A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes

I was very taken with this book when it came out in 1989 and read it a couple of times. It then sat on my bookshelf for a while until it was dug out again for a reading group choice ten years later. Sadly, I didn't feel that it had aged at all well. The exhilarating mish-mash of styles and the ‘big themes’ just seemed more than a little pretentious and the ridiculous ‘Parenthesis’ chapter (the half in the title) didn’t seem to hang the book together at all like it was intended to.

In the spirit of fairness, I decided to have one last go, and while it’s not the masterwork that a teenage 120 Units mistook it for, it’s not the tosh it got dismissed for when I read it last time. Although the book is still very curate’s egg, which is ultimately its undoing, there is some excellent writing in it. My favourite of the ten chapters proper is written in correspondence form: the letters, telegrams and postcards from British actor and former ‘hell-raiser’ Charlie, sent to his girlfriend Pippa back in London while he’s on location in the South American jungle.

Darling – Just time for a card – we leave in half an hour – had our last night on the Johnny Walker now it’s local firewater or nothing – remember what I said on the phone and don’t have it cut too short. Love you – your Circus Strongman.

He’s shooting a film about two Jesuit missionaries who got lost trying to find their way back to the Orinoco River and were nearly drowned in a river accident with the local tribesmen they were trying to convert. The director has teamed him up with an American actor called Matt Smeaton, by all accounts a suitable pairing:

Got stinko paralytico together on our last night in town and ended up doing the Zorba dance in a restaurant! Matt tried plate-smashing but they said it wasn’t the local custom and threw us out! Charged us for the plates, too.

Still, from the moment they get into the jungle, Charlie sees things at a more cosmic level. He envies the Indians their simple life, although he gets a sudden feeling of mortality when he realises that their life expectancy is younger than he is now. As his series of letters continues, he apologises for beastly behaviour towards Pippa and hopes that they can make a new start together, away from London:

Friday. Look, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I think this spell of being apart will do us lots of good. In lots of ways. Really. I’m getting too old for hellraising anyway. ‘MY HELLRAISING DAYS ARE OVER’ SAYS TV’S ‘BAD-BOY’ CHARLIE.

Just when it looks like Charlie might turn into a decent human being after all, (he still expects Pippa to have his children and look after them on a Yorkshire farm while he’s working though, but one thing at a time) Matt is drowned and Charlie is almost killed too in a repeat of the original accident with the Jesuits 250 years before. The Indians disappear back into the forest. Charlie might need to resort to the bottle again:

Pippa love – When we get out, I’m going to do the following things. Have the biggest fucking Scotch they can pour in Caracas...

Arrival back in Caracas is not helped by the fact that an ex girlfriend is also there. Pippa, indifferent to Charlie’s near death experience hangs up on him when he rings. A couple more rancorous letters follow:

Letter 15, St Lucia, Some bloody day or other. Listen bitch why don’t you just get out of my life GET OUT. You always fucked things up didn’t you that was your one great talent fucking things up. My friends said she’s trouble and the last thing I should have done was let her move in and I was a bloody fool not to believe them. Christ if you think I’m an egotist you should look in the mirror baby. Of course I’m drunk what do you think it’s one way of getting you out of my head. now I’m going to get stinko bloody paralytico. In vino bloody veritas. Charlie “the Hell-Raiser”. P.S. I’m expressing this.

I still contend that this is the strongest of all the stories, allowing the themes to develop within the dialogue, something that some of the others seem incapable of. A mixed appraisal then, for a 21st anniversary re-read. Think I’ll leave it at that...

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Occasionally a single passage will illustrate the point I’m trying to tease out of a novel with far greater clarity than I can by loading a review with selected quotes and witty asides. The following, from Jeffrey Eugenides quite remarkable debut, The Virgin Suicides, is a perfect example.

