Marabou Stork Nightmares

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**Marabou Stork Nightmares**

Author	Irvine Welsh
Country	Scotland
Language	English, Scots
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	W. W. Norton
Released	1995
Media Type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	264 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-393-31563-0

Marabou Stork Nightmares is a novel by Irvine Welsh.

The book's narrative is split into two styles: a conventional first person account of the past and a more surreal, stream of consciousness account of an otherworldly present. Like many of Welsh's novels, its tone veers from black comedy to outright tragedy, and is written entirely in Welsh's trademark Edinburgh Scots dialect. The language is, however, easier for non-Scots than the language used in Trainspotting. The plot consists of the memories and hallucinations of the protagonist, Roy Strang, making him an extreme example of an unreliable narrator.

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Roy Strang narrates the book from an (at first) unexplained coma, in which his life is a mundane, miserable affair surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, however, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for an elusive, deadly creature called the Marabou Stork.

When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing, 'a concentration camp for the poor') in Leith, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. The family relocates to apartheid-era South Africa when he is an adolescent, where he is repeatedly molested by his uncle. When his father is jailed the Strangs are forced to return to Scotland.

Over the next few years, Strang grows into a violent, woman-hating thug. He joins a gang of football hooligans, led by the fearsome Lexo. He enjoys his life as a "top boy," feared by the entire town, until the gang kidnaps a young woman who rejected their advances and gang rapes her; Strang is horrified but too intimidated to try and stop them, although he himself does not join in (or so he remembers at first.)

The gang evades prison, but Strang is stricken with guilt and withdraws completely into depression. He briefly revives when he meets a woman and genuinely feels love for the first time. Around the same time he begins to take ecstasy. The memory of what he has done continues to haunt him, however, and his depression soon completely engulfs him, taking him away from his lover and his drug-driven escapism. He attempts suicide but survives, left in the coma he began the novel in.

The novel's other, more stream-of-consciousness narrative, intertwined with the story of Strang's past, takes place in the fantasy world he creates for himself in the coma. At first a bizarre but rousing adventure, it gradually becomes darker as Strang reveals the uglier parts of his life and personality, involving surreal images of brutality and sexual violence.

In the climax of the novel, Strang is visited in the hospital by the gang's rape victim, who has been systematically murdering her rapists and has now come for him. As the woman mutilates and kills him, Strang reveals that he was among the most violent of the rapists. He also realizes at last that his own self-hatred is the real motivation for all the pain he has caused, forgives everyone who has done him wrong, and dies, finally at peace.

[edit] Analysis

As in many of Welsh's novels, there are many allusions to music and underground youth culture, especially rave culture, punk rock, comic books, and football hooliganism.

The critical reaction to the book was mixed; many viewed it as a great letdown after Trainspotting. Welsh uses the book to describe sexual violence and guilt, but also evokes a political dimension when he describes relationships between countries; Scotland, England and the British Empire. As Strang's dad says: 'The Scots built the empire n these daft English cunts couldnae run it withoot us'.

The South African parts are written in a 'Boys' Own' style, perhaps in parody of John Buchan.

The sociopathic Francis Begbie, one of the main characters in Trainspotting, makes a cameo appearance.