Though no doubt Irvine Welsh would sneer at the very idea, on the evidence of Glue he is working-class Scotland's greatest living ethnographer. As he follows the fortunes and misfortunes of four characters over thirty years, he does for the inhabitants of Edinburgh's housing schemes what Damon Runyon did for the Prohibition-era criminal classes of New York: He recreates a closed society that functions according to its own rules, oblivious and largely impervious to those of the law-abiding, job-holding, standard-English-speaking, education-valuing middle classes.

The rules are no metaphor: Characters refer to them repeatedly, and toward the end of the book Welsh conveniently spells them out for us. Of his ten, here are the first six:

1.  never hit a woman
2.  always back up your mates
3.  never scab
4.  never cross a picket line
5.  never grass friend nor foe
6.  tell them nowt (them being polis, dole, social, journalists, council, census [takers], etc.)

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