The titular ‘virgins’ of the book, the Lisbon sisters (less one, Cecilia, who has already killed herself), go out to the Homecoming dance with an assortment of the local lads on their only unchaperoned date in their short lives. Trip Fontaine, who has made all the arrangements with the girls’ father so that he can take the enigmatic Lux with him, manages to sneak her away from prying eyes to a spot under the seating in the hall. His friend Joe Hill Conley brings sister Bonnie along too. Trip produces a bottle of something sticky and alcoholic:

Everyone’s attention returned to the bottle Trip Fontaine held in his hand. Reflections from the disco ball glittered on the bottle’s surface, illuminating the inflamed fruit on the label. “Peach schnapps,” Trip Fontaine explained years later, in the desert, drying out from that and everything else. “Babes love it.” He had purchased the liqueur with fake I.D. that afternoon, and had carried it in the lining of his jacket all evening. Now, as the other three watched, he unscrewed the cap and sipped the syrup that was like nectar or honey. “You have to taste it with a kiss,” he said. He held the bottle to Lux’s lips, saying, “Don’t swallow.” Then, taking another swig, he brought his mouth to Lux’s in a peach-flavored kiss. Her throat gurgled with captive mirth. She laughed, a trickle of schnapps dripped down her chin where she caught it with one ringed hand, but then they grew solemn, faces pressed together, swallowing and kissing. When they stopped, Lux said, “That stuff’s really good.” Trip handed the bottle to Joe Hill Conley. He held it to Bonnie’s mouth, but she turned away. “I don’t want any,” she said. “Come on, Trip said. “Just a taste.” “Don’t be such a goody-goody,” said Lux. Only the strip of Bonnie’s eyes was visible, and in the silver light they filled with tears. Below in the dark where her mouth was, Joe Hill Conley thrust the bottle. Her moist eyes widened. Her cheeks filled. “Don’t swallow it,” Lux commanded. And then Joe Hill Conley spilled the contents of his own mouth into Bonnie’s. he said she kept her teeth together throughout the kiss, grinning like a skull. The peach schnapps passed back and forth between his own mouth and hers, but then he felt her swallowing, relaxing. Years later, Joe Hill Conley boasted that he could analyze a woman’s emotional makeup by the taste of her mouth, and insisted that he’d stumbled on this insight that night under the bleachers with Bonnie. He could sense her whole being through the kiss, he said, as though her soul escaped through her lips, as the Renaissance believed. He tasted first the grease of her Chap Stick, then the sad Brussels-sprout flavor of her last meal, and past that the dust of lost afternoons and the salt of tear ducts. The peach schnapps faded away as he sampled the juices of her inner organs, all slightly acidic with woe. Sometimes her lips grew strangely cold, and, peeking, he saw she kissed with her frightened eyes wide open. After that, the schnapps went back and forth. We asked the boys if they had talked intimately with the girls, or asked them about Cecilia, but they said no. “I didn’t want to ruin a good thing,” Trip Fontaine said. And Joe Hill Conley: “There’s a time for talk and a time for silence.” Even though he tasted the mysterious depths in Bonnie’s mouth, he didn’t search them out because he didn’t want her to stop kissing him.

A vignette of growing up in seventies Michigan, this is a sharply observed piece on the strange yearnings and rituals of adolescence. Sad, hilariously funny in parts and a sign of great things to come, (his second novel Middlesex is a masterpiece), The Virgin Suicides is well worth taking off the library shelf.

The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith’s short stories deal with her usual stock in trade of dysfunctional families, misanthropic young men and ugly crimes, but as ever the writing is a joy to read and her insight into the human psyche is as sharp as in her full length novels.

In I Despise Your Life, twenty-year-old Ralph is coming home to his father’s house to tap him for cash. Living with the hip set in New York City, he needs to get $100 together for the rent on their loft apartment, the dump, but his father says no and tells him to get a job, despite first offering him a beer:

“Sit down, boy. What brings you here? ... Like a beer?” “Yeah, sure. Thanks.” Ralph was at that moment feeling a little fuzzy in the head. He had been a lot sharper less than an hour ago, higher and sharper, when he had been smoking with Cassie, Ben and Georgie back at the dump... Meanwhile a beer was what they called socially acceptable. Ralph took the cold can that his father extended.

Ralph retorts by telling his father that he thinks that his life is junk and storms off, although a letter from his old man a couple of days letter tries to mollify the situation, insisting that he’s free to do what he wants with his life. Ralph sulks because he feels he’s been cut off.

Cassie, Ben and Georgie decide to hold a party with $3 entry to get the rent money together. Ralph, in an inspired moment invites his dad to the bash, although when the day itself dawns he realises that this might have been of questionable wisdom. The house is decked out with tape hanging from the rafters and a phallic display of fruit (two oranges, banana) on the food table. There’s enough to drink, if you like wine:

Ralph tossed back a paper cupful of distasteful red wine. Why was he drinking the stuff? He preferred beer any time.

