Bookspot: Filth

After the mild embarrassment of carrying If you Liked School you'll Love Work (pert female buttocks in tight jodhpurs) and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (bananas and a cartoon chef riding an obscene sausage) around work, the poor wee mouse snared in the trap seemed relatively tame.  The content however, was not.

My sister, incidentally a polis herself, had encouraged me to pick this one up for years, and I'm very glad I did.  Filth is the tale of DS Bruce Robertson of Lothian and Borders Police who is working on the homicide which opens the novel.  The dislocating opening chapter describing the novel from a distorted perspective sets the mood for a novel in which sly and subtle changes of language alter the mood and sense of the events being described.  My love affair with Welsh is really my fascination with his use of language: from the use of Scots, to his games of with reported speech: 'Broooos, Broooos!'.  Changes here are much more delicate than the isolated use of standard English during the court scene in Trainspotting, the unorthodox extra narrator gently moves the focus from 'I' to 'we' towards the end of the novel, characterising Robertson's mental and physical state.

That opening homicide lingers in the plot as a driving device: a black man has been murdered; Robertson and his team are tasked with finding the killer.  This event is incidental to Robertson who is focused (if one can be in his daily state) on what feels to him like a sure promotion to DI and his 'winter week in the 'Dam'.  Robertson is your stereotypical old-school polis: a hard-drinking, coke-snorting, misogynistic womaniser who thinks nothing of abusing his position to proposition prostitutes, the victims of crime and generally, anyone he perceives to be weaker than himself.  Despite this Robertson is able  to outwit 'that dyke Drummond', and the 'silly wee lassies' from the Ethnic Minority Forum but spouting what he terms equal opportunities bullshit.  Additionally he orchestrates several adulterous affairs while his wife attends her sick mother, and excels in his 'wee games' with fellow officers and friends: playing them off against one an other for sport and self-promotion.  The promotion for the Inspectorship is all but his, truly deserved too as Lothian and Borders dismiss the experience he gained while serving with the New South Wales force.  Duly deserved.  Or is it? 

Robertson is the classic unreliable narrator: at the outset we are his captive audience, but by the end we are questioning the truthfulness of his statements.  His grip of control bgins to falter in one particularly interesting way: he lets other people speak.  The extra narrator, well, he can't help that, but he allows Drummond (Drummond! that stupit wee lassie) to tell him (and us) exactly what she thinks of him.  It is these voices from within and without which begin to pull down the facade of Bruce Robertson, revealing deeper layers of the grotesque that we've only had glimpses of before.

It was the use of the grotesque that  fixated me towards the end.  As much as you want to hate Bruce, be disgusted by him, you can't deny the fact that you're absolutely captivated by him.  He's the monster, the sideshow freak: he is everything  we should shy away from.  Yet despite all his flaws, I worried about Bruce as the end of the novel approached, I wanted to extricate him from the mess of his life.  A mess than manifests itself in the powerful, tumultuous end that seemed impossible to imagine in the first chapter.

Not one for the squeamish, bit a gripping read.