It has been just over 30 years since readers first encountered Trainspotting’s Mark Renton searching for his drugs in an overflowing toilet, and almost as many since Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the scene was seared into the minds of a generation.
Now, Irvine Welsh is continuing the life stories of his iconic characters in a new sequel to the 1993 cult classic.
Men in Love will follow Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie as they try to leave heroin behind and pursue romance.
“I’m really, really excited about bringing these characters back”, said Welsh. While they have appeared in other Trainspotting spin-offs including Porno and Skagboys, Men in Love takes place immediately after Trainspotting ends.
The novel, due out 3 July next year, focuses on a transitional period for the characters, who are in their mid-20s – an “interesting time in the lives of men”, who begin to become “serious about the quest for romance”.
In your mid to late 20s, you also “start to believe in your own mortality for the first time”, said Welsh.
Trainspotting followed the lives of a group of heroin users and their friends living in Edinburgh. At the end of the novel, the group goes to London for a heroin deal – they succeed, but Renton steals the cash and goes to Amsterdam.
Men in Love sees the crew dispersed. Begbie and Spud are in Scotland, but Begbie is in jail most of the time, and Spud is still struggling with heroin addiction. Sick Boy is in London, trying to make his way in the porn world, and Renton is in Amsterdam, wanting to become a club promoter. They have gone from a tight-knit group into being “guys that are quite atomised and finding their own way, but they’re still very much connected”.
The “baggage that they’ve accumulated together,” said Welsh, “isn’t particularly conducive to them forming bonds and proper romance relationships with women.”
The book shows working-class characters “having big emotional lives”, which is not often seen in fiction, said Welsh. Working-class people are “generally just walk-on characters that speak in funny accents and entertain the bourgeoisie who have these rich inner lives and who have all these internal conflicts”.
Men in Love opens in the late 1980s. “It was that time at the end of punk and just before acid house, it was that quite fallow time of Thatcherism,” when the “end of history” thesis was popular, said Welsh. “Of course, that’s really been shown to be nonsense.”
It was an “interesting” time because “we made all these decisions that determine how we live now. We opted on to a neoliberal model which we thought would bring us personal freedom, but through the internet it seems now we’ve created a much more oppressive kind of corporate state than ever.”
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“I know for myself at the time, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve had my fun with punk and with drugs and all that, and I just want to kind of settle down to a nice life,’” said Welsh. “Then acid house came along and completely turned that on its head.”
Welsh “is a master storyteller, and his blazing new novel illuminates the lives of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie and the bonds between them,” said Alex Russell, senior commissioning editor at Jonathan Cape, the imprint of Penguin that is publishing the title. “It is three decades since we first met the Trainspotting crew and they are raring to return next summer.”
An album sharing the novel’s name by Welsh and The Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra will be released simultaneously. “I wanted to do a disco soul album, to extrapolate the emotional goods that you don’t always see in the book” because the characters “are quite hard-edged”, said Welsh. “My books tend to be a bit dark and twisted, but I wanted to show the beauty of love and romance and desire.”
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