Oh well. His father arrives and Ralph tries to impress him:

“My dad!” Ralph yelled on a note of pride. “Is there a beer?” “Beer, hah!” said a fellow with a little brown bottle in his hand, waggling the bottle upside down to show it was empty. “Up yours!” Ralph retorted unheard, and lunged forward and upward, unsettling at least two standing girls, but the girls didn’t mind, only giggled. Ralph was acutely aware of his father, standing more or less in the doorway, and aware also of other people’s surprised expressions upon seeing an older man among them. But Ralph found what he was after, Ben’s precious beer cache behind the fridge, tepid, but still one small beer. Only one had been left there, and Ralph told himself to replace it tomorrow, otherwise Ben would be annoyed. He found an opener and go the top off. The paper cups were already gone. “A beer!” said Ralph, proudly handing his father the bottle.

His father is a fish out of water with all these bright young things wandering around, clearly bombed out of their gourds. He makes his excuses after running into Ralph’s housemate Cassie who is coked up and talking utter nonsense. Ralph sinks into a boozy torpor. When he comes round he feels nauseous:

Ralph felt like throwing up, surely due to the wine. Best to get to the bathroom, the toilet of course, and Ralph at once headed for the bathroom. The door was not locked, though a fellow and a girl were in there, leaning against the basin, and suddenly Ralph was angry and yelled for both of them to get out. He heard his own voice yelling, and kept on, until with startled faces they slowly made their way out, and then Ralph slid the bolt on the door. He did not have to throw up, though he recalled that this had been his intent.

He keeps his supper, but ends up slashing his wrists and wakes up in hospital the next day. Once again, it’s back to his father for money, this time to pay a $500 medical bill...

I Despise Your Life is no more than a vignette, but Highsmith skewers her characters to the page so well that it’s a miniature masterpiece on the generation gap, a highly astute study in father son relationships.

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Gothic goings on and murky tales of smugglers and wreckers off the Cornish coast in one of Daphne du Maurier’s most popular novels. First published in 1936 but set in the 1820s, Jamaica Inn has been adapted for both film and television as well as the stage. Somehow, in nigh on 35 years of life, I hadn’t got around to reading this brilliant book...

Mary Yellan is sent away to stay with her Aunt Patience on the bleak and inhospitable Bodmin Moor where she lives in the dismal and decrepit Jamaica Inn with her husband Joss Merlyn. Mary discovers the once outgoing Patience a cowed figure, terrified of the violent Joss who Mary quickly assesses as either mad or drunk, anyway. Probably both.

She’s not disabused of this by Joss, who sends poor Patience off to fetch him a drink:

“Patience, my dear,” he said, “Here’s the key. Go and fetch me a bottle of brandy, for the Lord’s sake. I’ve a thirst on me that all the waters of Dozmary would not slake.”

After a couple of glasses he tells Mary how things stand at the Inn. One glass more and he’s started on the road the confessional:

“There’s been one weakness in my life, and I’ll tell you what it is,” he said, “It’s drink. It’s a curse, and I know it. I can’t stop myself. One day it’ll be the end of me, and a good job too. There’s days go by and I don’t touch more than a drop, same as I’ve done tonight. And then I’ll feel the thirst come on me and I’ll soak. Soak for hours. It’s power, and glory, and women, and the Kingdom of God, all rolled into one. I feel a king then, Mary. I feel I’ve got the strings of the world between my two fingers. It’s heaven and hell. I talk then, talk until every damned thing I’ve ever done is spilt to the four winds. I shut myself in my room and shout my secrets in my pillow. Your aunt turns the key on me, and when I’m sober I hammer on the door and she lets me out. There’s no one knows that but she and I, and now I’ve told you. I’ve told you because I’m already a little drunk and I can’t hold my tongue. But I’m not drunk enough to lose my head. I’m not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forsaken spot, and why I’m the landlord of Jamaica Inn.”

She finds out soon enough. Joss is head of a gang of hardened criminals who wreck ships off the north Cornwall coast, luring them onto the rocks with lights, then killing the crews and looting the wreckage for the cargo. Haunted by what he has done, Joss drinks himself into a torpor, sometimes for five days at a time. Repelled by Joss and determined to get Patience away from Jamaica Inn, Mary falls in with his brother Jem, another ne’r do well. Although not a smuggler or wrecker, horse thief Jem is hardly a great catch. Still, Mary finds herself falling for him, despite her better judgement.

