If anyone payed any attention to the book pile section on the right, they might have noticed that Porno, an Irvine Welsh novel, was there for a long while, finally finished it today. I read a bunch of other books in the mean time, not because Porno isnt good, quite the contrary, it’s that the vast majority of the book is written in slang and with various Scottish accents. If you thought Trainspotting or Lock stock and two smoking barrels were hard to understand, try reading it!
Ah’m waitin oan Kate comin in wi the bairn, tae make muh fuckin tea before uh goes doon the fuckin pub tae watch the fitba oan Sky. She’d better fuckin nash, cause time’s tickin away. So there’s me sittin watchin that big fuckin telly, it’s never oaf now. Goat the fuckin boax fir Sky n aw, bit ah’m watchin the game doon the boozer the night.
That’s one example, there are at least 4 different speach patterns in the book. What is interesting is that depending on where they are from and their social status, they speak with different accents. The girl from England speaks one way, very easy to read, the uneducated guys though (like this quote above) are damn hard to understand, which is why I just stopped reading a bunch of times, requires concentration and it’s harder to get into the story so I needed periods of a few hours to be available in order to get going properly.
Once I did get into it though it was lots of fun, gives a lot more color to the characters and helps in understanding where they are coming from. I started to like some of those people and was saddened to see them fall back in the same patterns. Welsh shows how the poverty and culture of violence traps them in and doesnt let go as they keep falling in with the same crowds, stuck with the same problems. Fascinating, funny, cringe inducing, twisted. Recommended, if you have the time for it.