The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh

Tanya Simmons writes that the title of Mr Welsh’s sixth novel is misleading—there’s no food and little sex but plenty of bad writing

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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 November 2009
Excerpt (PDF – contains explicit language)
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The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
By Irvine Welsh 391pp, Jonathan Cape, $32.95

Danny Skinner works for the Edinburgh council as a successful health inspector which he slots around his drug and alcohol binges. He is confident, stylish and has a way with the lassies but his love of a pint is estranging him from his ex-punk mother, endangering his career and destroying his relationship with his beautiful fiancée.

Meanwhile, he’s searching for the identity of his father, using information from a local, minor-celebrity chef’s latest publication, Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, which is linked to his mother’s waitressing days at the time of his conception.

When the conscientious Brian Kibby comes to work at the council, Skinner forms an intense and irrational hatred towards the clean-living and shy teetotaller. Kibby is socially awkward and has a passion for model trains, Star Trek conventions and non-violent video games; he epitomises the nerdiness that Skinner doesn’t have and is an unlikely nemesis. But as Skinner’s alcoholism escalates—he loses his fiancée and nearly his job—and the two compete for a promotion, Skinner’s abhorrence of Kibby triggers a supernatural curse. The hex ensures that Kibby takes on all the effects of Skinner’s hard living: hangovers, violent injuries from soccer hooliganism, repercussions of a brutal rape, obesity and eventually the need for a liver transplant. Skinner relishes this lack of consequence and delights in inflicting as much physical and mental pain on the luckless Kibby.

Welsh has littered this book with confusing first-person perspectives where anyone and everyone—a nurse, a cashier or a lady getting her hair cut—will get a few pointless paragraphs then slip into obscurity. Amongst this clutter of periphery characters’ viewpoints, the plot occasionally surfaces but is laboured and predictable. The big reveal of Skinner’s father is obvious from very early on and Welsh leaves nothing to his reader’s imagination—Welsh is explicit about what will happen at the time of the hex but references Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray just in case.

The result is a tedious read full of some very contrived elements: Skinner, despite his full-time hedonism, is purported to be a thinker because his shelves are full of poetry; his behaviour is spuriously equated with that of Bush and Blair in a lame political spin; and his American love interest is called Dorothy Cominksy and has a “dot.com business” (shorten Dorothy’s name for the wit).

Unusually, Welsh’s signature Scottish-phonetic dialect is toned down and set against a more elegant third-person narrative but the two styles clash and grate, adding to the reader’s disorientation. Unfortunately, Welsh’s new-found style is damaged by clichés (“twisted like a knife”), tautology (“nodded affirmatively”), predictable adverbs (“meticulously prepared”) and bizarre turns of phrase (“a fart slipped out of him, as poignantly weeping as a lover’s last farewell”). This is aside from occasionally misplaced words that render passages ridiculous—characters don’t leave, they make “a defeated egress”.

Mr Welsh’s editorial team has done him a disservice—the book should have had a sound structural edit and a thorough copyedit prior to its publication. Then again, bad writing is bad writing.

Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs was a contender for the 2006 Man Booker shortlist. Although tarnished by labels of misogynistic sex scenes, the book’s failure to make the longlist is not surprising.