Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting And The Acid House

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, playwright, and short story author. He’s well known from his best selling novel Trainspotting. He has adapted many of his books into screenplays and movies. Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother worked as a waitress and his father worked as a docker until his health made him work as a carpet salesman. When he was growing up, he lived in an area called Leith. The area was known for its ports and poverty in the 1980s. He moved to the prefabs in West Pilton and then onto Muirhouse’s mansionette flats. Muirhouse was part of a post-Second World War urban redevelopment program in Britain that increasingly relocated working-class communities in socially engineered estates

The housing area redeveloped as purely commercial places and tourist or consumer havens. Welsh left Ainslie Park Secondary School at the age of sixteen and took on various jobs. He was trained and worked in electrical engineering (Welsh). Welsh moved to London where he was part of the punk music scene of the late 1970s. His drug addiction, inspiration from the music scene and his obsession with class warfare led to his novels Trainspotting and The Acid House. His works is an depiction of fictional characters that relate to the culture of the generation. Through the late 1970s and 1980s heroin use in Britain became increasingly concentrated among the lower socio-economic class as an economic recession took place (Deacon). Welsh dealt with living in a poverty area and unemployment in his communities. Where he grew up, drugs were the natural landscape in Britain. He got in the dark world of

It was a tradition of vocalizing grievances - both local and national - in the familiar milieu of the public house (O’Malley). The 1980s defined the era that Britain turns out as a society. Britain would become very individualistic and atomized type of place. Welsh said “The government took away the idea of being responsible of a society. There was a void where generations of people who hadn’t worked, where there was nothing to do, and there was no way of making a living apart from the black market.” (O’Malley). Welsh mentions “We changed from being an employment-based economy to a drug-based economy” (Brooks). Welsh has an incessant obsession with class warfare where he constantly bashes the hegemonic constraints of the bourgeois British. “It’s fascinating to me because even though we are moving to a money society, we’ve also keep the worse elements of a class society.” said Welsh (O’Malley). He reflects this feeling in his character, Mark Renton where he is extremely class conscious and remind himself constantly of his working class credentials. The book Trainspotting focuses on the social stagnation for the working class characters. The novel poses some difficult questions about contemporary working-class community and affiliation and the profound crisis in class identities. In the context of continued oppression and inequality - and a loss of faith in the capacity of the