Not a lot of new ideas to spot in Welsh’s latest novel

He’s a couple of months late for the 20th anniversary of Trainspotting hitting the world’s screens, but then Frank Begbie was never a man for punctuality, or professionalism, or indeed anything that even vaguely reeked of bourgeois pursuits.

In Irvine Welsh’s 11th novel, however, it is initially made clear that we’re not dealing with Begbie as such, but rather the creature he later became.

Once the kind of bad egg who would gleefully ...