For Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh’s breakthrough 1993 novel, that is – the film directed by Danny Boyle which followed three years later was both a blessing and a curse. It thrust the book in the faces of an international audience, of course, making stars of Welsh, Boyle and actors including Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald and Robert Carlyle in the process. A lively, dynamically visual Britpop-era gloss was added to this Edinburgh-set tale of drug squalor and compromised redemption; the film was a brightly glowing cultural touchstone of its time not intended to glorify drugs – as Empire’s review noted – so much as film itself. What this meant, conversely, was that much of the original...
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