SOURCE: “Just Say No,” in Observer (London), No. 10, 676, June 2, 1996, p. 14.

In the following review, Adams finds Ecstasy a poorly written and uninteresting book. He argues that Welsh has tried too hard, and less successfully with each new attempt, to repeat the achievement of his promising debut.

Irvine Welsh has taken to referring to himself as a “cultural activist” rather than as a writer. He is, we are reliably informed, the “Poet Laureate of the chemical generation”; his books “are bought by people who don’t buy books”, and this, his latest, has, a week before its official launch, already attracted 100,000 non-book-buying punters (rivalling the latest Jilly Cooper or Jeffrey Archer). Welsh is fast becoming the most mainstream “cult” author ever published.

His success is based on a striking first novel, Trainspotting, which seemed to speak with the authentic voice of junkies in housing project Edinburgh, and which was...