“The past,” wrote L. P. Hartley in the opening sentence of his classic novel The Go-Between, “is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” And the past is the one thing which unites four trainspotters from Leith who for the past forty years have anchored their boats in the Sunshine Port.

The past is what Mark “Rent Boy” Renton (Ewan McGregor) has been running away from ever since he swindled his mates out of sixteen grand. The past is what Francis “Franco” Begbie (Robert Carlyle) has been stuck in ever since Renton left him in the shit with a twenty year jail sentence. The past is what Daniel “Spud” Murphy (Ewen Bremner) has been writing about ever since he changed his body clock to British Summer Time and gave up the skag. And the past is what Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson (Jonny Lee Miller) has been living off ever since he inherited his aunt’s pub and tried to turn it into a high-class brothel.

The problem is, they might “do things differently” in the luxurious country estate of The Go-Between. But in the housing estates of Pilton, Muirhouse and Granton and in the dingy stairwells of the Banana Flats, the past runs in a loop like an Edinburgh tram – or would do if the plug hadn’t been pulled on the over time, over budget and over the fucking rainbow and back again transport project!

I digress. Danny Boyle’s hotly anticipated sequel to the cultural phenomenon that was Trainspotting is a cracker. Though it lacks the raw energy, blistering pace and surreal creativity of the original (perhaps a reflection of the fact that the characters do so too, having suffered the slings and needles of outrageous misfortune for a further two decades since we last saw them), it more than makes up for it in depth, maturity and complexity.

And the plot line (and it really is just a line) upon which the fate of the characters hang is that Begbie has escaped from jail, adopted Spud’s poetic phrase “First there was an opportunity, then there was a betrayal” as his mantra and is intent on inflicting as much damage as is humanly possible on the now Colgate teeth and six-pack abdomen of Renton, who has returned to Edinburgh from Amsterdam after his marriage collapsed and his firm considered him surplus to requirement. Hence his mini-breakdown: “I’m 46 and I’m fucked!”

As fucked as Renton and Begbie are (and they are), what they and Sickboy and Spud have in common – and to some extent Sick Boy’s Bulgarian hooker-turned-girlfriend Veronica (Anjela Nedyalkova) – is a shared past and a desire to return home. This leads to a series of rose-tinted flashbacks and dewy-eyed recollections about a golden time when the days were longer, the nights were shorter and the future was something to look forward to. In stark contrast to the here and now which Begbie dismisses as: “We are all in a box, just waiting for the lid to come down.”

But this is no nostalgic wallowing in how good the good old days were. Sick Boy’s sick boy died because he failed to look after him. Their childhood friend and fifth musketeer Tommy (Kevin McKidd) died because they encouraged him to take drugs, which got him hooked, infected him with HIV and shortened his threescore years and ten by a whopping fifty years. And as a long-term resident of HMP Edinburgh, Begbie was as good as dead to his son Frank (Scot Greenan) who was brought up without a father. As a waiter once asked of George Best: “Where did it all go wrong?”

For those who saw and remember the original (I missed it first time around and only watched it a couple of weeks ago when Channel 4 in their wisdom chose to show it on the eve of the sequel’s world premiere in Edinburgh), the countless nods and references to it in T2 will stir the heart and warm the cockles. One of the standouts being Renton’s “Choose life” monologue, which has been updated to include social media, zero hour contracts and reality TV.

Though one of the most joyous moments in the film involves a theme which was left unexplored in the original. Namely, sectarianism and the satirisation thereof, which involves Renton and Sick Boy robbing the patrons of the King William Arms and then singing for their supper (not to mention to save their skins) with an improvised chorus of “There were no more Catholics left.” Danny Boyle, take a bow. Glasgow-born screenwriter John Hodge, ditto. Messrs McGregor, Carlyle, Miller and Bremner, quadruple ditto. Irvine Welsh, who reprises his cameo role as drug dealer Mikey Forrester, don’t give up the day job!

Video courtesy of: Sony Pictures UK

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Peter Callaghan
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