Jem, at least, can stay sober. Drink doesn’t hold the same fascination for him as it does his brother Joss:

“Drink’s a funny thing,” he said, after a moment or two. “I got drunk once, in Amsterdam, the time I ran away to sea. I remember hearing a church clock strike half past nine in the evening, and I was sitting on the floor with my arms around a pretty red-haired girl. The next thing I knew, it was seven in the following morning, and I was lying on my back in the gutter, without any boots or breeches. I often wonder what I did during those ten hours. I’ve thought and thought, but I’m damned if I can remember.”

Meanwhile, Joss is recovering from another bender. Needless to say, he comes to a sticky end...

W Axl Rose by Mick Wall

I spotted this in the library and had an instant flashback to buying Guns N’ Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction nearly twenty two years ago. Brazenly biased and almost as self deluded as its subject matter - the band’s lead singer - W. Axl Rose is an interesting combination of rock memoir and personal grudge by a journalist whom Rose very publicly picked a fight with, telling him to “...get in the ring, motherfucker...”

The first part of the book contains a reasonably illuminating look at Rose’s home life in small town Indiana as a youth. He was frequently in trouble with the law between leaving home and moving to California, and alcohol certainly played its part:

Now living away from home, staying at his maternal grandmother’s small house, he had his first brushes with the law – mainly for misdemeanours such as ‘public consumption [of alcohol]’ and ‘disturbing the peace’... “But he would do some pretty wild things.” Axl and his friends, including Dana Gregory, “would go out and drink and do some stupid things, like smash windows along Main Street.”

Long before the acrimonious row and subsequent bad blood, Wall was writing for Kerrang! magazine, covering the rise and rise of the Rose’s band, Guns N’ Roses. He’s previously written an unauthorised biography of the band, and I can’t help feeling that a lot of it has found its way into this book. That said, the stuff about the rest of the group is far more interesting than his pontificating about the inner thoughts of Rose.

The original line up of Guns N’ Roses had a pretty heavy intake of booze and hard drugs. Inevitably, this interfered with the music and at one point it looked as if they wouldn’t even get their debut LP recorded:

In fact, early sessions eventually had to be postponed while Slash and Izzy took time off to try and rid themselves on the bad habits they had been recklessly nurturing. According to Steven, “drugs and drink” had already begun “to take their toll as Slash [was] secreted away by the label to dry out”.

The certainly made no secret of their substance abuse on the final cut of Appetite For Destruction. Track ‘Mr Brownstone’ was an ode to the ups and downs of heroin use and on the same side there was also ‘Nightrain’, a paean to the ephemeral joys of the cheap ‘bum’s wine’ it was named after – the only drink the band could regularly afford in the days before they were signed...

Wall appears to run into the band on quite a few occasions in the next few years, although how much of this has been culled from interviews is probably moot. By the time they had become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, most of the band, with the exception of Axl Rose, was apparently knocking out increasing amounts of harder and harder intoxicants. Steven Adler is reported as saying:

“Let me say for the record that I was no angel,” he told me years later. “I drank – no, scratch that – could outdrink any of the other guys in the band, including Slash (which is saying a hell of a lot). I once swallowed thirty-two kamikazes and lived to tell about it... But I never shot smack until we arrived in Amsterdam during our first European tour...

Lead guitarist Slash was the bands most visible indulger, rarely seen without a bottle of JD to hand:

I turned to speak to Slash, the only one I’d actually been introduced to. He looked like he’d just stepped off the album cover: black top hat pulled low over a waterfall of dark curls deliberately obscuring his soft brown eyes, holding on tight to a Jack Daniels bottle like a toddler clinging to its teddy. “I bet you go to bed with that thing,” I joked. “Sure,” he said, “I like to wake up to it, too. It’s the only way I can handle...” He paused and glanced around, “... I can handle this.”

As Rose begins to take a separate bus to the gigs, Slash celebrates his twenty third birthday in alcoholic style:

Slash celebrated by getting stuck into a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, rather than his usual Jack Daniels, because downing two bottles of bourbon a day was now “giving me black stripes on my tongue”.

Asked at the end of 1988 what his plans for the future were:

He stared at me through his long, corkscrew hair. “Uh, I don’t know. Right now, it’s just about getting fucked up...”

