If there is a moral lesson in The Bedroom Secrets, it is that hatred is overrated.
“There's no point hating,” he says. “Just leave them alone, for fuck's sake.” Does he not read the reviews? “Sometimes. But they don't get to me any more. My problem now is that I don't care enough about what critics think.”
He should care, though: the book's chief defect, which even the more measured reviews have noted, is its lack of fun with language. Welsh has written a book, for the most part, in English English, not the Scottish vernacular that fired his earlier efforts.
Welsh has become a mellow fellow. A year ago, he married a 26-year-old American called Beth. In the novel, there is a brief passage of tender lovemaking between Skinner and an American woman that is disarming enough to have the ring of reality about it.
Mellowness has made him productive. He's been directing pop videos, preparing a short-story collection with the winning title If You Liked School, You'll Love Work. His and Dean Cavanagh's play Babylon Heights, about the people who played the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz, opens shortly in Dublin after a successful run in San Francisco.
Rumors that the new novel is his last are misplaced. “I'm in the middle of my next novel now. Really tearing through it.”
The current book, as the title suggests, also tackles celebrity chefs. “I've a great respect for people who work in kitchens. It's like going down the mines.” What does he know of it? While working as a cook on the Harwich (London) to Hook of Holland ferry, he met a former Dorchester Hotel chef who had been blackballed from London's restaurants for pushing a diner's head into a bowl of soup. “That's where I got the idea of putting a character's head in the deep fat fryer.”
As a Hibernian (the other Edinburgh soccer club) supporter, Welsh might have been expected to skewer the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, Rangers (soccer club) player turned kitchen fascist. But no. “I quite like Gordon Ramsay. At least Ramsay looks as though he worked his way up. Unlike Jamie Oliver.”
When a Hibs fan can't find it in his heart to hate a Rangers player, something has gone terribly wrong. But there is another point about hate. It cuts both ways. Towards the end of The Bedroom Secrets, Kibby realizes he can make Skinner suffer, just as Skinner has been doing for the previous 300-odd pages. There follows a scene in which Skinner and Kibby go mano a mano over the pints and chasers, each seeking the other's oblivion. It is a very Scottish gunfight.
It's a drinking contest so potentially funny and with such twisted metaphysical ramifications that the scene should have made one forget the novel's many earlier shortcomings. But it doesn't: Welsh, through leaden writing and dire plotting, blows what could have been a poignant denouement, a toxic antidote to the city's festival image every bit as chastening and thrilling as Trainspotting was.
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