Reading from page 1-8 of Reheated Cabbage

Irvine Welsh works in English prose like a Homer of sloth culture. His style takes a few pages to get comfortable with if the reader is unaccustomed to low-class British slang. The key aspect of Irvine’s character exposition—for it could not be termed development—as his stories are character-based rather than plot-driven, is that these characters, typified by the subhuman football fan who narrates his wife’s medical plight, think in the same shallowly abbreviated slang as they speak.

Right at the beginning of this short story collection Irvine crafts the destination of the postmodern man under the welfare/media state. The perspective character is so morally retarded that he is merely a prism into his own degenerate state. The lesson I take from this story is that words matter, and if a person who names every human being a cuոt and abbreviates his every verb, adverb and adjective, it can be reasonably expected that that person will devolve mentally to one who thinks in terms of monosyllabic abbreviations.

In A Fault on the Line Irvine Welsh zeros in on where the life of a domesticated human leads.

The Awakening of a Paleface Ethnocist