I was recently registering to the audiobook of Irvine Welshs Skagboys for the Second time just last week. I listened to it a few years ago when it was first published back in 2019.
t I found it so enjoyable that I just had to listen to it again and figured it was high time I gave it a review.
Skagboys by Irvine welsh
Skagboys is the first book in chronological order of The Mark Renton Series and is the Prequel to Welsh’s award winning novel Trainspotting. The book is set around a year before Trainspotting begins and sets a kinda backdrop for the scene. It tells the stories of the characters and how they get into the heroin and how they became the characters we knew in Trainspotting.
it also sets a pretty accurate picture of how things were in the early Mid Eighties in the world’s AIDS capital where both Industry and the people were suffering from an infectious rot.
he Novel is set in 1984 and starts off at with Mark Renton going with his father to a demonstration down south with the National Union of Miners which LL after became known as The Battle of Orgreave. It tells tales of escapades in London where the gang would often be living for periods of time whilst regularly back up the road for funerals and skag deals.
Edinburgh Dialect
As like most of Irvine Welshs novels, Skagboys is written with regional dialect. I always remember the Edinburgh Dialect being a bit of a stumbling block for many, which I can totally understand. I’m Scottish and even I struggled to get into reading it.
so the Audiobook is really great for getting round having to read in regional dialect as the novels narrator, Tam Dean Burn does an amazing job of narrating the story in each of the characters own unique voices and he pulls it off really well.
For novels like these Irvine Welsh writes in the Edinburgh Dialect, the Audiobook is the perfect solution for anyone struggling to keep up with the written story.
I love the audiobooks as I can just sit back n relax with no need to sit holding a book and focusing on reading. I can do things at the same ti e as I’m listening to it.
but the Audiobook is also a brilliant alternative for anyone who had dyslexia or any other reading difficulty but still enjoy a book. Audiobooks are the way forward.
Reflections
With Skagboys, Welsh does a brilliant job of portraying the smack scene and drug addiction in a much more realistic light from the carbon copy stories we’ve become so accustomed to hearing.
i mean, he does certainly include many of a personalities,circumstances and characters that are often attached to that lifestyle or scene. But he also makes way for the exceptions to their rules. Like Mark Renton for Instance. Doing well at college. Has his perfect girlfriend, ‘decent’ parents and up ringing. Yet still opts for a life of skag. Renton. Is by no means unique, and stories like this are very often overlooked by society . Why? Maybe because if they had to look into it, they’d have to say accept that its a far too big an elephant yo just be partitioned off as industrial waste and maybe there’s so etching else, something bigger, deeper and more powerful that makes some people want to take drugs.
Friendship and betrayal
The novels tells how many the characters we know from the book and all of them from film Trainspotting all growing up together and their friendships and personalities. It goes on to tell how the skag creeps in and soon enough they’re “all quaintences now” as the mother superior loves to point out regularly.
A Far cry from the Film
I mean it’s almost cheesy to even say that the book is better than the film with pretty much anything. But if you haven’t read any of Irvine Welshs book at all and have only see. The film, then you’ll be blown away.
But if they had to make the film cover even just half of the book, it’d probably be about 12 hours long at least. I guess there’s only so much story you can cram into a 90 minute slot. So they pretty much took a few bits n pieces from all the different stories within the book, and formulate their own little storyline, which i actually thought it was Pretty good in its own right.
But the book is a totally different world and there are many characters within the book that don’t appear in the film at all. So if you haven’t read the book of Trainspotting yet and this is your introduction to Irvine Welsh’s work, then you’ll absolutely love it
The Mark Renton series
The whole Mark Renton Series is brilliant and well worth a read. There’s 5 books in the series; Skagboys, Trainspotting, Porno, The Blade Artist & Dead Man’s Trousers.
d highly recommend reading or listening to the whole entire series, one after the other in order. It’s amazing.
Get it free!
I’ve got all of them and I got them all free from the Audible Free home trial. When you sign up for the free trial, you get to choose an Audiobook in exchange for the 1 credit you get granted when you sign up.
Simply download the audiobook of your choice and then cancel your trial. You still keep the book. Then just sign up again and choose another book. It only takes 30 days for them to forget your bank card details of so you can use it again on your next free Audiobook. But if you have another bank card, you can use that, and just carry on using them in tandem and get a free audiobook every month.
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