The Long Knives (The CRIME series, 2)

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A critical consensus has built up over the years that there is Good Irvine Welsh and there is Bad Irvine Welsh. Good Irvine encompasses such generation-defining works as Trainspotting, The Acid House and Filth, while Bad Irvine covers such sloppy, repetitive, self-parodic novels as A Decent Ride and the many sequels and prequels to Trainspotting. His 2008 novel Crime, which follows the exploits of Edinburgh detective Ray Lennox as he hunts down paedophiles in Florida, was definitely Good Irvine, with its contorted moral dilemmas, fast-paced action and rich characterisation. Recently adapted into a television drama, Crime was the first part of a proposed trilogy centred on Lennox. The Long Knives is the second instalment. It’s definitely Good Irvine.

I think people will stop paying bills. I think if we get a really hot summer next year people will be out on the streets. We’re in the process of an ongoing revolution; it’s just happening very slowly.” If I’m just sitting there typing away thinking ‘this is nice, this is nice’ and nothing’s happening, then nothing’s going to happen for the reader either,” he said. Dopo un promettente revival con gli ultimi due romanzi ( L’artista del coltello[2016] e Morto che Cammina [2018]), Welsh mette ancora da parte, speriamo provvisoriamente, i personaggi che gli hanno conferito successo, fama e fans appassionati, cioè la banda di Trainspotting, seguiti e dintorni… Eventually Welsh thought, why not? Teaming up with his music partner Steve Mac, “we smashed out these songs. We did it in two weeks basically. We did about 12 songs. They were blues and disco and jazz and country and western. We usually do acid techno.”I love writing novels but I’ve never found it enough. I’ve always been involved with music. When Trainspotting took off I got right into film because the opportunity came up and now it’s TV. Our November/December issue i s available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.

You’re cut away from the rest of the world so you can concentrate on love and art, which are the only things you really want to concentrate on anyway,” he said.

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I really got into the actors and how they’re performing, so I thought ‘I’ll just sandwich another book in’ and that’s become the season. The Long Knives’ is the second novel in which DI Ray Lennox is the main protagonist, the first being the novel ‘Crime’ and he also featured in the novel ‘Filth’ too. I had read Filth but hadn’t read ‘Crime’ prior to reading this novel, as it can be read as as a stand alone but I actually went and watched the television series, ‘Crime’ which was based on that novel and it gave me a bit of a flavour of what had went on prior to the events in this outing. Suscita inoltre un certo fastidio o quanto meno un distacco di partecipazione (ma forse è solo una mia personale idiosincrasia…) il fatto che il nocciolo dell’intera trama poliziesca sia costruito sul tema dei crimini sessuali più disumani, la violenza sui minori e la redenzione affidata a una vendetta perseguita per anni e messa in atto con una ferocia non inferiore a quella dei criminali primari.

We had known each other vaguely because I used to go into her pub. There was nothing to do, so we started doing these walks together and a romance developed. It was nice. A really lovely time.” No, I’ve learned how to do that down the years. I didn’t know how to write a novel when I wrote Trainspotting. I had these loose stories that seemed to be heading somewhere; the start was going on too much about how they became junkies, so I cut it and went straight into their world and ended it with a heist ending I thought would be dramatic. Then I went on to The Acid House – more stories. Marabou Stork Nightmares was my first attempt at a conventional novel but it turned out quite experimental. I was just messing around in those first few books. They were probably the best ones, because then you learn how to write and you end up writing like everybody else [laughs].You have all these different entry points,” Welsh says. “And I think for a lot of people who have been through a radical trans experience there is an exhaustion. ‘We’ve had to fight all these battles, both with the world, but also internally, to get to this point. We just don’t want to f****** talk about it any more in our lives.’ Ma, a prescindere da ogni considerazione, I lunghi coltelli è un romanzo che mette in discussione ogni valore morale e che punta a squarciarti la pancia (e non solo...) a causa dei tuoi errori e delle tue debolezze. Irvine Welsh travalica i confini del bene e del male per raccontare - a modo suo - una storia fatta di dolore, rabbia e ingiustizia, dove i buoni diventano cattivi perché tutti sono andati troppo oltre e non si torna più indietro. And, he adds, working out makes it easier to move around. “We get older and we get slower and we get stiffer and our bodies slow down. But I think you just have to up your game a little bit and keep yourself active and busy. Nobody seems to have a high opinion of them now. Really, what is their role? Is it to take the resources of the country and give it to a trans-national elite and skim off some stuff on the way for their friends and cronies? That’s what we expect of politicians. We don’t really expect them to do anything for us. At the end of the novel, Welsh even tries to give up on understanding any of it, with one of the detectives having the revelation that all this trans stuff is 'a distraction, mate, a petty diversion from the real farking issues.' Really he would've been better off focusing on all the stuff about elite Tory abusers. He had some good lines about all of that, but it felt like his heart wasn't really in it, which is strange and sad because his previous work he was really able to dig into this kind of thing.