West Coast

I love Kate Muir's writing from the days when I used to enjoy her column in the Saturday Times Magazine, the predecessor to Caitlin Moran, who currently inhabits that column with such panache. I loved to read all about her postings in Washington DC and Paris, which she covered with a great degree of humour as an outsider looking in at the quirky ways of foreigners. So I expected this novel to be a complete wheeze from start to finish.

Indeed, now that I have done shuttling between the metropolis inhabited by Fergus MacFarlane, the novel's protagonist, and the place of his birth on the West Coast of Scotland, I can reveal that whilst there is some dour Scots humour, there are also some sad, reflective bits. In fact, it is much darker than I expected, populated by loss, alienation, rent boys, squats, drugs, and alcoholic binges. 

Fergus, born in a small-minded West Coast fishing port, Burnoch, is desperate to escape its restrictions and low expectations. Along the way he finds a vocation: edgy, art photography, and becomes famous, moving in the same circles as the Saatchis and the Joplins, and going from living in a dingy squat to working in a trendy Hoxton studio cum loft, and living in a millionaire's pile in Belsize Park. It's a world away from his mum Isla's bungalow "Marbella" back in Burnoch, with it's ruched sateen blinds, known locally as "hoor's knickers", which I have to confess to lusting after myself in the late eighties! She sadly squandered her opportunities to leave the town when she fell pregnant with Fergus at seventeen, and never subsequently managed to escape its confines. Fergus is absolutely determined to get out of town, and when an opportunity presents itself, he goes at it with a kind of death wish. 

There are some great pictures of the excesses of the self-indulgent art world and its parties, where agents woo rich Russian oligarchs at exclusive sushi bars, the slivers of fish laid like scales on a human mermaid. There are photography trips to war-torn Baghdad to capture the grisly aftermath of suicide bombs, and to death row in Houston to photograph the condemned and their last meals, with Fergus cruising around in a rental car playing "Dropkick me Jesus through the goalposts of life" on the radio.  It is an expansive novel covering the years from 1978 - 2007,  and clocking up considerable mileage on photographic expeditions.

Despite his fame and artistic achievements, Fergus remains deeply unsatisfied and cynical of the art world, nursing an alienation from his former life, as deep as the differences between North and South. After making a bit of a mess of lots of things, the resolution comes from closer to home than he could imagine. As Kate Muir herself once said in an interview about this book: "The thing about roots is that they keep you upright. They're the ballast in your life, the thing you're never going to throw away."

However, there is still one unresolved issue in my mind: is it really true that if one feeds Alka Seltzer to seagulls, (a recreational sport for bored teenagers in Burnoch, and a story once told to me as a student in Aberdeen), they will explode, or is it just an urban myth?