by Irvine Welsh
Published 1993
There are a lot of books that are made into movies. Most of the time everyone says, "The book is better." I'm not entirely sure in the case of "Trainspotting". I won't say that the movie is better than the book or that the book is better than the movie. They are just very different.
One of the key differences in the book is that the characters aren't nearly as likable as in the movie. In the movie, when Renton screws over his friends and acts like a horrible person, it is somehow forgivable because he's wearing the wide smile of Ewan McGregor. When Renton does reprehensible things in the printed word, it's a lot harder to sympathize. But I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. Perhaps we weren't meant to sympathize with these characters. When Renton walked away from his friends with an armful of cash in the movie, I believed he would really clean up his act and become an upstanding tax-paying citizen. In the book, I was pretty sure he'd waste it all on junk and be right back where he started.
Irvine Welsh has a great talent for writing in the voices of many varied characters. The style of the book is one where the point of view shifts to many characters throughout. It is confusing at first, but by the end, you become so attuned to the nuances of the thinking patterns of each character that it really starts to flow.
If you loved the movie, give the book a shot, but don't expect it to be exactly the same. If you hated the movie, don't bother with the book. You'll hate that too.
