violence robbing an American tourist in Edinburgh's pastorally named Meadows, that Spud, his accomplice, is shocked. "Ugly, ugly, ugly man, likesay, ken . . . Ah lie in bed n likes, shudder." Normally inarticulate to a fault, Spud uses a moralist's metaphor for what has been done to him by making him join in the attack: "He raped us, likesay, raped us aw that night."
Begbie's language is violently vile, but some of the characters use obscene vocabulary even when they are saying gentle things. "One of the nicest fuckin cunts ye could hope tae meet," maunders one character as he drunkenly recalls a dead acquaintance. (Deaths and wakes and funerals regularly punctuate the novel.) Swearing is an instinct. It even has democratic pretensions, the language of everyman. "Ah've hud, and brushed oaf, such reverses in the past. Every cunt has." The first sentence is, after all, something like educated English, however pronounced. Several of the narrators sneak complex vocabulary into their narratives - unheard, as it were, by the other characters. "If ah wis a wee bit more, what's the word? Duplicitous . . ." Tommy tells us.
Many such bursts of articulacy serve for self-condemnation. In one odd interlude, we are given the dialogue between Mark and a psychiatrist, Dr Forbes, in which our narrator explains that he had found himself seeing women "purely as a means ay satisfying ma sexual urges", and so had thought it "mair honest tae go tae a prostitute . . . Ah wis quite a moral fucker in these days." Is this mockery? Of the attentive psychiatrist, perhaps - but the character's self-analysis is also believable even to himself. Even disgusting language is often an expression of self-disgust. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, orgasm may be "the springing of his seed", but not in Trainspotting: at the end of one coupling, Mark blankly tells us "Ah blurt oot ma muck n pull oot." He is revolted as much as revolting. Seen closely enough, much of the book is about characters failing not to feel bad about what they've done.
· John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. He and Irvine Welsh will be discussing the novel on June 12 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Doors open at 6.30pm and entry costs £8. Returns only. Email book.club@guardian.co.uk or phone 020 7886 9281.