Davie Mitchell Character Analysis

Davie Mitchell is a resident of Leith who is friends with Tommy and peripherally knows Rent Boy and some of his other friends. Davie Mitchell doesn’t use heroin, and perhaps as a result, the sections of the novel he narrates are often more self-contained than some of the other sections. Despite abstaining from heroin, Davie still lives a fairly reckless life, at one point getting blackout drunk and creating a huge mess at his girlfriend Gail’s house. Later, Davie contracts HIV, leading him to enact a long revenge plot against Venters, the man who indirectly gave Davie HIV. Davie seems like a respectable man on the surface, and so his shocking stories represent the dark side lurking underneath polite Scottish society.