Let's Go Out and Spot Some Trains!
The only actual mention of trainspotting occurs fairly late in the novel and passes very quickly. It involves the main characters coming across an old drunkard joshing the guys about what they’re up to, asking if they are trainspotting. The old man turns out to be Begbie’s father. Trainspotting is a strange hobby practiced in Scotland involving literally spotting trains and cataloguing them. The fact that such an endeavor creates such passion on the part of those who do it and such a sense of bewilderment at how anyone could have such passion over such a thing is symbolic of the many ways in which people become addicted to not just heroin.
Tommy Lawrence
Amazingly—almost incomprehensibly—of the central characters in the novel the only one who dies is Tommy. He starts out by being the only one of the group who is neither a junkie nor an alcoholic. The last thing this guy needs is a hard break-up with a girlfriend combined with low self-esteem mixed liberally with heroin addicts. Tommy thus becomes symbolic of the way that drug addiction—any addition, really—can have tragic consequences on those who start out on just the periphery.
Writing Style: Do Not Enter!
The novel is an example of form fitting function. The function of the novel is to provide a graphically realistic immersion into the world of hardcore drug abuse among hopeless inner city young men in Scotland. Their lives are intertwined around each other through the labyrinth of addiction. This is a subgroup of human beings; one that most people never really know, even many drug addicts. The incestuous relationships combined with the commonality of the language of drug use, sex, alcohol, violence and, occasionally, soccer is not one that most people could just enter into with no barriers in translation. The mix of often incomprehensible—on a first reading—of the Scottish dialect, the whiplash of multiple narrators who don’t seem particularly distinguishable and just the plain simple fact that Scotland is a small country with its own national identity is enough to make wading into the reading of Trainspotting akin to attempting to infiltrate this scene as an undercover cop. Even the title itself is designed to fend off outsiders while at the same time, of course, enticing them. Who didn’t come out of the film adaptation still asking just what the heck trainspotting meant?
Davie Mitchell
For the purposes of narrowing the cast to focus primarily on the four main character of the film, some aspects of Davie Mitchell and Tommy were combined. In the novel, it is Davie who contracts HIV, not Tommy whose death in the novel is a direct result of his addiction. On the other hand, Davie’s contraction of the virus is not direct result of drug addiction, but sex. Davie is neither a junkie nor a slacker. He graduated college and has a steady job. In all respects, he is the antithesis to his friends: the road they have not taken. And yet his story winds up not just tragic, but tragic in a deeply sickening sort of way which seems to burst the bubble of his being merely a symbol of “choosing life” well. He becomes instead a symbol that no one is protected from this insidious subculture of the vicious cycle of drug addiction. Sooner or later, his story seems to suggest, it will suck everyone within its orbit into the white hot center.
Dawn the Dead Baby
The film adaptation features a number of memorable images, from the iconic movie poster to Renton almost getting run over by a car to the strains of “Lust for Life” to Begbie’s insane violence to Spud’s horrific night in bed to the image of Renton with a smile on his face as he decides to choose life. For many viewers, however, the single most disturbing image in the film is that of the dead baby in the crib (and later the hallucination of the baby crawling across the ceiling.) The real horror of the scene is not the poor dead bloated corpse in the crib, but what happens after. The entire incident is taken from the novel and the baby—named Dawn—becomes one of literature most utterly tragic symbols. She represents the inescapable fact that no matter how many tears are shed over the lives or deaths of others, a junkie’s first allegiance is to one thing and only one thing: getting that next high.
