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Edwina Mendes

West Coast
by Kate Muir
Headline Review,  HK$272
Fergus MacFarlane, a Glaswegian photographer who made big bucks in the noughties Brit art scene but who has now dropped out of London society to return to his roots, is listening to a voice in his head. 'You rejected the dour,' it is saying, 'You rejected the smell of boiled cabbage in the close ... you rejected all the Karens, with their ordinary names and ordinary prospects ... Can you go back? Yes.'
It is an echo of the famous lines from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: 'Choose life. Choose a job ... Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments ... But why would I want to do a thing like that?' When he says those lines, Mark Renton,  the protagonist in Trainspotting, is justifying the rejection of suburban values for a free-wheeling, drug-fuelled, nihilistic lifestyle.
Fergus, on the other hand, is learning that his rejection of those same values was misguided.
It is a depressing revelation: the moral  seems to be that Fergus, with his posh wife and London mansion, ended up above himself. It is probably not the intended  one: the jacket copy prefers the sunnier idea  that this book is for 'everyone who ever lost their roots, and set out to find them again'.
Kate Muir, the author of West Coast and a Glasgow-born Times  columnist, muddies the waters elsewhere too.  At one point the jovial clue as to the villain in a hit-and-run accident is 'a paper bag containing half a chorizo sausage', yet the next scene sees Fergus forced to earn his living in the gents toilets in London's Victoria Station. Is this a comedy or a tragedy? The two rarely work well together.
Further, there are so many reminders about the era in which the book is set - each chapter heading is the name of a contemporary book or song that is then rather painfully worked into the text - it is hard to concentrate on the plot. Besides which, the pointers to Fergus' mother's lower-class tastes are so prevalent as to be patronising. She has wipe-clean wallpaper, wears blue mascara, adores her avocado bathroom suite  and calls her house Marbella, after a holiday her husband once took.
In fact the character is nothing more than a cartoon; even the author seems to concur when she writes, 'Fergus wondered ... why [his mother] seemed to speak entirely in cliches.'
But this is not to say Muir's writing is artless. West Coast can be compelling and Fergus makes a fascinating and complicated hero. Another highlight is the discussion of modern British art. Muir conjures some good ideas for Fergus' Nan Goldin-style  photography and his struggle to understand the admiration for the art produced at the time is forceful. He roars drunkenly at a party, '... it's the Emperor's New Clothes installation. Come and see the bollocks!'
Although it has its problems, West Coast is an enjoyable book. But it may be true that both Fergus and Muir would have done better not to have returned to their roots.



West Coast