Glue

W.W. Norton & Company

"Glue" isn't going to be that book — the one that mixes with "Trainspotting" to cement Irvine Welsh's legacy. But for long patches of Welsh's latest 469-page tome, genius and humor show through.

Welsh must be getting just a little square in his middle age because Glue is a novel of fours — except for a newfangled Ten Commandments. The novel is divided into four sections, each set at 10-year intervals: 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. There are four protagonists, all friends with each other from the poor neighborhoods of Edinburgh. Welsh takes turns narrating the novel from the first-person perspective of each of the four.

In 1970, the four friends are no more than toddlers and Scotland is itself in a state of innocence, enjoying a healthy industrial economy. Their parents have moved from the city's run-down tenement buildings to a newly built public housing "scheme." In the midst of the relative optimism of full employment, early fatherhood, and too much whisky, their parents come up with a new Ten Commandments for their boys.

Never hit a woman Always back up your mates Never scab Never cross a picket line Never grass friend nor foe Tell them nowt (them being polis, dole, social, journalists, council, census, etc.) Never let a week go by without investing in new vinyl Give when you can, take only when you have to If you feel high or low, mind that nothing good or bad lasts for ever and today's the start of the rest of your life Give love freely, but be tighter with trust – from "Glue"

In just a few pages, the reader is taken to the 1980s and dumped into the intimate thoughts of each of the teenage boys. And these aren't the teenagers of Judy Blume. Welsh is dead on. It's almost impossible not to hear the uncomfortable echo of your own breaking voice in these adolescent dialogues of fear, humor, aggression and frustration.

The trouble they find quickly takes on a sinister edge in the depressed Edinburgh of the '80s. Welsh crafts several intense scenes involving bar fights, a robbery, animal torture and soccer mobs — all of which are notable for their perfect portrayal of the "drift" from petty mischief to hardcore violence to silent doubt.

Miscommunication becomes the central theme of the novel as the boys are thrust into a moral dilemma after a night of mayhem gone wrong. Gally, the most insecure of the four, carries a knife into a fight. Someone fighting on his side grabs his knife and slashes the face of Gally's opponent. Gally is arrested, but refuses to "grass" on the slasher, thereby receiving all blame for the incident.

Gally was no friend of the slasher, but the morality of the schemes is clear: Never grass, friend nor foe. Gally hopes that one of his friends who witnessed the fight will tell the police the real story, thereby obeying another of the Ten Commandments: Back up your mates. Carl, one of the four, does fret a bit over Gally. He's unsure which of the commandments supercedes the other. But ultimately he's more focused on getting laid for the first time.

And this is where the weakness of the novel begins: the reader doesn't get to see the Gally dilemma play out. After Carl "gets his hole," the novel skips 10 years ahead. We're told Gally went to jail for awhile, now he's free. The whole process — set in motion through an intense first-person narration from Gally — suddenly is aborted and forgotten.

The stunted development of a theme reoccurs in the final decade of the novel. Without giving away the story, communication is the dilemma again, but Welsh chooses to settle the conflict through an Agatha Christie "whodunit" trope rather than a polished climactic scene.

The brilliance of the characters and scenes in the 1980 and 1990 sections makes the reader want to forgive Welsh the portion of the novel set in 2000. But, not only was the end unsatisfying, the beginning of 2000 was simply bewildering. Welsh suddenly abandons the first-person narration of the last 250 pages, and slips into third-person selective — selecting characters the reader has never met! There are at least 20 pages of confusion before the reader can reasonably be expected to reconnect to the story.

In an interview with Flak, Welsh said "Glue" would make a better TV series than a film. He's right. This novel is a collection of brilliantly executed scenes, with vivid characters and dialogue. It only falls flat in development and resolution of themes. Each scene would make a great installment in a serialized TV show. Hopefully, week to week, the viewers would forget about the larger ideas that should glue it all together.

— Benjamin Arnoldy (benjamin@csmonitor.com)