ACID HOUSE: Irvine Welsh

From the author of Trainspotting, this is a collection of short stories culminating in a novella, and it's written literally in thick, low-bro Scottish slang with words like “bairn” for baby and “radge” for an edgy person. It was hard to get into at first and so I rewatched Trainspotting and looked up some short YouTube films with low-class Edinburgh accented actors. After some time, the accents started to flow out from the pages and into my brain and images of run down flats in bleak working class suburbs began to fill my head.

The characters in the book are mostly despicable, yet they also convey so much about the fragility and desperation of the human condition. I was drawn in deeply to each story and somehow, despite how bleak each universe was, I still felt somewhat affectioned to the characters for being so real. And the bleakness was balanced out by the brilliant humour, which had me laughing out loud on many occasions, like when one of the characters becomes a human fly.

The book opens with a story about a trans woman and it was a very brutal characterization including many intense and disturbing sex scenes. Many more stories were to follow including ones where a young junkie hides his addiction from his grandma only to realize that she herself is also an addict, a man films his own suicide, and a wife keeps her husband's animate severed head on display and cuckolds for him. In one of the most hilarious stories Welsh gives Hollywood stars Madonna and Kim Basinger Edinburgh accents and has them crudely sizing up the bodies of working class men in a magazine.

I don’t want to give too much away about the main story, Acid House, though it‘s a rather brilliant LSD mishap taken to the extreme.  Welsh really managed to craft something unique, bizarre and gut busting.

I was left me wondering if Edinburgh really was that trashy, and the answer I got from the internet and a man from Edinburgh who came into my work one day was: yes. It was the AIDS capital of Europe and seedy as fuck. So however painful it was to read at times, it does serve as a cultural cache. And however upsetting many of the character's depictions are, it seems that they were true to the reality of what Welsh was surrounded by in his youth.

As I got near the end, I came an uncomfortable place where I couldn’t stop reading the book yet I was also eager to finish it and go find a teddy bear to hug. This book will chew all of the skin and flesh off of your bones and leave you lying on the ground in a pool of your own goo, so be careful.

I wasn’t aware of some of the controversy directed at Welsh, though as I got deeper into the novel, I began to suspect that his writings wouldn’t sit well with many in the current culture that is increasingly moving towards greater sensitivity around how marginalized people are depicted and represented.

I found myself conflicted many times in reading intensely cruel depictions of women, trans and BIPOC characters - and after reading the book I found out that Welsh created a whole documentary called “Offended” defending an artists right to express themselves freely. He also spoke out against an anti-hate bill being passed in Scotland.

I would put Welsh in the same category as someone like Steve Albini, in that the art that he creates is meant to be provocative and reflect on the often brutal realities of human existence and it’s not meant as a personal condonement of such brutalities. And it seems that Welsh is deeply aware of how toxic masculine culture can be, and there is nothing celebratory in his depictions of dissafected young White men in his books: nearly all are tormented souls and fraying at the edges. At the same time, I think there's a distinction between reflecting on hatred in society, whatever form it may take, and then actively promoting it. And unfortunately there are many people in the world who are using the banner of free speech to actively promote hatred towards others - hence the need for anti-hate laws.

Welsh himself is quoted as saying: “The sad indictment of us as a society is we’ve not been able to mature enough societally to kind of get on with it ourselves and to sort of police ourselves.”

In my heart I wish that humans were collectively intelligent and discerning enough to handle unlimited freedoms. Yet in my experiences thus far, that hasn’t been the case. In online forums where unlimited freedoms are given, things seems to degenerate pretty quickly, and those who are small minded and wish to restrict the freedoms of others tend to dominate. So many people want the freedom to spread hate, the freedom to destroy nature, the freedom to rape, the freedom to abuse and the freedom to take away the freedoms of those who disagree with them.

All over the world there is rape, genocide, murder, racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty and displacement, and Irvine Welsh feels that the biggest affront to freedom is “cancel culture”? Cancel culture isn’t the problem. Rape, abuse and racism are the problems. Why aren’t more people pissed off about how little accountability there is from rapists and pedophiles? Or the fact that genocides are still occurring all over the world as people scrap over land and resources? Resources that are mainly funneled into excessive Western lifestyles. Why are “wokists” considered such a huge threat by so many? I mean I personally find it annoying to be called out unfairly by ditzy middle class white girls, as has happened to me before, but it’s not as scary as being violently raped by a stranger and left in a ditch.. or having soldiers come into my home and shoot my family members in front of me.. or starving to death.. or having my village flooded – those would be real infringements upon my freedoms. It’s hard not to see Welsh’s position as quite entitled.

At the same time, I do see how woke culture often misdirects itself at the most low hanging fruit, like Irvine Welsh who I believe is an intelligent and sensitive artist who in many passages of Acid House shows a lot of humanity towards the queer and female characters. He’s not the problem, he’s just laying it all out for everyone to see. There is terrible bigotry and misogyny being propagated by men like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate and I think taking people like that on is far more impactful than going after people like Welsh.

So how can we differentiate between legitimate art and works that deserve to be cancelled? In the same way that humans are not able to handle the responsibility of true freedoms, they are likely not collectively responsible enough to be able to discern between satire, art and sincere hate speech.

I really don't have the answers to any of these questions, they’re open ended and fluid. I’m glad that the younger generations are more sensitive to each other's feelings than I was when I was growing up and I have a lot to learn from them. I’m glad to be alive during the MeToo movement and I’m glad that many people including myself are waking up the reality of how fucked up the world is and are starting to do something about it, and I look forward to more positive changes in the world.

As for this book, it’s a dark portal that pulled me under for a spell and I’m glad that I finally managed to make it through one of Welsh’s books as it’s something I’ve been wanting to do since the 90’s when he first became super popular. I feel like I went through some kind of rite of passage.