Filth

Filth

A favourite line was the police-chief bloke ripping into DCI Bruce Robertson:

“First of all I find out that one of the most senior, respected members of my team is a totally behind the times dinosaur, a homophobe, a racist, a sexist, an absolute liability…”

Something like that, anyway, followed by:

“and then I find out that another one’s a raving buftie!!!”

The book has pages of italics setting out the input of Robertson’s parasite, a tapeworm. The text wriggles down the pages, interrupts, adds little and I don’t think Welsh would, if he wrote the book now, have included it. The cliff-hanger didn’t exactly work a treat in writing, either. (That isn’t a full explanation, but one must avoid spoilers, mustn’t one?).

The fact is, with Irvine Welsh, story, plot, and all that are secondary to the dialogue, to the basic human interactions, and to the inspection of life as it is lived by a huge percentage of the world’s population: on  a day-by-day and almost hour-to-hour basis.

Whoever decided on taking the chance and filming Filth, on the cast, on the screenplay, on whatever goes into making a successful film could not have done much better than what they’ve produced. They’ve overcome all the sticking points the novel may have presented and turned out a great film.

Filth (the novel) is described as: a scabrously funny gothic-noir thriller. While the film does not (and probably could not get past those saints preserving us, the censors, if it had) go into the nitty-gritty, muck and bullets, sordid detail, where the book never fears to tread, it does get on with things at a fair old pace, with lashings (ooopps, sorry) of kinky sex and savage, unrelenting humour. Oh, and there’s the obvious and rejected chance for redemption with a twist, too.

Same rules apply, eh?

A Tale for the Time Being

We’re all time beings. All species exist within the borders and boundaries and the rules of time. Probably more so those of us (me included) with the big internal ticking clocks measuring and agonising over every second spent on every micro-second-worth’s of importance.

It’s odd that everything else, money, material stuff, that sort of thing, can come and go, and there’s no way to ever recover a wasted second, and yet time is still the currency most people throw away without a thought.

There’s a washed-up diary, and associated artefacts, on a remote Canadian beach. There’s the story of the writer of the diary, and her family, in Japan, and America, and Canada. There’s the finder’s story, on the remote island. Things start to tangle, temporarily, isolated, discrete dreams, actions and outcomes. The weird, sub-atomic world where time as clocks describe it and calendars record it becomes meaningless, and the spiritual Buddhist world are both places where interconnectedness abounds, rises up and envelops two writers, one professional, one a troubled teenage girl, separated by miles and years, and, time and space being the same thing, those miles and years are not exactly set in stone.

I think the cat makes it, too.