i hated it.
my goodreads review:
Dear Irvine Welsh,
I was looking forward to reading The Blade Artist ever since I read that Francis Begbie was making a comeback. The short description at the back of the book said that you had turned Begbie into a famous sculptor (!) living in America. This indicated to me that you would be at your cheeky best. Some questions would be answered. What is Begbie really like? Is he a force of nature? Or just a wanker? How would Begbie deal with gentrified American society and those phony Hollywood celebrities? Has he genuinely changed? Or is it just an act to keep his family and career together? The possibilities were endless.
But somehow your novels that feature American characters or ones that are set in America always end up as clunkers (A Decent Ride was an exception). The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins was full of cliches about American society. Crime was simply one of your worst novels (I cannot remember why). The Blade Artist is your worst novel. Ever.
It started off alright with Begbie taking on those two psychos at the beach to protect his family. But the novel falls apart once Begbie reaches Scotland to attend his son's funeral. His interactions with his alcoholic sister (Elspeth) and her middle class husband were mildly interesting. But the older gangsters like Tyrone and the younger ones like Anton Miller and their turf wars came across as uninspired and hastily written/created. Almost as if a successful Scottish writer now settled in America was pushing out one more novel set in his home town. Frankly, the parts where Begbie turns investigator into his sons death and meets up with gangsters could have been out of books by average American crime fiction writers. You always had this talent to flesh out some sort of humanity out of some of the worst human beings. But Tyrone and Miller are complete nobodies to be sacrificed for Begbie's Clint Eastwood like drive for revenge. The two other female characters apart from Elspeth - Melanie (Begbie's American wife) and Frances (his son's girlfriend) were also quite forgettable. If it weren't for some of the flashbacks about an adolescent Begbie, the book would have been no better than a mildly entertaining American crime fiction novel.
Also, you were silent about everything that is going on in Europe at the moment. The terror attacks, the possibility of the UK exiting the EU, the migrant crisis, the rise of right-wing nationalist parties etc. I am sure an unfriendly alpha male like Begbie would have had some interesting things to say about mass migration and Islam. Begbie is not someone who ever struck me as being a liberal.
Yet, you made Begbie mouth banalities like - "Funny how a prime minister can condemn a whole generation ay bairns tae a future ay poverty, or gie the order tae wipe out Iraqi women and children in a phoney war, and they WAFFLEs get described as great men ay history." This is how Begbie justifies his own actions. And in the same breath Begbie says - "Dinnae get me wrong, ah'm no a social service, any WAFFLE ah've done is only been for ma ain satisfaction." Of course, it is possible that life with a woman like Melanie might have changed Begbie a little. But you were clearly using Begbie as your mouthpiece when you made him say things like - “The truth is that we’ve moved beyond democracy, universality and equality in the eyes of the law and, de facto, embraced a hierarchical, elitist world view.” Jeez! It is true. But it sounded like something George Clooney would say.
Guys like Begbie, Renton, Sickboy and Juice Terry are from a generation of working class people that was crushed by Margaret Thatcher's policies (you alluded to this in Skagboys). They turned to drugs and alcohol in the 90s. But there was something about these guys that separated them from weaker men like Tommy (from Trainspotting) or Spud Murphy who destroyed their lives. The likes of Begbie and Renton had an uncanny survival instinct that helped them see through the bullshit and get their lives back in order. That seems to be the point of the sequels to many of your earlier novels. In The Blade Artist, Begbie returns to his hometown where people he used to know have destroyed themselves with drugs and booze. But he is beyond all that now. He has figured it all out and carved a place for himself in the world. Entirely on his own terms. He is not a tired bourgeois worker like Elspeth's husband or a working class drug addict with no future (your novels always categorize these characters and their attitudes).
But frankly Irvine, a novel like Michel Houellebecq's Submission undermines anything that you have written in the last 10 years. Even your idol Iggy Pop spoke about Houellebecq as one of the few important writers in the world. While your books are still very funny, the attitudes and commentary are trite and commonplace. Your tendency to provoke is now limited to writing funny sex scenes or preposterous violence (like in this novel). What happened to all that enlightening commentary spewed by the characters in Trainspotting? I guess all of them grew up. You grew up too. And now you have a career.
Don't get me wrong. You attempted something very daring with The Blade Artist. I would still pre-order your next book. How about a full length novel about Spud Murphy?
