The drugs don't work nae more

Fiction: The one-time icon of the chemical generation tries a culinary take on Jekyll and Hyde - with unpalatable results.

Irvine Welsh's new novel is not really about master chefs. Nor is it particularly concerned with bedroom secrets. It is, perhaps, about the perilous search for oblivion through drink and drugs, a subject with which readers will be familiar from Welsh's earlier fiction.

But really, it's not clear whether The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs is about anything much at all. Ostensibly the tale of two young Edinburgh Council health officers - one charming, articulate and dissolute, the other socially inept and virginal - the book turns on an unsatisfying conceit, whereby the former's inevitable hangovers, liver disease, etc are somehow transferred to the latter.

Hard-drinking, hard-living Danny Skinner is a rising star among the health inspectors who monitor hygiene standards in Edinburgh restaurants.

Maladroit, teetotal Brian Kibby is the new boy in the office whom Skinner comes to loathe. That loathing becomes so intense that - for some ill-defined and unsatisfactory reason - Danny magically escapes from the consequences of his self-abuse, while Brian finds himself suffering. As Danny enthusiastically ratchets up the boozing, snorting and fighting, Brian collapses into swollen, sweating decrepitude. Only when death looms does the relationship shift from parasitism to symbiosis.

For those having difficulty in keeping their disbelief suspended, Welsh drops broad hints that he is writing in the tradition of his Edinburgh predecessor Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, along with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (there are secrets in Brian's attic, you see). On a few, all too brief occasions the writing lives up to those illustrious precedents: occasional outbreaks of the working-class Scots demotic with which he made his name in Trainspotting; some astute observations on civil service office politics (Welsh is a former local government officer himself). But other elements seem tossed in for no particularly good reason: a passage in San Francisco gives the opportunity for an uninspired pen portrait of that city which reads like something dashed off as a quickie travel article.

Some three-quarters of the way through, the reader is suddenly invited to draw a parallel between the unfolding narrative and the Bush/Blair show flickering on the TV screens in the background (we are in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq). But it's just another forced contrivance which adds nothing to the novel.

In theory, at least, the story turns on Danny's search for the father he never knew. A brief prelude describes the night he was conceived, either just before or just after a Clash concert in Edinburgh in 1981. As for the promise of the title, the portrayals of the couple of "celebrity chefs" who do turn up along the way as potential dads are too thin even to describe as caricatures. The central characters are not much better: Danny's attachments to 19th-century French poetry, and to the dumber sorts of contemporary hip-hop, seem tacked-on and ill-conceived; Brian's geek credentials - the computer games; the Star Trek conventions - are nerdism-by-numbers. Neither rings true.

There are the inevitable moments of Welshian grand guignol, where the author, at least, seems most at ease (though the same can't be said for the reader): Danny's anal rape in the improbable setting of a soirée of decadent Scottish nationalists; a graphically detailed sexual encounter with an incontinent old psychic. But those gory tricks are wearing thinner with age.

There was always something rather odd about Irvine Welsh's anointment as spokesman for the so-called "chemical generation" of the mid-1990s. His fiction has always drawn more on the post-punk junkie nihilism of the early 1980s. He is now 48, old enough himself to be Danny's missing father, so perhaps it's not surprising that the most interesting characters here are the parents. Unfortunately, they are relegated to supporting roles in this twentysomething drama. It would be wiser for Welsh to stop stumbling around the pubs of Edinburgh after young wastrels and start trying to think, act and write his age.

Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times journalist

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs By Irvine Welsh Jonathan Cape, 391pp. £10.99