Violence, Innocence and Redemption in Irvine Welsh’s Chemical Mythos

Scottish author Irvine Welsh has crafted an internally cohesive cosmology, grounded in mapping a somewhat loosely defined “chemical generation” that helped spearhead a personal brand of anti-Thatcherite counterculture (with an especially heavy focus on the marginalized, disgruntled and boisterous youths of Edinburgh). Examining some of the writer’s most recent and lesser-known works, my essay will argue that a series of archaic mythical patterns, symbols and cosmological coordinates can be shown to guide a large number of the axioms that Welsh employs to refine his own vision of a modern, emergent mythos.