Mystery with too many words

Tag : burnt-out print
JOHN CONNOLLY
FICTION: The author of 'Trainspotting' is still struggling to match thepower of that massively successful novel - but he's getting closer,writes John Connolly .
WHEN IT WAS sometimes suggested to the late Joseph Heller that hehad never written a better novel than Catch-22, he would generallyreply that neither had anybody else. Whether that was true or nothardly mattered; it was Heller's way of dealing with the fact thathe was one of a small, possibly cursed band of writers whose entireoutput has been overshadowed by a single book
Irvine Welsh is similarly afflicted, in his case by his 1993 novelTrainspotting. That book came to be associated with a particularstage in British cultural life, the Cool Brittania era of the mid-to late 1990s: Britpop; Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit on thecover of Vanity Fair draped in a Union Jack bedspread; and assortedfilm, music and literary types all "'avin it large". To be fair,that connection wasn't entirely Welsh's fault. His novel was adaring, funny slice of drug noir, heavy with the argot of Leith,unflinching (and, let's be honest, rather rejoicing) in itsdepiction of the depths to which its heroin-addicted centralcharacters were prepared to sink for a fix. When it was filmed byDanny Boyle, Welsh's fine work became inseparable from the movie'sorange-and-white advertising campaign, its ubiquitous soundtrack ofIggy Pop and Underworld, and an overall cultural legacy that hasdated badly.
In the years since, Welsh seems to have struggled somewhat with thelegacy of Trainspotting, as any writer would. He attempted asequel, Porno, and is now rumoured to be working on a prequel, buteverything that was admirable about the earlier work was missing inits successor, and all that was worst about Welsh's writing came tothe fore. Porno was squalid and genuinely nasty where Trainspottingwas hard-edged and visceral, and while there have been interestingbooks since then, particularly Filth, they've been easier to admirethan to like.
Now comes Crime, which takes a relatively minor character fromFilth and pushes him to centre-stage. Ray Lennox is a burnt-outEdinburgh copper who travels to Florida with his fiancée aftera particularly disturbing case involving a paedophile and hismurdered victim. In Miami, Ray, still struggling with his demons,not least those of his own troubled youth, finds himself protectinganother little girl, a 10-year-old named Tianna, from an organisedband of sexual predators. As Ray himself would put it, pretty soonhe's knee-deep in nonces.
This is, as its title announces, a genre experiment, tinged with alittle irony, like naming your latest brand of soup simply "SOUP".As Lennox comments of a British gangster movie: "It was nonsense,of course, like most crime in fiction and on television, but itkept the action moving along. It entertained."
Genre conventions offer literary writers both significantadvantages (structure, momentum and, frankly, the promise of somehard cash in return for increased sales) and potential pitfalls,the latter usually a result of their failure to take the genre inquestion seriously. Occasionally, though, their literarycredentials liberate such writers from the expectations thatreaders might have of a more mainstream genre novel, allowing themto create something startlingly different while remaining, for themost part, within the structures of their adopted form.
WELSH DOESN'T MANAGE to do anything particularly interesting orinnovative with the form, but Crime is still his most entertainingbook in years, if that's the right word for a novel that deals withpaedophilia, even if it does so with admirable restraint. There isa sweetness at the core of the book that one might not haveimmediately associated with Welsh, and the scenes between Lennoxand his pre-adolescent charge are both touching and funny, despiteTianna never quite sounding like the child she is supposed to be.
Crime also manages to be gripping, but that is despite, rather thanbecause of, the writer's best efforts, for the pacing is repeatedlyundermined by his compulsion to show off his literary credentials.The economy of style required to sustain tension does not comenaturally to him, and his reluctance to use one word when there are10 much longer words available tends to cause the narrative to sagunder the additional weight. This problem is compounded by hisdecision to write all of the flashback chapters in the secondperson singular, and then to insert them at often inappropriatemoments, most irritatingly immediately after Ray sets out toconfront the predators at their lair. Finally, his ear for Americanspeech is slightly off - he commits the common error of using thephrase "y'all" when referring to an individual - so that only theScottish characters really seem to come alive on the page, whilesome of the American dialogue veers close to parody.
This is far from being a bad novel, but it is a frustrating one.What is done well in the book has been done just as well by genrewriters, but they would not make the mistakes that Welsh has madein terms of pacing and overwriting. It is, in its way, the verydefinition of a literary crime novel: a mystery with too manywords.
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John Connolly's latest thriller, The Reapers, was recentlypublished by Hodder & Stoughton
Crime, By Irvine Welsh, Jonathan Cape, 344pp. £12.99
© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times