Book Review | The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh

“Who called the cook a cunt? Who called the cunt a cook!”

Within a canon of works famed for its truculent one-word titles, a name like ‘The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs’ certainly stands out – but not quite as much as the story that it crowns. Encompassing as many sundry themes as its title does words, Irvine Welsh’s 2006 “guilty lunchtime purchase” takes the gritty realism of the then-recent Glue and Porno and throws it into a tale that blends the supernatural and the sensual with the much more mundane malt and barley blues.

“Is alcoholism the product of bastardism, or is it just another fucking excuse? Discuss, discuss, discuss…”

The enthralling narrative follows Leith bastard Danny Skinner, a twenty-something employee of the fictional Edinburgh Council who spends half his life inspecting kitchens and the other half inspecting the bottoms of bottles. He’s a character a little higher on the social ladder than Welsh’s most renowned subjects, and one with a demon that’s tacitly tolerated by society, making him a great deal easier to identify with, particularly if you’re of the same binge-drinking “metrosexual” generation as me. Indeed, countless passages of the book are eerily evocative of my own experiences at Danny’s age – besotted voyages of “drunken camaraderie with friends and sneering antagonisms with foes” always crashing into waking up with puke and piss on your expensive designer gear; a morning full of convulsive, dry-heaving spasms ahead of you and an irremovable taint of sleaze decimating your psyche.

Only our Mr Skinner finds a way to eradicate that taint, unwittingly stumbling upon the powerful, hate-fuelled recipe that allows him to enjoy all the deleterious effects of alcohol, but without suffering any of its adverse effects on his health.

“A powerful speculative fantasy gnawed at Skinner: wouldn’t it be fantastic if Kibby could take his hangovers and comedowns for him! If he, Danny Skinner, indulged in the pleasures of life in the most wanton, reckless way and fresh-faced, clean-cut, mummy’s boy wanker Kibby could pay the price!”

The victim of Skinner’s strange hex is the upright and uptight Brian Kibby, Skinner’s rival at work and unsuspecting nemesis. One of Welsh’s best-observed creations, Kibby is the antithesis of everything that Skinner believes in; a fit, wholesome and painfully pious young man who enthuses over model railways with the same ardour that Skinner does women, and spends as much time online gaming as Skinner does down the pub at the centre of a social web. At the outset, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is unashamed in its bias towards Skinner. Kibby one-liners like, “I dinnae like football, but I like Manchester United because they’re the biggest team in the world, so you’ve got to follow them,” instantly attract readers’ scorn, probably even the hardcore Man U-supporting contingent’s, while Skinner’s natural, unassuming charm endears him every bit as quickly. Yet as the novel progresses and Kibby’s health deteriorates, so does our repugnance for him. His condition hardens him in a way that almost benefits his character, while Skinner finds himself more emotionally vulnerable than ever despite his veritable bullet-proof vest; arguably, because of it. With hangovers and comedowns no longer on the menu, Skinner finds himself staring into the father-shaped hole that he once used drink to fill. And so, armed with the knowledge that his long-lost pop was once a cook, Skinner seeks to expose the bedroom secrets of the master chefs and find his old man, but little does he know that his curse on Kibby is reciprocal – and Bri’s about to start fighting back.

“…my kitchen and my bedroom: how they disintegrate around me, as my smile gets bigger and my heart emptier.”

By turns comic and cripplingly sad, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is a study of symbiosis ad absurdum; an all-out contest between alcoholism and abstinence that quite candidly highlights the perils of both. Kibby and Skinner are two sides of the same coin, each invisibly scarred and fatally flawed, and each too arrogant to ever recognise it, let alone admit it. Evoking the ghosts of both The Acid House and Trainspotting (albeit with the ale in place of skag), The Bedroom Secrets of the Chefs is a unique and gripping high-concept piece that showcases its Scots scribe at his most inventive.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is available to download from Amazon’s Kindle Store for £5.22 or from iTunes for £5.49. A paperback edition is still in print, with today’s cheapest online retailer being Amazon, who have the book for sale for just £5.59.