Porno was published by Jonathan Cape in 2002 and is the sequel to Trainspotting, catching up with the characters a decade later. Sick Boy — now going by his given name Simon David Williamson — has returned to Leith from London and is planning to make a pornographic film, using his manipulative charm to recruit performers and investors. Renton, who betrayed his friends at the end of Trainspotting by stealing their drug money, is now a successful club owner in Amsterdam. Begbie is newly released from prison and as violent as ever.
The pornography industry provides Welsh with a metaphor for the entrepreneurial culture of late-1990s Britain: everyone is selling something, everyone is exploiting someone, and the rhetoric of choice and empowerment disguises transactions that are fundamentally exploitative. Sick Boy’s film project — presented as a legitimate business venture, an exercise in sexual liberation — is really another scam, another manipulation of vulnerable people by a charming predator.
The novel is structured similarly to Trainspotting — multiple narrators, fragmented episodes — but the tone is darker and more cynical. The characters have not grown or learned; they repeat the same patterns of betrayal, exploitation, and self-destruction in new contexts. The confrontation between Renton and Begbie — deferred since the end of Trainspotting — provides the novel’s climactic tension. Danny Boyle adapted the novel as T2 Trainspotting (2017).
Collecting Porno
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15
- Signed copies: $40–$100