A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh

By the end of the first chapter of Irvine Welsh's new book, Edinburgh cab driver ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson has managed to secure himself a ten grand driving gig for a reality TV star, and revealed to a mourning family that his friend has killed himself by choking on his own vomit and then accidently freezing his own head in a fridge freezer. He mistook it for an oven apparently. Terry has also fucked every female he has so far encountered, using his cab as a mobile love hotel for unsuspecting Festival tourists, drunken late-night revellers and the odd suicidal playwright.

A dozen pages in, I thought I was going to hate this book. The plot is ridiculous and gratuitous – several characters, especially the American, are so stupid you want to squash them out of the pages with your thumb. We witness a hurricane, $100,000 bottles of whisky, necrophilia, incest and heart attacks. Despite this, A Decent Ride ends up sucking you indecently in. Terry, with his ‘Auld Faithful’ cock, is a charming and loveable cartoon character and Welsh’s customary use of distinctive dialect and full-on language is, as ever, immersive and weirdly enjoyable. The book leaves you feeling satisfyingly grimy, like the meaty brown-paper-bag aftertaste of a McDonald’s cheeseburger eaten shamefully alone in the night drizzle of a deserted street corner.