Word On Books by Jeremy Fenton
Glue

By Irvine Welsh, Published by Jonathan Cape

It's hard to tell these days whether Irvine Welsh is better known as a writer capable of demonstrating the formidable narrative powers that gave us Trainspotting, or that Scottish bloke who's willing to ingest every drug known to humanity (plus a few that probably aren't) in the name of art and a good time.

While many authors like to let their work speak for itself, Welsh has made a career out of being associated with the lifestyles he writes about. Call it street credibility, or plain foolishness (he doesn't look that well in photographs) - there's no doubt that his celebrity status owes as much to fine writing as it does to excess.

Perhaps I'm being a little unfair on Welsh, as he's reportedly been pursuing a cleaner lifestyle since the beginning of this year - though even he doesn't know for how long this new-found abstinence will last.

His latest book Glue, finds him back on familiar literary stomping grounds. Drugs, gutter-level language and hopelessness ahead.

Glue tells the "scabrous" tale of four Edinburgh 'schemies' (someone who grew up on a housing scheme) from boyhood to around the age of 30. As you would expect (from the location and the author) life is not always a bed of roses for Juice Terry, Billy the Boxer, Carl the Milky Bar Kid and Gally as they make their way through the 70s, 80s and 90s.

That's not to say that there isn't a fair amount of humour (most of it very black) and the odd patch of uplifting prose in Glue (the title actually relates to the substance that holds the four together). But ultimately it feels like we've been there before, and in far more satisfying reads.

Predictably for a Welsh book, much of the dialect is an accurate representation of the Scottish spoken word. Difficult to begin with, but worth persevering for the veracity it gives to its speakers (Trainspotting without the dialect intact would have been a sorrier experience by half). I mention this jist soas ye ken what tae expect.

Strangely the publishers have included a blurb inside the front cover that can be taken as a warning of the difficulties readers will encounter, or perhaps it was Welsh himself who thought the caution appropriate? Whatever the case, the words - despite its scale and ambition - are not standard book jacket-blurb. At least no one can say that they didn't bring it on themselves.

It's a big book (literally, at 469 pages) with a meandering core, not altogether unreadable, but hardly as gripping as that from which its title is taken.

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