Talk about truth in advertising! Irvine Welsh's novel about an evil Edinburgh cop is filthy enough to please the most crud-craving fans of his blockbuster debut, Trainspotting. Like Trainspotting, Filth matches its nastiness with a maniacal, deeply peeved sense of humor. Though one does feel the need to escape this train wreck of a narrative from time to time for a shower and some chamomile tea, just as often Welsh provokes a belly laugh with an extraordinarily perverse and cruelly funny set piece. Nicely violent turns of phrase litter the ghastly landscape of his tale.

Our hero, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, is a cross between Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and John Belushi in Animal House. His task is to nab a killer who has brained the son of the Ghanaian ambassador, but bigoted Bruce is more urgently concerned with coercing sex from teenage Ecstasy dealers, planning vice tours of Amsterdam, and mulling over his lurid love life. He's also got a tapeworm, whose monologue is printed right down the middle of many pages. Here's one of this unusually articulate parasite's realizations: "My problem is that I seem to have quite a simple biological structure with no mechanism for the transference of all my grand and noble thoughts into fine deeds."

Welsh's real strength is comic tough talk and inventive slang. The murder mystery helps organize his tendency to sprawl, but the engine of his art is wry, harsh dialogue. At one point, his books hogged the entire top half of Scotland's Top Ten Bestsellers list--and half the buyers of Trainspotting had never bought a book before. The reason is not that Welsh is the best novelist who ever got short-listed for the Booker Prize. It is that he is that rarest of phenomena, an original voice. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Another scabrous, lurid, blackly comic novel from America's favorite Scottish enfant terrible, this one does for present-day Edinburgh what James Ellroy does for 1950s Los Angeles. Welsh begins with a detective's investigation into a murder?the death of a Ghanaian ambassador's son?and turns it into a vivid exploration of the detective's own twisted psyche and seedy milieu. Detective Bruce Robertson finds himself preoccupied not with the murder but with his own genital eczema, sadistic sexual antics involving any number of girlfriends and prostitutes, his increasingly chronic appetite for coke, alcohol and greasy fast food and, finally, the parasite that has taken up residence in his intestines. Welsh effectively plays off Robertson's bilious narration with the coolly insistent voice of another entity?the tapeworm, who seems to be the repository of Robertson's childhood memories and what is left of his superego?as the detective spins out of control, wasting himself in increasingly risky games of erotic asphyxiation with one of his mistresses (ex-wife of another detective), machinations to undermine his colleagues, and misanthropic rage: "Criminals, spastics, niggers, strikers, thugs, I don't fucking well care, it all adds up to one thing: something to smash." Even for readers who have mastered Welsh's Scots dialect, such an eloquently nasty narrator can be exhausting. As in the past, Welsh himself sometimes seems rather compromised as a satirist by the glee he takes in his characters' repulsiveness. Yet if this hypnotic chronicle of moral and psychological ruin (funnier and far more accessible than Welsh's last full-length novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares) fails to charm a wide readership, it will not disappoint devotees. Editor, Gerald Howard; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Courtney Weaver
Welsh writes with such vile, relentless intensity that he makes Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, the French master of defilement, look like Little Miss Muffet.


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Kurt Jensen
Welsh's often-captivating novel opens and closes with stingingly specific deaths and is most powerful at the midpoint between them. Nominally, Filth is a murder mystery that kicks off with the first death, and the stabilizing, low-maintenance frame of an unsolved killing frees Welsh to write his version of what makes and drives a life. This is the fascination around which Filth circles, whose pages pit the unstable character Bruce Robertson against the incompleteness of a murder.


From Booklist
The author of Trainspotting (1996) offers a novel with a politically correct twist, a philosophical intestinal worm, and a loathsome protagonist. Edinburgh cop Bruce Robertson is scaly-skinned, putrid, and worm-infested. Since his wife left, he eats only carry-out and does no laundry or cleaning. He views all humans as enemies and his police colleagues as too easy on the public--especially the new girl, with her annoying inclusive language and ideas, whom Bruce deems a lesbian. When assigned the murder of a black man, Bruce collects overtime pay harassing anyone faintly connected to the event, while the investigation almost comically stagnates. Meanwhile, the intestinal worm inside Bruce interjects with what Bruce suppresses and questions what Bruce never does. Bruce continues beating up thugs, forcing women into sex, and exploiting his associates' weaknesses. His defilements are unrepentant and almost unbearably relentless, until the surprise ending reveals that nothing is what it seems. Those who make it through Bruce's gruesome abuses and the difficult Scottish dialect will be left with something to think about. Kevin Grandfield