Quite. The subsequent implosion of Guns N’ Roses and Axl Rose becoming a virtual recluse for the rest of the next decade aren’t so hard to understand now...

Greenmantle by John Buchan

A classic adventure story, Greenmantle is a tale of espionage and derring-do in the midst of the First World War on the front between Turkey and Russia in Eastern Anatolia.

Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is convalescing from wounds sustained at the Battle of Loos when he is asked by military intelligence to go undercover in enemy territory in an effort to discover the truth behind rumours that Germany is plotting to start an uprising that will affect the whole Muslim world. Britain, with its interests in India, Africa and the Middle East would be especially vulnerable.

Arriving in Lisbon disguised as a South African hostile to Britain, Hannay runs into an old friend, a Boer called Peter Pienaar. Together they agree to travel to Germany as soldiers of fortune, hoping to be recruited to the war effort against Britain while secretly making their way to Constantinople. They slip into their parts instantly, going out on the town for a few drinks:

I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.

Having established that they are up for a ruckus with the Brits, a German agent in Lisbon suggests they take the next morning’s boat to Rotterdam, and from there travel to Germany. Once inside enemy territory, they are recruited by the terrifying Colonel Stumm, a brute of a man who selects Hannay for a special operation in Egypt. Peter has been left behind in Berlin though, and almost blows their cover by getting himself thoroughly pickled:

It was just the sort of thing I might have foreseen. Peter, left alone, had become first bored and then reckless. He had persuaded the lieutenant to take him out to supper at a big Berlin restaurant. There, inspired by the lights and music—novel things for a backveld hunter—and no doubt bored stiff by his company, he had proceeded to get drunk. That had happened in my experience with Peter about once in every three years, and it always happened for the same reason. Peter, bored and solitary in a town, went on the spree. He had a head like a rock, but he got to the required condition by wild mixing. He was quite a gentleman in his cups, and not in the least violent, but he was apt to be very free with his tongue. And that was what occurred at the Franciscana. He had begun by insulting the Emperor, it seemed. He drank his health, but said he reminded him of a wart-hog, and thereby scarified the lieutenant's soul. Then an officer—some tremendous swell at an adjoining table had objected to his talking so loud, and Peter had replied insolently in respectable German. After that things became mixed. There was some kind of a fight, during which Peter calumniated the German army and all its female ancestry. How he wasn't shot or run through I can't imagine, except that the lieutenant loudly proclaimed that he was a crazy Boer. Anyhow the upshot was that Peter was marched off to gaol, and I was left in a pretty pickle.

Needless to say, Hannay gets out of this particular tight-spot, but only by the skin of his teeth, which sets the tone for the rest of the book. Never out of print since it was published in 1916, Greenmantle is a cracking read with resonances even today.

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh’s second novel, the saga of the Bright Young Things in 1930s London, is an experimental and daring piece of writing, documenting the difficult beginnings of that doomed decade. There’s also plenty to drink...

Adam Fenwick-Symes, a penniless writer engaged to be married to Nina Blount, has returned from Paris to London and is staying in Shepherd’s in Mayfair, an Edwardian institution where the game pie is quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae. He’s greeted at the door by Lottie Crump, who runs the place:

“Well,” she said, “You are a stranger. Come along in. We were just thinking about having a little drink. You’ll find a lot of your friends in here.” She led Adam into the parlour, where they found several men, none of whom Adam had ever seen before. “You all know Lord Thingummy, don’t you?” said Lottie. “Mr Symes,” said Adam... In came the waiter. “Bottle of wine,” said Lottie, “With Judge Thingummy there.” (Unless specified in detail, all drinks are champagne in Lottie’s parlour. There is a also a mysterious game played with dice which always ends up with someone giving a bottle of wine to everyone in the room, but Lottie has an equitable soul and she generally sees to it, in making up the bills, that the richest people pay for everything.)

