A consistency in the last two books we've read for this class that immediately springs to mind for me is the usage of the schemes, or high-rise, low rent apartments. Even the last two movies we've seen have presented the schemes in a dismal light, all concrete and steel, dreary as the grassless earth that surrounds them. They represent a metaphorical casting away, I believe, a removal of the lower class undesirables from the picaresque, tourist touted suburbs all into the same honeycombed heap. .
I think that by signaling to the reader that Roy Strang's life and troubles all began in a scheme plays upon a certain subconscious notion of what kind of people inhabit these dull structures. I have learned by previous example that true to their appearances, the schemes are the lairs of the downtrodden, so when Welsh has his narrator say:.
"Being so close to those other families, it became impossible for people, as much as they tried, to keep their lives from each other. In stairs, on balconies, in communal drying areas, though dimpled glass and wire doors, I sensed that there was a general, shared quality kicking around which we seemed to lack. I suppose it was what people would call normality- (Welsh 19).
I'm given not only the proximity of normal' life surrounding Roy, but also the picture of exactly whom Roy refers to as normal. Certainly at this point I became subtly aware that if Roy thinks the inhabitants of the scheme are normal folk, what should I consider him but lower than the low? He goes on to state this later, but I am hardly surprised when he does. The texture of the novel leads me gently into this assumption on my own, and Roy merely confirms it when he says: "For me, though, the sterile boredom outside my house was preferable to the chaos inside it- (Welsh 19).
The scheme is the entryway into the world of Roy Strang. It is this platform from which we as readers are privy to the downward spiral of his life, his environment-induced slant towards violence and hurt.