From Kirkus Reviews
The third and most willfully irreverent novel yet from Scotland's answer to William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., and, arguably, Howard Stern. Heres a long howl of hatred and misogyny uttered at full foulmouthed throttle by Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh police detective whose investigation of a presumably racially motivated murder only intermittently distracts him from routine pursuits of extramarital sex, illegal drugs, and officially sanctioned mayhem. Though he's nominally a member of the establishment, Bruce has all the qualities one hopes for in an Irvine Welsh character: he's loud, boorish, xenophobic, racist, sexist, alcoholic, stridently profane, and tormented by flaming eczema (afflicting his not-so-private parts). Oh, and there's a tapewormwhich occasionally takes over the narrative when Bruce himself isn't speaking from his gut, as does also estranged wife Carole, a basically normal human who hopes for a reconciliation but doesn't neglect to take a lover in the meantime. This latter fact is skillfully made crucial to the rather busy plot, which is nicely varied by Bruce's embattled relationships with disapproving superiors, Racial Awareness sensitivity training, and the willing wives of his fellow officers. The relentlessly confrontational book comes to raucous life in its more abusive and violent scenes (Bruce's sexual exploitation of a teenaged hooker; a Rabelaisian ``holiday'' in Amsterdam; a bit of bestiality, involving Bruces favorite prostitute and a collie named Angus, that goes hilariously awry).But it founders when Welsh gives his loutish antihero unconvincing moments of reflection (``I feel entrapped by my lust, but when I actually get round to doing it, it just seems so pointless and tedious''), and especially when, in the overcrowded closing pages, the sources of Bruce's pathology are located in his memories of a grotesque father and of a first love who was killed by lightning. Some marvelous writing, but little of substance that Welsh hasn't already done better, notably in Trainspotting (1996) and the superb Marabou Stork Nightmares (1996). One wonders if he has written himself out. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Village Voice Literary Supplement, "Our 25 Favorite Books of 1998," 8 December 1998
The corrupt Edinburgh cop-antihero of Irvine Welsh's best novel since "Trainspotting" is an addictive personality in another sense: so appallingly powerful is his character that it's hard to put the book down....[T]he rapid-fire rhythm and pungent dialect of the dialogue carry the reader relentlessly toward the literally filthy denouement.


Diversion, Nick Ravo, December 1998
"Filth" has the daring and depth of emotion that few American novels seem able to muster these days.


Book Description
At last, a novel that lives up to its name-from the author of the international sensation Trainspotting. With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially-kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime-and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding (and psychologically acute) intestinal parasite in his gut. Yes, things are going badly for this utterly corrupt tribune of the law, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse. . . . In Bruce Robertson Welsh has created one of the most compellingly misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction, in a dark and disturbing and often scabrously funny novel about the abuse of everything and everybody.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With Christmas season in the offing, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially -- looking forward to his annual week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime -- and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding, and conscience nagging, parasite living in his gut. Yes, things are going badly, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Garry Smout

Filth is far more coherent, consistent and better paced. Trainspotting was a collection of connecting anecdotes; Filth is a bona fide novel with a plot. Trainspotting was funny on the surface; Filth is far more sombre...it is a graphically vivid portrayal of class betrayal, misanthropy, and the corruption that comes with unchecked power, revealing far more about human passions than at first obvious and proving that Welsh is no one-book-wonder and far more deft at his art than is often given credit for. -- Barcelona Review

New York Magazine

. . .[R]eading Filth becomes an act of vicarious sadomasochism.

Publishers Weekly

Another scabrous, lurid, blackly comic novel from America's favorite Scottish enfant terrible, this one does for present-day Edinburgh what James Ellroy does for 1950s Los Angeles.

Welsh begins with a detective's investigation into a murder -- the death of a Ghanaian ambassador's son -- and turns it into a vivid exploration of the detective's own twisted psyche and seedy milieu. Detective Bruce Robertson finds himself preoccupied not with the murder but with his own genital eczema, sadistic sexual antics involving any number of girlfriends and prostitutes, his increasingly chronic appetite for coke, alcohol and greasy fast food and, finally, the parasite that has taken up residence in his intestines.

Welsh effectively plays off Robertson's bilious narration with the coolly insistent voice of another entity -- the tapeworm, who seems to be the repository of Robertson's childhood memories and what is left of his superego -- as the detective spins out of control, wasting himself in increasingly risky games of erotic asphyxiation with one of his mistresses (ex-wife of another detective), machinations to undermine his colleagues, and misanthropic rage: "Criminals, spastics, niggers, strikers, thugs, I don't fucking well care, it all adds up to one thing: something to smash." Even for readers who have mastered Welsh's Scots dialect, such an eloquently nasty narrator can be exhausting.

As in the past, Welsh himself sometimes seems rather compromised as a satirist by the glee he takes in his characters' repulsiveness. Yet if this hypnotic chronicle of moral and psychological ruin (funnier and far more accessible than Welsh's last full-length novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares) fails to charm a wide readership, it will not disappoint devotees.

Charles Winecoff

Welsh excels at making his trash-spewing bluecoat peculiarly funny and vulnerable -- and you will never think of the words 'Dame Judi Dench' in the same way ever again. --Entertainment Weekly

New York Magazine