The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
Robert Zamsky

Irvine Welsh, The Marabou Stork Nightmares. Norton, 1996. 284 pp. Paper: $13.00.

Welsh is back with the schemies. In his novel The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Irvine Welsh revisits the life of raging Scottish youth with the same fury and honesty as Trainspotting and Acid House. As with his previous books, Welsh displays an almost unsettling ability to sympathetically complicate the lives of loathsome characters. In Nightmares, Welsh writes from the perspective of Roy Strang, a racist, sexist, homophobic budding soccer hooligan. Miraculously, he manages to do so in such a way that while we understand how Strang’s own self-loathing conspires with the cruelty of his life to prescribe habitual violence, we still hold him personally responsible for his involvement in a horrific crime. Welsh constructs a situation in which there is the possibility, perhaps the imperative, for understanding without forgiveness.

It is this posing of the crux between empathy and justice that makes Welsh’s use of the first person the most interesting aspect of the novel, and the most disturbing. Although Strang remains in a coma throughout the novel, he speaks to the reader as if in a confessional booth or bar. As Welsh interweaves three levels of Strang’s subconscious, we hear how his lifelong inaction results in his own predicament. Moreover, we are forced to examine our own complicity in both the reading of the text and our own social actions. If we accept the status quo, we can read biographical excuses into Strang’s crime, thereby reinforcing the novel’s culture of misguided victimization. However, if we read and live critically, we may recognize unfairness and act justly. This is the understanding to which Strang is coming, and it puts quite a terrifying spin on the time he is spending in a coma: his suspended existence becomes an inverted purgatory which offers only the tease of redemption and the time to factually and imaginatively convict himself. As Strang’s surreal dream quest collapses onto itself and reveals him as the evil he had been seeking, so we find our own best intentions (and the narratives which surround them) exposed for their self-congratulatory complicity.

Ultimately, the style and subject matter of Marabou Stork Nightmares combine to make an incision into the layer of slothful acceptance and rationalization that covers society. As Welsh shows, the putrid stuff that lies beneath may carry fearful implications, but the honest engagement with this underbelly may also reveal the only beauty there is in this world—that of the struggle. [Robert Zamsky]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh Robert Zamsky Irvine Welsh, The Marabou Stork Nightmares. Norton, 1996. 284 pp. Paper: $13.00. Welsh is back with the schemies. In his novel The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Irvine Welsh revisits the life of raging Scottish youth with the same fury and honesty as Trainspotting and Acid House. As with his previous books, Welsh displays an almost unsettling ability to sympathetically complicate the lives of loathsome characters. In Nightmares, Welsh writes from the perspective of Roy Strang, a racist, sexist, homophobic budding soccer hooligan. Miraculously, he manages to do so in such a way that while we understand how Strang’s own self-loathing conspires with the cruelty of his life to prescribe habitual violence, we still hold him personally responsible for his involvement in a horrific crime. Welsh constructs a situation in which there is the possibility, perhaps the imperative, for understanding without forgiveness. It is this posing of the crux between empathy and justice that makes Welsh’s use of the first person the most interesting aspect of the novel, and the most disturbing. Although Strang remains in a coma throughout the novel, he speaks to the reader as if in a confessional booth or bar. As Welsh interweaves three levels of Strang’s subconscious, we hear how his lifelong inaction results in his own predicament. Moreover, we are forced to examine our own complicity in both the reading of the text and our own social actions. If we accept the status quo, we can read biographical excuses into Strang’s crime, thereby reinforcing the novel’s culture of misguided victimization. However, if we read and live critically, we may recognize unfairness and act justly. This is the understanding to which Strang is coming, and it puts quite a terrifying spin on the time he is spending in a coma: his suspended existence becomes an inverted purgatory which offers only the tease of redemption and the time to factually and imaginatively convict himself. As Strang’s surreal dream quest collapses onto itself and reveals him as the evil he had been seeking, so we find our own best intentions (and the narratives which surround them) exposed for their self-congratulatory complicity. Ultimately, the style and subject matter of Marabou Stork Nightmares combine to make an incision into the layer of slothful acceptance and rationalization that covers society. As Welsh shows, the putrid stuff that lies beneath may carry fearful implications, but the honest engagement with this underbelly may also reveal the only beauty there is in this world—that of the struggle. [Robert Zamsky]

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