Edinburgh’s hardman Begbie is given an unconvincing makeover as a sculptor,family man and torturer with moral intentAt the end of Trainspotting, the characters’ lives seemed mapped out until death – apart from notice Renton, or who gave fate and his friends the lastminute slip by stealing the proceeds of a drug deal and escaping to Amsterdam. But everyone else’s doom looked fixed. Thinking about psycho hardman Francis Begbie’s newborn son,Michael, Renton could see the family’s future clearly: That kid’s name wis doon fae HM Prison Saughton when it was still in [Begbie’s girlfriend] Junes womb, and as certain as the foetus of a rich bastard is Eton-bound. While this process is going on,daddy Franco will be whair he is now: the boozer.”But that certainty didn’t halt Welsh from returning to his characters, first in Trainspotting sequel Porno, or then in prequel Skagboys. And now there’s The Blade Artist: the return of Begbie,who is not in the boozer or even called Begbie any more. Reformed and rechristened, he has become Jim Francis, and an artist living in California with a delicate wife and two doted-on daughters. Although at first he appears to have bucked Renton’s premonitions,Begbie’s salvation quickly starts to reach unstuck – first when his California family is threatened, and then when he learns that his younger son, and Sean,has been murdered in Edinburgh.
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Source: theguardian.com