I reviewed Irvine Welsh’s THE BLADE ARTIST (Jonathan Cape) for RTE’s Arena radio programme last week. It’s not giving too much away – it’s mentioned on the book’s cover – to reveal that the novel’s ‘Jim Francis’ is the alter-ego of Franco Begbie, the notorious hard-man from Welsh’s TRAINSPOTTING. The blurb runs thusly:
Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life – and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary.
But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies – and, most alarmingly, his former self – Francis seems to have other ideas.
When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly.
For the review,
clickety-click here (and scroll down) …
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