The Blade Artist

The Blade Artist

by Irvine Welsh
Published April 2016.

I've been a quiet fan of Irvine Welsh for years - quiet in that I tend to forget about him completely for years, only to randomly stumble across one of his books and remember just how much I enjoy his writing. The Blade Artist is quite possibly his best one yet.

Irvine Welsh has an undoubtedly unique voice and a way of bringing Edinburgh's seedy underbelly to life in all its dark, gritty glory. The Scottish accent is thick throughout (every now and then you need to read a sentence out loud to figure out exactly what it says) and the atmosphere brilliantly expressed. It's like the Scottish equivalent of what Marlon James does so well in A Brief History of Seven Killings - both authors can take a time and place that I know absolutely nothing about, but somehow make it feel very real and even a little familiar.

 What's unique about The Blade Artist is the somewhat jarring juxtaposition of the rough neighbourhoods of Edinburgh against the much softer (and arguably less interesting) privileged lifestyle of main character Jim Francis, an acclaimed artist living a quiet family life near a Californian beach. Successful, comfortable and apparently quite content, Jim has turned his life around, leaving behind a jailbird past to become a redeemed character far from his home town of Edinburgh.
A sudden death in the family sees Jim back in his old neighbourhood and he is quickly pulled back into the same old social circles and the same patterns of drunken violence.

Like the best of Irvine Welsh's novel, The Blade Artist is funny and dirty and dark in parts. It's fast-moving, graphically violent and action-packed with never a dull moment. It's jam-packed with vivid, memorable characters, many of whom are making return visits from earlier novels - to enjoy The Blade Artist, you certainly don't need to have read Trainspotting, but there are some beautiful little gems in there for readers who loved the earlier book and wondered what became of the characters...

Where are they now..? Wouldn't you like to know...

The Blade Artist proposes that even the most irredeemably violent and horrid of characters can be saved. But then it turns this idea completely on its head - has Jim Francis really changed? Is a talent for art and an overseas move enough to change a person from bad to good, or has he just gotten better at hiding his real nature? In trying to prove that he's changed, is Jim only fooling himself? Considering that the story is largely told from Jim's point of view, Irvine Welsh does a beautiful job of keeping these questions up in the air throughout the book; Jim's character seems constantly in flux and this grey-area mentality is seen in many of the other characters too. Most of the people in The Blade Artist are neither good nor bad; they're people who've done terrible things but they're more than just the drugs they've taken or the fights they've started. These are fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters and they bring some real weight to what could otherwise be a fairly simple story of murder and revenge.

The Blade Artist starts with this quote from Camus - could not be more appropriate, really.

I knew nothing about this book before I read it, so I don't want to say too much and ruin the fun for anyone else. Don't worry about the plot of The Blade Artist or where you've seen these characters before - just get yourself a copy as soon as possible (it's available from the 7th of April) and read it. I promise you'll love it.

10/10