by Ken Johnstone

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: June 21, 2009

In "Porno", Welsh re-unites for the first time all of the seedy characters from his first (and only) blockbuster novel "Trainspotting" (1993) and brings them all together again in their old stomping ground of Leith in Edinburgh.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel Trainspotting, (but NOT the movie) and have read all of Welsh's subsequent five novels, none of which reached the dizzying heights of success that he achieved with Trainspotting. We had a brief coming together of some of the Trainspotting characters in Welsh's novel "Glue", which followed the changing fortunes of four of the characters from a sink housing estate in Edinburgh's port of Leith over four decades. But in Porno, Welsh brings together all the old drug addled Trainspotting crew some ten years after they all went their separate ways, when Mark Renton (Rents) relieved his erstwhile buddies of their ill-gotten gains from a dubious drug deal in London.

Rents has been running a dance club and turning a shilling in the drug capital of Europe, Amsterdam, while his old drinking and injecting pal Simon Williamson, "Sick Boy", has been head of security at a seedy strip-joint in London. Begbie, the psychopath with a penchant for random and extreme violence, is languishing in Saughton Prison in his hometown of Edinburgh, where he is nearing the end of a long sentence for murder, and harboring thoughts of sadistic revenge on his old pal Renton. In the meantime, Sick Boy has been amusing himself by sending Begbie anonymous parcels of gay porn magazines to the nick, which obviously hasn't been received at all well by the erstwhile nutcase.

"Spud", the fourth member of the old quartet, has never moved from his old haunts in Leith, and still suffers from a love/hate relationship with heroin, attending a drug rehabilitation program and planning to write a definitive history of his beloved Leith, while at the same time still spasmodically partaking of drugs of both a hard and soft nature, and trying to keep together his relationship with his long-term partner and young son. (Mostly unsuccessfully)

Terry Lawson, "Juice Terry", the ex-soft drink salesman (off the back of a lorry) with an insatiable appetite for the ladies, is still on the scene. Fatter and no longer selling "juice", but still dutifully chasing the fairer sex, ducking and diving to make a living, and still as fond as ever of the booze and illegal chemicals.

Sick Boy is asked to take over the running of a seedy public house in Leith by his old

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