As the drink starts flowing, Adam comes into some money, a thousand pounds to be precise. Easy come, easy go, however; he gives the whole lot to a drunken major to put on a horse in the November Handicap. Drunken shenanigans seem to be the order of the day at Shepherd’s. After a particularly wild night out (the party ends up at No. 10 Downing Street and the government falls the next day...) Adam returns to find the place crawling with the constabulary who are investigating an incident in the Judge’s room:

Downstairs, as Lottie had said, everything was upside down. That is to say that there were policemen and reporters teeming in every corner of the hotel, each with a bottle of champagne and a glass. Lottie, Doge, Judge Skimp, the Inspector, four plain-clothes men and the body were in Judge Skimp’s suite. “What is not clear to me, sir,” said the Inspector, “Is what prompted the young lady to swing on the chandelier. Not wishing to cause offence, sir, and begging your pardon, was she...?” “Yes,” said Judge Skimp, “She was.”

Adam’s fortunes rise and fall with the chapters of the book and his engagement with Nina is an increasingly on/off affair. Driving to a race meeting with friends, he finally runs into the drunken major who had kept his word and planked the thousand pounds on Indian Runner, leaving Adam with a nice little packet of thirty-five thou. should he condescend to collect it:

“Good heavens... look here, have a drink, won’t you?” “That’s a thing I never refuse.” “Archie, lend me some money until I get this fortune.” “How much?” “Enough to buy five bottles of champagne.”

Unfortunately, the major disappears and Adam is left boracic again. Still, the day isn’t without its entertainments. The man they have come to see race has dropped out halfway round and their friend Agatha Runcible takes over as second driver. Adam is slightly concerned that she might be over the limit, so to speak:

“I say, Archie, is it all right being tight in a car, if it’s on a race course? They won’t run her in or anything?” “No, no, that’s all right. All tight on the race course.” “Sure?” “Sure.” “All of them?” “Absolutely everyone – tight as houses.”

As the day finishes, the drink wears off:

Adam and Miles and Archie Schwert did not talk much. The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance hand-books, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.

Sounds like a suitable metaphor for the 1930s... The book finishes with war declared and Adam finally finding the drunken major, now a general, walking across no-mans-land. While the guns start up again, they share a case of champagne in an abandoned Daimler...

Polo by Jilly Cooper

Partly as a reaction to a surfeit of what I like to call ‘worthy fiction’ and partly on the strength of an article in the Graun detailing her as one of reading’s great guilty pleasures, I recently picked up a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo. I will confess that I had mixed expectations but Cooper when she’s at her best is a hoot, and Polo is a fun, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting read. Bit like a polo match, I suppose...

It would be futile to try and list the cast in a single blog post. Cooper stretches it out to five pages; (...Kevin Coley: A petfood billionaire and polo patron of Doggie Dins. Enid Coley: His awful wife...) and the plot meanders over another seven hundred. In short: Perdita, the spoilt but precociously talented teenage daughter of Daisy McLeod, has fallen for Ricky Francis-Lynch, the brooding but magnificent polo player with a nine goal handicap. Unfortunately, Ricky’s life has just disintegrated into disaster after his wife Chessie leaves him. The night it happens he has just won an important match and is celebrating:

After drinking at least a bottle and a half of champagne after the French Championship, Ricky tried to ring home, but the telephone was dead – probably been cut off. Suddenly, missing Chessie like hell, he decided to accept Victor Kaputnik’s offer of a lift back to the Tigers’ yard in Newbury... Victor’s helicopter seated eight, so the drinking continued on the flight, and Sukey, who didn’t drink, drove Drew and Ricky back to Rutshire, so they were able to carry on boozing, reliving every chukka.

Ricky comes back to an empty house and a note from Chessie to say that she’s left with their son, Will. Ricky finds out that the new man is his polo patron, super-rich American Bart Alderton. He sets of in his Beamer:

It was a warm night. The clouds had rolled back leaving brilliant stars and a rising moon. As Ricky couldn’t find the top of the whisky bottle, he wedged it in the side pocket, taking repeated slugs as he drove. He covered twenty miles in as many minutes, overtaking two cars at once on the narrow roads, shooting crossroads.

Chessie jokes that she’ll take him back, if he achieves a hat-trick of Herculean horsey tasks, culminating in being made a ten goal handicap, the first British polo player to rise to that level since the Second World War. Ricky snatches up their son and drives off, but tragedy strikes as his car leaves the road. Ricky is badly injured. Will is killed outright.

Ricky at least has the sense to stay off the sauce (after he gets out of prison, that is) but the rest of the cast are pie eyed for most of the novel. Daisy is perpetually topping herself up with vodka and orange, except for one dreadful Christmas with her mother-in-law when ...upstairs in her bedroom, with a bottle of Benedictine, she started frantically cocooning presents with Sellotape.

