Welsh begins with a detective's investigation into a murder -- the death of a Ghanaian ambassador's son -- and turns it into a vivid exploration of the detective's own twisted psyche and seedy milieu. Detective Bruce Robertson finds himself preoccupied not with the murder but with his own genital eczema, sadistic sexual antics involving any number of girlfriends and prostitutes, his increasingly chronic appetite for coke, alcohol and greasy fast food and, finally, the parasite that has taken up residence in his intestines.
Welsh effectively plays off Robertson's bilious narration with the coolly insistent voice of another entity -- the tapeworm, who seems to be the repository of Robertson's childhood memories and what is left of his superego -- as the detective spins out of control, wasting himself in increasingly risky games of erotic asphyxiation with one of his mistresses (ex-wife of another detective), machinations to undermine his colleagues, and misanthropic rage: "Criminals, spastics, niggers, strikers, thugs, I don't fucking well care, it all adds up to one thing: something to smash." Even for readers who have mastered Welsh's Scots dialect, such an eloquently nasty narrator can be exhausting.
As in the past, Welsh himself sometimes seems rather compromised as a satirist by the glee he takes in his characters' repulsiveness. Yet if this hypnotic chronicle of moral and psychological ruin (funnier and far more accessible than Welsh's last full-length novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares) fails to charm a wide readership, it will not disappoint devotees.
Feces and other bodily emissions are a collective metaphor for the sick soul of Scotland, inhabited by the underbelly of the chronically grim working class, who shit out their youth, their dreams and their chances of future fulfillment. Filth chronicles the mid-level rise and low-level fall of Bruce Robertson, a detective sergeant in the Edinburgh Police Department, a cop who lives to manipulate and who feasts on a daily diet of violence, betrayal, adultery, racism, sexism, homophobia and autoerotic asphyxiation, with an occasional stint of cross-dressing and bestiality thrown into the mix. To Robertson, the world is made for sell-outs, for those who are smart enough to assess whatever side will be the winner of the moment, and he is determined to prove himself master of this universe. "The same rules apply," he mutters to himself over and over -- his rationalization for attempting to steal whatever opportunity comes by, particularly a coveted promotion to inspector.
Scorning the active investigation into a brutal, racially biased murder involving a diplomat's son, he instead takes a trip to Amsterdam for his annual ritual of whoring and snorting as much coke as he can get up his nose. Back home in Edinburgh, he spends his time having callous sex with any willing or half-willing "lassie," when not obsessing over the wife and child who have (understandably) deserted him and scratching his eczema-inflamed genitalia and buttocks until he induces bleeding. He also has a parasite that, while eating away at the gut of its repellent host, is our key to understanding Robertson and his psychosis. This is a tapeworm that talks; it relates the history of Robertson's horrific childhood and its effects, without which we'd be clueless as to what makes him behave as horribly as he does.
My problem with Filth is its lopsidedness. More than 300 pages are given over to Robertson's repetitive rant, which is, I admit, often viciously funny. But the insights into his character that explain all of this are dispensed with in less than 50. In a rush, one implausible episode piggybacks on another. It's all so crudely recounted and preposterous -- with tales of mistaken identities and people buried alive or struck by lightning -- that it seems as if Welsh is spontaneously plotting as he's writing. But if you have an appreciation for gallows humor and unrepentant nihilism, as I do, you'll probably find Filth a fun read. And the ending, in which the parasite gets the last gasping word, might have made Beckett smile. --Salon Sept. 4, 1998