We first come across Fergus MacFarlane eating sushi from the naked female body of
a "human plate" at an exclusive Japanese restaurant, in the company of two wealthy
Russians and his art dealer. The year is 2000, and he is a famous and fabulously
wealthy BritArt photographer: a cross between David Bailey and Sam Taylor-Wood, in
the body of a Scottish, working-class one-time rent boy. The Russians, duly impressed
by the evening, sign up to buy some of Fergus's expensive art work. Fergus, feeling
soiled by their company, strips off and jogs across the city to his large, architect-remodelled
home in Belsize Park. As he does so, he "feels good. So good, so wealthy, so happy".
When your protagonist tells you this in the first chapter of a novel, you know it
won't be long before he's feeling bad and poor and miserable. Muir hardly makes us
wait at all. The novel flashes back immediately to 1978, to his childhood in Burnoch,
a fictional depressed fishing port in Argyll, not far from Oban. Fergus, aged eight,
has just lost his father, a fisherman, in an accident at sea. His mother, only 25
herself, is struggling to cope, both emotionally and financially. Muir demonstrates
keen insight into their plight, one particularly acute detail showing her crying
not over the loss of her husband but over Fergus's damaged anorak that was "supposed
to last all year at school". What passes for dinner at this stage of his life is
a packet of peanuts lobbed out of a pub window