Even the horses, themselves fully drawn characters in this book, are partial to a drink:

“Can you wait somewhere else”? snapped Phil. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got a critically sick horse here.” “Sick, my eye,” thundered Miss Lodsworth, “That horse isn’t sick, it’s dead drunk. It’s just eaten all my cider apples.” There was a long pause. Crouching down, Phil sniffed Wayne’s breath. “I do believe you’re right. How many apples d’you think he ate?” “Close on a hundred.”

It all ends happily, at least for the nice people. Daisy gets a new man, and Perdita finally grows up and gets herself a suitable feller as well. On the way Cooper’s cast shift enough drink to float a battleship, indulge in some fairly fruity extra-marital sex and take part in some truly exciting polo; (her descriptions of the matches are breathtaking). It’s unashamed escapism, and all the better for it.

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

I was recommended this on the strength of its descriptions of Aberdeen, and some rather fanciful depictions of the local paper aside, it paints a realistic sounding picture of the Granite City, a conurbation of pubs, churches and rain. Three things Aberdeen had in abundance.

DS Logan is back at work after a year off sick. His first case is the body of a missing child, found mutilated and badly decomposed. As the weather gets steadily worse the body count starts to rise. Grampian Police are overstretched and unable to make a breakthrough. Sometimes, it seems, when the going gets tough, the tough have to slip out to the pub after work:

Archibald Simpson’s had started life as a bank, the large banking floor transformed into the main bar. The ornate ceiling roses and high cornices were blurred above a fug of cigarette smoke, but the crowd were more interested in the cheap drinks than the architectural details.

Naturally, they’re there to talk shop:

They’d spent the first third of the evening talking in serious tones about the dead and missing children. The second third had been spent bitching about the Professional Standards investigation into the leaking of information to the press. Changing their name from Complaints and Discipline hadn’t made them any more popular. And the last third getting seriously drunk. One of the PCs – Logan couldn’t remember his name – lurched back to the table with another round of beers. The constable was entering that stage of drunkenness when everything seemed very funny, giggling as half a pint of lager went all over the table and down the leg of a bearded CID man.

Logan, with no intention of being the responsible adult that night, gets himself thoroughly pickled, a situation not exactly assisted by the painkillers he’s still taking; one four times a day, not to be taken with alcohol. The evening gets messy, the morning after is worse:

Six o’clock and the alarm’s insistent bleeping dragged Logan out of his bed and into a blistering hangover. He slumped at the side of the bed, holding his head in his hands, feeling the contents swell and throb. His stomach was gurgling and churning with lurching certainty. He was going to be sick. With a grunt he staggered to the bedroom door and out into the hall, making for the toilet.

If that’s not bad enough, he seems to have several coppers wandering around his flat in a state of hungover bewilderment:

“Mornin’, sir. Good party last night. Thanks for putting us up.” “Er... Don’t mention it.” Party?

Still, at least he gets a bacon sandwich for breakfast:

Logan sat back from the table, chewing on his bacon buttie, trying to remember what the hell happened last night. He couldn’t remember any party. Everything was pretty much a blank after the pub. And some of the stuff before that was none too clear either. But apparently he’d had a party and some of the search team had crashed at his place. That made sense. His flat was on Marischal Street: two minutes’ walk from Queen Street and Grampian Police Headquarters. But he still couldn’t remember anything after they were chucked out of the pub. The PC currently throwing up in his toilet – Steve – had stuck Queen’s ‘A Kinda Magic’ on the jukebox and promptly taken off all his clothes. It couldn’t be called a striptease. There was no teasing and too much staggering round like a drunken lunatic. The bar staff had kindly asked them to leave.

With this crack team on the case, the rest of the investigation will be a breeze.

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

The rambling start to what is threatened to be a trilogy, Sea of Poppies is the colourful saga of the crew, passengers and prisoners aboard an old slaving ship, the Ibis, as it journeys from India to the Seychelles.

Beginning in British India at the start of the Opium Wars, the cast of Ghosh’s wide and diverse novel include Zachary Reid, the ship’s American second mate, a ruined raja, a cross-dressing secretary and the widow of an opium worker. I felt, however, that his minor characters were much more fun, especially that of the Doughty, the pilot sent to navigate the Hooghly as the Ibis sails up to Calcutta from the Bay of Bengal.

