Rather than revisiting the early careers of Renton et al, Irvine Welsh would have done better to review his own youthful talent
In the 1990s he exploded on an overwhelmingly upper middle-class industry with a two-fisted, glottal-stop-gobbed roar of defiance from the lumpen-prole gutter. Hilarys and Camillas did their collective nut over a cast of Dickensian ne'er-do-wells updated for the last decade of the 20th century. Here were Bill Sykes, Fagin, Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger re-imagined as duckin', divin', thievin' robbin', "little bit woo, little bit way" criminal (yet curiously sympathetic) scumbags. And all of it delivered in a totally authentic, note-perfect regional argot guaranteed to make university-educated types everywhere go weak at the knees with lust, envy and admiration.
Since when his star has waned somewhat. Critics - particularly those of the mockingly snobbish Private Eye school - have greeted each gritty, urban, sweary subsequent release with increasingly snide accusations of self-parodying onetrickponydom.
"Ah, yes. The dancing monkey. Yes, frightfully clever. Now what else do you do?"
But that's enough about Guy Ritchie.
Meanwhile, Irvine Welsh is writing a prequel to Trainspotting, the hilarious and disgusting 1993 novel about a gang of skag-addled Scottish scamps that made heroin cool for another generation. Actually, it was the movie that did that - featuring as it did the unutterably beautiful Johnny Lee Miller and the puppy-studly Ewan McGregor (who got to have sex in the movie with the only Scottish actor sexier than him, Kelly MacDonald.)
Young middle England - always a sucker for a bit of yer awfentic exciting sexy junkie slumming - loved it (ignoring the fact the only junkies they actually knew in real life weren't really that sexy at all, tending either to sit in the corner at parties drooling out of both corners of their mouths simultaneously, or to mug them savagely on the way back from the cashpoint.)
In the 90s Welsh - alongside Kate Moss, Oasis and the Happy Mondays - was part of the last gasp of prole-chic, before the anti-chav backlash ushered in the world of James Blunt, preppie smugsters Vampire Weekend and "fashion designer- turned-novelist" Bella Pollen whose mega-selling novel about "the broken boozehounds of the British upper class", Hunting Unicorns, is being made into a movie (that almost certainly won't start with a gang of loot-spilling loveable crims being chased through the greasy, soot-stained Victorian streets of a British capital city).
Is Welsh's decision to revisit his best-loved characters a sign of desperation or genius? Edinburgh novelist Ian Rankin, and lecturer in English at the University of Edinburgh Aaron Kelly both told the Times that yes they thought it was a jolly good idea. Me? I never understood why people wanted to read about junkies in the first place. So why on earth would anyone want to read about a bunch of proto-junkies. What's the strap line? "They don't take heroin ... yet."
But to pontificate thus is to chase a butterfly with a hammer. Welsh makes a hugely lucrative living, to use the American vernacular, pulling ideas out of his ass. He is what he's always wanted to be - a literary novelist. He is and has always been a conservative writer, fulfilling all the criteria of "good writing" - a fact often missed by prissy critics blinded by his flurries of fecality.
So what if he's a one trick pony? That never did PG Wodehouse or Tom Sharpe or George MacDonald Frasier or Slade any harm. But there's the rub. Those chaps were more than happy to be considered superb craftsmen. Welsh wants to be considered an artist - a curiously bourgeois ambition.
I wish he'd give it up and allow himself to become the great comic genre novelist he could be if only he'd let himself. In fact, if I could. I'd like to revisit the young Irvine Welsh - before he became addicted to the notion of being a "serious" writer - and advise him to whack out mass-market junkie and physically rotted cop comedies by the score, and not give a damn about what Hilary and Camilla have to say.
Choose life, lad, choose life.
Not that I think he'd listen.