Style
His novels share a number of characters, giving the feel of a "shared universe" within his writing. For example, characters from Trainspotting make cameo appearances in The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy, Filth, and slightly larger appearances in Glue, whose characters then appear in Porno.
Irvine Welsh is known for writing in his native Edinburgh Scots dialect. He generally ignores the traditional conventions of literary Scots, used for example by Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Orr. Instead, he transcribes dialects phonetically.
Like Alasdair Gray before him, Welsh also experiments with typography. A notable example is the book Filth, where the tapeworm's internal monologue is imposed over the top of the protagonist's own internal monologue (the worm's host), visibly depicting the tapeworm's voracious appetite, much like the 'Climax of Voices' in Gray's novel 1982, Janine.
Read more about this topic: Irvine Welsh
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Style is the man himself.
[Le style c’est l’homme même.]”
—Leclerc, George-Louis Buffon, Comte De (1707–1788)
“I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“If the British prose style is Churchillian, America is the tobacco auctioneer, the barker; Runyon, Lardner, W.W., the traveling salesman who can sell the world the Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you and convince you that tomatoes grow at the South Pole.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)