In this essay Irvine Welsh’s most disturbing novel, Marabou Stork
Nightmares (1995), is placed within a postcolonial framework. The novel
centres on the cultural and political context of the set of violent relationships
that form the experience of a young working-class Edinburgh
man. Welsh draws an analogy between the plight of Scotland’s urban
poor and the victims of apartheid in South Africa, a comparison whose
appropriateness is challenged by critics who see in it an act of appropriation.
But the real problem with Welsh’s comparative class analysis
is its gendered politics, exemplified by the way in which the brutal
gang rape at the centre of the novel is displaced onto its margins.
