That's the moral and ethical dilemma faced by Daniel Skinner, the protagonist of Irvine Welsh's new novel, 'The Bedroom Secrets of The Master Chefs.' 24-year-old Skinner has more problems than just moral or ethical ones though. A self-loathing, nihilistic, alcoholic, drug-using football casual (familiar Welsh territory, to be sure), he works for Edinburgh City Council (an organization the writer himself worked for many moons ago) in the Environmental Health department. He has a decent salary, the pick of Edinburgh's top restaurants for a free feed (perk of the job) and a great girlfriend, but he's still not happy. His mother had sex with three men one night after a punk gig in London she attended in 1980 and one of the three fathered Skinner. He has never met his father, doesn't even know his name, and this lack of clear identity is driving him crazy. His dad might be any one of three top celebrity chefs, and this knowledge fills him with even more despair, as he deals with one of them on a regular basis and can't stand the guy.

To top of all his troubles, a new guy starts work alongside him, Brian Kibby, and Skinner can't stand this young, squeaky-clean, virginal, model train enthusiast, the straightedge Yang to his drink-drowned Yin. Full of existential pain and anger and hatred and booze, Skinner literally curses his diametrically opposed work rival, and the cracks in Kibby's life soon start to show. In a scenario that recalls 'The Acid House' from the excellent, seminal short story collection of the same name, Kibby (who has never even had so much as a drink before because he saw the effects booze had on his alcoholic father) starts to feel the effects of Skinner's wanton bodily abuse as his nemesis, realizing what is happening, starts to enjoy torturing Kibby mercilessly and starts to get more and more wiped and wired to hurt the confused young man as much as he can. But when Kibby is starting to deteriorate towards death Skinner gets a change of heart. He decides he must find his father once and for all, try to understand why he has such hatred inside himself and try and reverse the curse if he can.

Now, as any long-term reader of Welsh's will know, his books range from excellent ('Trainspotting', 'The Acid House') to okay-and-interesting-but-disturbing ('Marabou Stork Nightmares') to just plain terrible and almost unreadable ('Filth,' 'Ecstasy.'). 'Bedroom Secrets'? Well, I'd have to place it somewhere in the middle category, edging up slightly towards the first. It has a lot of flaws, many of them the usual Welsh ones, but it also has a lot on its mind that makes it a more interesting, deeper read than boring, author-not-trying-too-hard stuff like 'Porno'.

One thing that immediately struck me upon reading the book is that it is, in part, an indictment of the contemporary inescapable Scottish alcohol culture. Skinner wants to try and stop drinking, but is surrounded by pubs every few yards (something about Scotland that is absolutely true, as any Scottish person will unfortunately tell you) and this easy accessibility of thought-stop and blackout thwarts any serious attempts he makes at sobriety, to his despair. Male culture in Scotland is predicated on bonding over alcohol, to a mental, detrimental degree, and it's telling that the only surcease Skinner gets from the ever-flowing river of liver-degenerative booze is when he goes to San Francisco to meet one of the chefs who could possibly be his father.

Here we can sense the Arcoroc France pint-glass-myopia suddenly-expanded horizons of somebody brought up in an alcohol-vulture culture who sees for the first time that a good time, and indeed a normal life, can be had without being boozed-up or blootered, and it's a revelation to him. It's a very telling, true moment, and a deeply sad indictment of the violent alcoholic mess that is parts of contemporary Scotland. This clearly matches Welsh's own experiences upon arriving in the USA (where he lived for a while), and the awareness of alcohol as an anti-social social control mechanism and Scottish cure-all-ills curse is a thread that I, as somebody who moved from Scotland to America last year, could unfortunately fully identify with. It's very telling that the only time Skinner is truly happy is when he is in the USA, far away from the alcohol-sodden 'culture' he has been raised in, and when he has to go back there things go to the pub and to inescapable incapable dipsomaniac Hell again.

This is not, of course, to say that this is a book full of anti-alcohol Prohibition-era puritan preaching but, speaking of preaching, there are strange religious threads running through this book, of both Catholic and Protestant varieties, an area of the Scottish psyche that Welsh has never truly explicitly dealt with before, that certainly gave me pause for thought. Based on the old Calvinistic 'good and evil sides to man' mode, as established in the text by two clear stylistic templates for the book mentioned in it, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde,' (with a touch of the old Cheech And Chong film 'The Corsican Brothers') 'Chefs' plugs into a long-established 'duality of man' (not for nothing did Dennis Nilsen, the serial killer from the Highlands of Scotland, call himself a 'monochrome man') area explored by Scottish literature for centuries now.

The book deals also in part with how destructive repressive fun-damn-mentalist religious beliefs can be, whatever their stripe, on the sexual psyches of young men. And alongside this is a depressing Scottish father riff about how emotionally inaccessible, absent or alcoholic fathers can also contribute to the extinguished-by-alcohol-and-oblivion painful psychic fires that rage and rave and raze through large sections of the male population of the country; the thought of how out of touch many Scottish men are with their feelings is a truly depressing, thought-provoking one. As I said though this is not all totally in-your-face, but it's definitely all in there for the taking and this is what makes it the best book Irvine Welsh has written in a long, long time. As a Scottish man, parts of this book rang far too true to me and hurt to read. And for this I must salute the author.

On one level 'Chefs' reads like a lewd laundry list of the usual Welsh staples: sex, sexual repression, depression, obsession, sickness, vice, violence, nihilism, scatology, sociology, aberrant psychology, drink, drugs, liver failure, homophobia, football casuals (though the scenes of casual casuals violence in this book, as well as a brief visit to an Ibiza rave, are curiously muted and understated, as is if Welsh, at 47, is getting too long in the tooth to write this kind of stuff now), Tourette's Syndrome characters, freeform pointless anger and deep unhappiness, a pensioner sex scene where Skinner has sex with an ancient woman of indeterminate age that is incredibly vile and made me feel physically sick upon reading it; a tongue bitten off; a Scottish nationalist character with his penis blown off with a pipe-bomb whose affliction may or may not be a pointed (well, pointless would be more appropriate) statement about the power of his chosen independent-from-England pipe (bomb) dream; a sort-of necrophilia scene; religious porno parody film titles like 'Moses And The Burning Bush' or 'The Second Coming of Christ,' too-old-for-the-character pop-culture references to 70s and 80s bands and cartoons, fear and loathing of self and others, misogyny, racism, parody of the established (anti) social order, disgust with working, sick mockery, animal torture (this time it's a cat that gets singed with a lighter and not a dog getting it tight), somewhat out-of-place references to poetry and novels (Skinner does not come across as somebody who'd be a wordwork aesthete), a curious hypocritical distaste with middle class existence of the type that Welsh embraced long ago, slightly ludicrous anti-Bush-and-Blair political rants - it's all here and more. And in case you missed rape in his work (as I'm sure you did)(n't), which he occasionally throws in to shock and disgust for juvenile sick reasons, there's even a creepy male rape scene on Skinner that he barely even mentions again that serves only to inflict some mean main anal vein pain on Kibby, in a real (cough) bum note in the book that I found utterly tasteless and ludicrous. But underneath all this are genuine deepdish thoughts on contemporary Scotland, and you could do a lot worse than grab yourself a copy of this book. If you're a Welsh fan, you'll love it. If you're not, you won't even pick it up, so that's basically all I need to say about this. Disturbing, thought-provoking and even slightly stupid - everything you want from your (un)populist literature and more or less.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.