If this sounds like an updated Victorian melodrama, that’s because...it is at some level ... The difference here is the reductive perspective Welsh applies to all sides. His caricaturing can be very funny, shrewdly nailing the precise cultural, material and libidinal interests operating at any given moment, but it’s hard to care very much about which of his equally unlovable parties is going to end up in command of Cantley Lodge ... Trainspotting articulated the energies of an entire culture seething under the Thatcherite ice of 1980s Britain. Men in Love doesn’t aim so high.
There are plenty of moments that showcase Welsh at his best, impertinent and loose and attuned to the poetic cadence of everyday speech. When his writing hits these heights, most often during flights of knowing, referential, rhetorical fancy, it is hard not to be charmed by its flair and insolence ... Elsewhere, Men in Love is tough going. Throughout, there is a tendency to grope for edgy and transgressive sentiment in a way that lands closer to juvenile and embarrassing ... Clocking in at well over 500 pages, there is also the sense that Men in Love could have done with a more rigorous edit.
Tedious, lazy, pretentious and simply bad writing ... The heartbreaking thing is there’s a good novel to be written about the punk/smack generation of the early 1980s encountering the ecstasy love-buzz period as the decade progressed. But Welsh has signally failed to tackle any of that. He could have taken them to Ibiza, the Hacienda or Spike Island, or considered the achievements and failures of the Love Generation Mk II. But no. It’s another lazy retread.
Much of the grime has been wiped away to reveal a kind of cartoonish social comedy ... The problem isn’t the rancid attitudes of the characters. It’s that Welsh doesn’t offer any other perspective on the women, the gay characters or the 'chinkies' other than the one that leaves them totally dehumanised ... Ultimately, it reads like a literary car boot sale. You can pick up the odd gem and enjoy spending a few hours in a time warp. But most of what’s on offer feels too worn down and shop-soiled to bring home.
There’s no slacking in either the pace or the energy of the prose. Chapters alternate the cacophonous voices of the four ... This is what Welsh does so brilliantly, mixing registers and revealing unsuspected depths in his characters.
Told through their distinctive voices, Welsh delivers a funny, propulsive meditation on sex, intimacy and vulnerability ... This is what Welsh captures so well: the seething toxicity in much of what we pursue as love, alongside the powerful beauty of those misguided ideals. It’s the logic of addiction: knowing something is wrong and still being helpless under its spell.
The raw, gritty, trippy urgency and hyper-realism that drove Welsh’s debut novel has long-since faded from his writing. Some of his graphic descriptions of oftentimes squalid sex may leave you needing a shower. But the simple ease and joy with which he reinhabits these vivid characters makes this his paciest, funniest, most page-turning book in years.
Welsh refuses to sentimentalize his characters; instead, he exposes their fear of ordinariness and their hunger for connection, asking whether men raised on detachment and deflection can learn to risk sincerity, and whether love, like recovery, requires a reckoning with the self.
