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Irvine Welsh

Filth

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With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially—kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam.

There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime—and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding (and psychologically acute) intestinal parasite in his gut. Yes, things are going badly for this utterly corrupt tribune of the law, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse. … In Bruce Robertson Welsh has created one of the most compellingly misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction, in a dark and disturbing and often scabrously funny novel about the abuse of everything and everybody.
“Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British writing in decades.”—Sunday Times [London]  “[O]ne of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit, and force, and in a voice which those alienated by much current fiction clearly want to hear.”—Times Literary Supplement “Welsh writes with such vile, relentless intensity that he makes Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French master of defilement, look like Little Miss Muffet. "—Courtney Weaver, The New York Times Book Review «The corrupt Edinburgh cop-antihero of Irvine Welsh's best novel since Trainspotting is an addictive personality in another sense: so appallingly powerful is his character that it's hard to put the book down….[T]he rapid-fire rhythm and pungent dialect of the dialogue carry the reader relentlessly toward the literally filthy denouement. "—Village Voice Literary Supplement, “Our 25 Favorite Books of 1998” “Welsh excels at making his trash-spewing bluecoat peculiarly funny and vulnerable—and you will never think of the words 'Dame Judi Dench' in the same way ever again. [Grade:] A-. "—Charles Winecoff, Entertainment Weekly
This book is currently unavailable
476 printed pages
Original publication
1998
Publication year
1998
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Impressions

  • Mr Memeshared an impressionlast year
    🚀Unputdownable

  • Johnny AndBeashared an impression7 years ago
    👍Worth reading

Quotes

  • ☁️ ursula ☁️has quoted6 years ago
    Now I’m ready and I hear the key. I jump and I’m falling, then I feel myself rising, I hear a crash, but there’s no pain and there’s a figure at the frosted glass of the door but it’s not her it’s too wee it’s Stacey no Stacey for fuck sake don’t open the door . . . don’t . . . and I care . . .
    . . . I want more than anything for Stacey not to be there and see this and I’m trying to shout No go away and I hear her screaming Daddy and I want to live and make it up to her and Carole, I can hear her now too, screaming BRUCE because I care and I’ve won and beaten the bastards but what price victory
    STACYE PLEASE GOD BE SOMETHING ELSE SOMEONE ELSE . . .
  • ☁️ ursula ☁️has quoted6 years ago
    The feelings must be followed. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they’re your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate past, each one you brush against, ripping you a little more open and there are always more on the horizon. But you can’t face up to that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those that you instinctively know to be liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often enough and fervently enough you’ll attain the godlike status we accord to those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately.
    But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn’t value it, you’d realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don’t really want and keep from us what we really do need.
  • ☁️ ursula ☁️has quoted6 years ago
    I’ve made the t-shirt we are wearing. It has YOU CAUSED THIS on it in big, black letters. The noose feels tight around our neck. We look up at it, strung on the rafters of the attic and we’re now just waiting, ready to drop out of the hatch as soon as she turns the key in the lock and pushes the door open. We’ll land right in front of her in the hallway, so she’ll have that on her conscience for the rest of her fucking life the fuckin whore and liar.

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