Filth
Irvine Welsh

review by: Brandon Copple
Date: 5/1/03

Irvine Welsh's version of a murder mystery, complete with talking tapeworm.

A couple weeks ago I went to a panel discussion at a writer's forum in Chicago. On the panel sat Irvine Welsh, a brilliant writer who I hoped would be interesting as a speaker. Unfortunately the whole thing was Q&A, full of idiotic questions from creative-writing students.

One of these dippy wannabes asked the panel if images or events from their dreams had ever appeared in their fiction. Welsh's response: 'Most of my dreams are about sex and violence, so aye.'

Nowhere is this more evident than in Filth, published in 1998, four years after his debut classic Trainspotting. Filth has more sex and violence than the Fox fall lineup. The sex is overt, dirty and constant. The violence is much more subtle – and more disturbing.

This book is not for the faint of bowel. It's about Scottish cop, Bruce Robertson, investigating the gruesome murder of a black man on a December night in Edinburgh. The book opens with the murder, presented in graphic detail, but this is one of the few descriptions of a physical act of violence.

Instead, it's the book itself that's violent. Welsh assaults with his rapid, rhythmic prose. He bludgeons with a protagonist who's almost impossible to like. Robertson lies, steals, womanizes, gets drunk, does drugs and masturbates. Now, I've done all of those things (and enjoyed doing them) at one time or another. But Robertson does all of them at once. And more. He listens to Phil Collins. He blackmails the daughter of a prominent defense attorney into a blowjob. He turns colleagues against each other. A compulsive manipulator, he executes on a patient scheme to get in his best friend's wife's pants while getting the friend thrown in jail.

If this is what Irvine dreams about, dude's got issues.

Robertson isn't wholly despicable. He has flashes of kindness and fellow-feeling. It's obvious that something has damaged him. Physically, he's falling apart. He's got a nasty case of eczema on his genitals. And he's got a tapeworm in his gut. The tapeworm comes to life on page 24. After it has grown strong and become sentient, the tapeworm occasionally interrupt Bruce's narration to share its thoughts and observations.

I am not shitting you. The tapeworm narrates. It interrupts the protagonist's thoughts with long soliloquies. It serves as a sort of conscience. The tapeworm is more likeable than its host. It wants desperately to live a meaningful life.

'My problem is that I seem to have quite a simple biological structure with no mechanism for the transference of all my grand and noble thoughts into fine deeds,' the tapeworm laments. It goes on: '...here I am, thinking that this Host, due to greater his complexity is probably an empiricist; believing that intelligence can only be inferred from behaviour, which I know to be false.'

Confined to a life of eating and defecating, dependent on its host for existence, the tapeworm decides to learn everything possible about this man. What better place to do that than from inside his bowels?

So this thing begins soaking up Bruce's life, literally and figuratively. And it lets us in, describing the man's horrid past for us even as we watch his present life fall to pieces.

The tapeworm is a stroke of genius. Not only does it help us understand our brutal protagonist, but it keeps us reading. It's articulate and interesting. It loves life in a way that its host cannot.

Throw in a couple of shocking twists at the end, and you've got a fine book. It's not great: the murder mystery is largely neglected and too much happens too fast at the end. But Filth is funny and compelling from the start. And the language is spectacular. As in Trainspotting, Welsh takes a dialect that's almost impossible to understand, in print or in voice, and makes it sing.

I should say that if you haven't read Welsh, start with Trainspotting. Filth lacks the depth and fundamental sweetness that gave ''Spotting' its power. If it weren't for the talking tapeworm, Filth wouldn't have much soul at all.

As it is, it's worth reading just for the tapeworm.