Filth - ISBNLookup.com

Michael Garry Smout

Filth is far more coherent, consistent and better paced. Trainspotting was a collection of connecting anecdotes; Filth is a bona fide novel with a plot. Trainspotting was funny on the surface; Filth is far more sombre...it is a graphically vivid portrayal of class betrayal, misanthropy, and the corruption that comes with unchecked power, revealing far more about human passions than at first obvious and proving that Welsh is no one-book-wonder and far more deft at his art than is often given credit for. -- Barcelona Review

New York Magazine

. . .[R]eading Filth becomes an act of vicarious sadomasochism.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Another scabrous, lurid, blackly comic novel from America's favorite Scottish enfant terrible, this one does for present-day Edinburgh what James Ellroy does for 1950s Los Angeles.

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.

Charles Winecoff

Welsh excels at making his trash-spewing bluecoat peculiarly funny and vulnerable -- and you will never think of the words 'Dame Judi Dench' in the same way ever again. --Entertainment Weekly

New York Magazine

. . .[R]eading Filth becomes an act of vicarious sadomasochism.

Details

Political, dangerous, and more important. . .a completely original, hilarious, and deeply affecting attack on the authoritarian mind.

Daniel Reitz

Caveat emptor: Irvine Welsh's new novel is called Filth, and the title does not mislead. After making a name for himself with Trainspotting, which featured heroin suppositories and filthy toilets, Welsh has, with his latest novel, earned the right to be called our foremost author of excretion.

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

Courtney Weaver

Filth is not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach...I found it....reminiscent of Brett Easton Ellis on a bad holiday in Scotland...some readers...put a high value on shock content. Still others will be titillated... -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

The third and most willfully irreverent novel yet from Scotland's answer to William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., and, arguably, Howard Stern. Here's a long howl of hatred and misogyny uttered at full foul-mouthed throttle by Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh police detective whose investigation of a presumably racially motivated murder only intermittently distracts him from routine pursuits of extramarital sex, illegal drugs, and officially sanctioned mayhem. Though he's nominally a member of the establishment, Bruce has all the qualities one hopes for in an Irvine Welsh character: he's loud, boorish, xenophobic, racist, sexist, alcoholic, stridently profane, and tormented by flaming eczema (afflicting his not-so-private parts). Oh, and there's a tapeworm, which occasionally takes over the narrative when Bruce himself isn't speaking from his gut, as does also estranged wife Carole, a basically normal human who hopes for a reconciliation but doesn't neglect to take a lover in the meantime. This latter fact is skillfully made crucial to the rather busy plot, which is nicely varied by Bruce's embattled relationships with disapproving superiors, Racial Awareness sensitivity training, and the willing wives of his fellow officers.The relentlessly confrontational book comes to raucous life in its more abusive and violent scenes (Bruce's sexual exploitation of a teenaged hooker; a Rabelaisian 'holiday' in Amsterdam; a bit of bestiality, involving Bruce's favorite prostitute and a collie named Angus, that goes hilariously awry).But it founders when Welsh gives his loutish antihero unconvincing moments of reflection ('I feel entrapped by my lust, but when I actually get round to doing it, it justseems so pointless and tedious'), and especially when, in the overcrowded closing pages, the sources of Bruce's pathology are located in his memories of a grotesque father and of a first love who was killed by lightning. Some marvelous writing, but little of substance that Welsh hasn't already done better, notably in Trainspotting (1996) and the superb Marabou Stork Nightmares (1996). One wonders if he has written himself out.