The Way of All Flesh

During the course of his narration, Bruce Robertson, whose voice carries “Filth,” Irvine Welsh’s third novel, provides a running account of the music he listens to, mostly while driving his Volvo about Edinburgh, less frequently while at home. A sampling of the Robertson playlist looks like this: Deep Purple’s “In Rock”; Ozzy Osborne’s “Ultimate Sin”; Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy”; and the Michael Shenker Group’s “Assault Attack,” “Rock Will Never Die” and “Built to Destroy.”

Then there’s Michael Bolton. Bolton sings, on a “compilation tape I made, ‘How Am I Supposed to Live Without You’ . . . and I sing my heart out.” This is clearly not the musical menu of a man with eclectic tastes, and instead is an indication that Robertson has a hairline fracture in his soul, through which Bolton’s snuggly croon leaks in among all the Metal. Rending the gap in the course of the novel shows a matured Welsh at his best and proves more interesting than discovering the reasons for the fault.

Most American readers first encountered the writing of Welsh in “Trainspotting” (1993). His first novel assaults the inflected rhythms of the native tongue with a Scottish slang that, with patience, furnishes a habitable aural space. In “Trainspotting,” Welsh imagines an often brutal place, roamed by the horse-warped whose imaginations contract to encircle the new fix. Here, the man groping for his junk in an unflushed toilet bowl gags only as he rinses his arm clean at the faucet. Here also is the remarkable intimacy of a young girl’s startled vision of a father risen from the dead; with such combinations, the repugnant in Welsh is often paired with the familiar, making his work impossible to disown. In this and subsequent works, Welsh’s language was a glottal melange of primitive-sounding utterances and postmodern slangs, reduced in the loll of a chemical daze to a spat-up clot of enchanting sounds.

Welsh has retained this distinctive locale in “Filth,” but it reads differently. With this novel, the prose is largely cleansed of lingual obstacles; it reads more breezily and aspires higher than he can manage the slang to say. In the attempt, Welsh risks his known strength for the securities of the conventional novel, in which the author develops a character as if setting a mechanical trap. Plot events and other people meander near, and the trap is sprung near the close; events reach a climax, and our picture of how this character works is completed. Welsh completes and explains Robertson by hauling in childhood trauma and neglectful parents, an unimaginative contemporary cure-all that explains too much and completes too little.

Welsh’s often-captivating novel opens and closes with stingingly specific deaths and is most powerful at the midpoint between them. Nominally, “Filth” is a murder mystery that kicks off with the first death, and the stabilizing, low-maintenance frame of an unsolved killing frees Welsh to write his version of what makes and drives a life. This is the fascination around which “Filth” circles, whose pages pit the unstable character Bruce Robertson against the incompleteness of a murder. If Welsh is faithful to the form, something has to show up to conclude the frolic here. Eventually something does, and Welsh has been better faithless.

The quality of the story’s framing deaths supplies an index to the progress of the novel. The first murder is of an unidentified African man and is rendered in Welsh’s particularly antic carnality. A flourish of “skooshes,” brain spatterings and the involuntary excretions issued with the final throe demonstrate Welsh’s unique, and persuasive, take on literary candor. The first death comes by a blow to the head; the second is a suicide, a blow within the head. This movement, from murder to sucide, is the making, and unmaking, of Bruce Robertson, detective inspector, Edinburgh and Lothians Police, mid-30s, left alone by his wife and daughter, sinking from the start.

Robertson appears first as an effusing body. He is hung over at an office briefing; his “bowels are as greasy as a hoor’s chuff at the end of a shift.” He establishes presence by farting “silently, but [I] move swiftly to the other side of the room,” thereby lacing the confined airspace with the novel’s second whodunit. Later, we learn of Robertson’s testicular and anal eczema, a skin-chipping rash that wafts a trousers-tapped stench and at which he “claw[s] feeling a delicious liberation as the wound tears and pulsates.” Robertson, then, is afflicted flesh, moving about town, patrolling for chuff to ease his stiffening “wedding kit,” coke to soothe the nerves, beer and whiskey for a disruptive gullet. In these stretches, Welsh’s rhythmic lope is at its easiest and most relaxed, particularly as Robertson and a friend, Clifford Blades, decamp for an Amsterdam vacation. Among these incidents, Welsh exercises a prose style he has refined to a terse, invasive, intimate and corrupting poetry--the unmistakable fluency of a writer in the residence of his language.

Robertson’s private sneer is divorced from his public grin. Expectedly, his head simmers with misanthropy (“I hate them all . . . criminals, spastics, . . . strikers, thugs, I don’t [expletive deleted] care; it all adds up to one thing: something to smash”), racist cynicism (“The race card is just one of the cards in the pack and if you’re serious about the game you utilize that full pack as and when you need to”) and other probably uncataloged varieties of contempt, disgust and loathing.

Yet, when he addresses Toal, his superior, or his colleague Drummond, he is nothing if not proper: cordial, composed, measured, even solicitous. The instrumental advantages of public manners keep Robertson a player in the social game--and “the games are always, repeat, always, being played” he reminds--which he manipulates with a ruthless and self-serving proficiency. So far, Welsh delivers a fairly recognizable duplicity, a pathological narcissism as common to an office as a photo cube.

A long-quaking ache in the Robertson gut is diagnosed as tapeworm, which “speaks” from within a nicely contrived typographical biology lodged in the Robertson gut: “00000eating eating feed me my Host00000.” The worm serves as a spokesman who condenses Robertson’s inner Hobbes down to its appetitive essence: Feed me. In the course of these developments, Robertson’s estranged wife, Carole, supplies her sentimental recollections of Bruce as a kind, intuitive, gentle father and husband whose bracing sexual tutorials, she believes, have been edifying. “[M]y soul is a very sexual one. You cannot deny your nature. Bruce taught me that.”

At this stage, about midway through “Filth,” the novel achieves an absorbing power, drawn from the indeterminancy--the competing, contradictory depictions--of the character Bruce Robertson. It is a difficult move to make and is rarely done successfully, but it opens the novel form onto refreshing possibilities, which Welsh too early retracts.

The tapeworm is expelled, and Carole’s contributions cease. What replaces them is a schizophrenic blend of the voices, both sentimental and charmless, that drones dismal platitudes and playback sermons on things like Bruce’s unrealized participation in the human community. The novel spoils utterly, as Robertson’s world-spirit begins to argue with his conscience. He recounts Bruce’s difficult childhood, an early love lost, an indifferent father.

It is the voice that retails the bitter root of his grief. “Your father was a shadow when you were a child. There was no warmth or tenderness coming from him,” and it appeals to his capacity for kindness. “Let us curse any unfair and unjust society . . . that chooses to punish . . . goodness.” It is jarring, to find such a murmur gladhanding beneath Bruce’s deliciously craven, interior monologue.

The early murder--never more than a peripheral concern in “Filth”--is solved with efficient dispatch, and Robertson’s suicide, while not expected, is emotionally jarring. Welsh has energetically and haltingly brought an original novel into partial view. The novelties of dialect and frank carnality upon which his early fame was staked--both now rightly considered his signature--may evolve as essential flourishes to the deeper inscription he has attempted here. As for Bruce’s nascent humanity? The Bolton tape gets eaten, in the faulty mechanism of his cassette player.