Irvine Welsh's typically abrasive new novel about an oversexed cabbie returns to his native 'Embra'
Novelist Irvine Welsh Photo: Martin Pope
In a prickly foreword to a new edition of Bret Easton Ellis's violent satire American Psycho (1991), Irvine Welsh dismisses objections to the novel's portrait of misogyny as coming from "a place of politics, not art".
Did he also have his own critics in mind? His 1993 debut, Trainspotting, about benefit cheats on heroin, narrowly missed the Booker shortlist when it split the jury over his representation of women, minor characters relentlessly degraded by the male leads.
Although Welsh has long since left behind Trainspotting's nihilism for warmer-hearted (but equally mucky) comic capers, he still rejects what someone in his new novel calls "plitikill kirrectniss". A Decent Ride marks the return of Juice Terry, the oversexed cabbie first seen in Glue (2001), whose motto for dealing with "birds" (aka "rides" or "fanny") runs: "F--- off means naw, naw means mibbe, mibbe means aye n aye means anal. Guaranteed!"
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