The Marabou Stork Nightmares is the second novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It follows on the heels of his wildly-successful Trainspotting, and has been somewhat overshadowed by the phenomenon surrounding the earlier novel and the controversy of its successor, Filth. If anything, however, The Marabou Stork Nightmares proves that Trainspotting was no fluke and that Welsh is a genuinely talented writer.

The story of Roy Strang, a young man who grew up in the Schemes of Edinburgh (the Schemes are the Scottish equivalents of Projects in the US), takes place on three different levels throughout the novel. Roy spends all of the novel in a coma, but he is close enough to consciousness to be able to hear his family visiting and his nurses as they tend to him. He finds this to be an intrusive annoyance and often descends inward to escape it, retreating into memories of his childhood in Edinburgh. The third level, and the one most detached from reality, takes place in a surreal dream world version of South Africa. In this world, existing entirely within Roy's mind, he is on a mission to hunt down and eradicate the predatory scavenger known as the Marabou Stork. He is accompanied on this quest by Sandy Jamieson.

Among these three levels, the most fully-realized is Roy's flashbacks to his childhood. Readers won't soon forget the Strang family. Between his violent and quick-tempered father, his psychotic episode-prone mother, and his brothers and sisters, Roy appears almost normal. When not keeping detailed notes on the goings-on of their neighbours, listening to old Winston Churchill speeches, or writing threatening letters to the BBC, Roy's father is actually proud of his son. This is because Roy does very well in school, described by his teachers as "college material" - a phrase that his father repeats at every opportunity.

What The Marabou Stork Nightmares is NOT, however, is one of those "kid grows up in disadvantaged circumstances, but works hard and becomes successful" stories. In those kinds of stories, the main characters usually don't deal with school bullies by stabbing them or avenge taunting by mercilessly terrorizing the perpetrator. If anything, this book is a brutal parody of those kinds of stories; it's Angela's Ashes on crack (although it was written before Angela's Ashes).

Roy's comatose South African dream world is a stark contrast to the reality he knew. In this world, Roy is everything he is not in reality. It is his idea image of himself and the place he was happiest during his life; it is the place he attempts to reach, he would forsake reality for it if he could. Reality intrudes on this world from time to time though, important clues about the rest of the story are hidden there. It also begins to change as he comes closer to coming out of his coma, although he fights to get it back under his control. And as we near the end of the novel, many of the more important hints as to why Roy is in the coma are revealed through this world.

One thing Welsh can be especially praised for is resisting the urge to glamorize his characters or their actions. Roy is essentially a "good person"; while he sometimes - even often - does bad things, it is a far cry from the over-the-top malice of Filth's "protagonist", Bruce Robertson. Roy's acts of violence or cruelty are more often than not followed by remorse and in many of the scenarios throughout the novel, they are also deserved. The side of good doesn't always come out on top, the scales don't always even out. In this way, both the characters and the story end up seeming more real.

In this novel, we also see the first occurrence of Welsh's technique of using the physical arrangement of words to convey more than the mere meaning of the words themselves, a style built upon further in Filth. Here, Roy's passage between worlds is marked by words arranged in a steps pattern.

Overall, The Marabou Stork Nightmares is probably Welsh's best novel thus far. It is possessed of more depth than either of his other novels and much more imaginative. This book is also a great starting place for those who have yet to read any of Welsh's work; only the dialogue here is written in phonetic Scottish slang - whereas all of Trainspotting was written in that style -, and The Marabou Stork Nightmares contains many of Welsh's recurring themes.

The Marabou Stork Nightmares is a thought provoking read, and an enjoyable one that more than holds it's own with the rest of Welsh's work.

SBB, June, 2000

Links:

Famous Scot Irvine Welsh
Filth