Doughty certainly makes an impression on his arrival onboard, a stout, irate Englishman pounding the deck with a Malacca cane:

He waved airily at the lascar who was standing behind the wheel. “That’s my sea-cunny over there; knows exactly what to do – could take you up the Burrempooter with his eyes closed. What’d you say we leave the steering to that badmash and find ourselves a drop of loll-shrub?” “Loll-shrub?” Zachary scratched his chin. “I’m sorry, Mr Doughty, but I don’t know what that is.” “Claret, my boy,” the pilot said airily, “Wouldn’t happen to have a drop on board, would you? If not, a brandy-pawnee will do just as well.”

It soon transpires that Doughty likes a drink. An invitation to dine on the barge of doomed raja Neel Rattan Halder starts off well enough with a bottle of fizz, although Neel notes that it’s only the sauce that makes these interactions bearable:

Back in the sheeshmahal, a bottle of champagne was waiting in a balty of muddy river water. Mr Doughty fell upon the wine with an expression of delight. “Simkin! Shahbash – just the thing.” Pouring himself a glass, he gave Neel a broad wink. “My father used to say, ‘Hold a bottle by the neck and a woman by the waist. Never the other way around.’ I’lll wager that would have rung a gunta or two with your own father, eh, Roger Nil-Rotten – now he was quite the rascal , wasn’t he, your father?” Neel gave a chilly smile: repelled as he was by the pilot’s manner, he couldn’t help reflecting on what a mercy it was that his ancestors had excluded wine and liquor from the list of things that could not be shared with unclean foreigners – it would be all but impossible, surely, to deal with them, if not for their drink?

Unfortunately, Doughty, well in his cups, overhears something said by Neel’s mistress halfway through the dinner and gets in a terrible rage. Zachary and his employer shovel him off Neel’s barge and into the capable hands of their lascars:

“Catchi too muchi shamshoo,” said Serang Ali matter-of-factly, as he took hold of the pilot’s ankles. “More better go sleep chop-chop.”

After a long period spent in Calcutta while the characters assemble for the voyage, Doughty is given little to do, although he’s brought in to write the register of indentured labourers as they pass through the company’s holding camp on their way to the ship. Sadly his clerical skills are a little compromised:

Mr Doughty had just half an hour before left the table of a district magistrate, where he had been served a heavy lunch, copiously lubricated with many brimming beakers of porter and ale. Now, between the heat and the beer, his eyes were gummed together with sleep, so that a good few minutes followed between the opening of his right eye and then the left.

In a nod to future books, the names of two of the protagonists are written down incorrectly, the blame given to the faulty hearing of an English pilot who was more than half-seas over:

Zachary later says goodbye to the man in this walk-on-part with much greater regret than he anticipated, and I have to say that I did too...

Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willets

Describing itself as The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Dandy Julian MacLaren-Ross this extensive biography sheds light on one of the 40s most promising writers. Fêted by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh among others, MacLaren-Ross is not so well known now, perhaps because he fell from favour later in life, his talent compromised by booze and debt.


Born in South Norwood, his family moved to the French Riviera when he was young and it was there, supported by a generous monthly allowance, that he became something of a dandy in his early twenties. Back in Blighty, the money dried up and he found himself living on the charity of friends and working as a vacuum cleaner salesman. Throughout all this, he nursed a burning desire to write.

His first real successes came during the Second World War (a shortage of materials meant that short stories were never more popular). It was at this point that he started to make his way to Soho when on leave, gravitating towards the Fitzroy Tavern:

The pre-eminent meeting place in that area, sometimes called North Soho, was the Fitzroy Tavern on the corner of Windmill and Charlotte Streets... It consisted of the relatively smart, L-shaped Saloon Bar, and the smaller Public Bar, the bare boards of which were strewn with saw dust... their atmosphere of raucous fraternity enhanced by music from an electric pianola and by an array of potent drinks like the peppery concoction sold as ‘Jerusalem Brandy’...

After a disastrous stint in the army, he found himself discharged in 1943 and reappeared back in London. Dressed to the nines in a trademark ‘teddy bear’ overcoat, dark glasses and a malacca cane, he once more made his way towards the familiar boozy territory west of the Tottenham Court Road.

Proudly attired in his latest get-up, his coat habitually draped round his shoulders in the style of a smooth but sinister Hollywood hoodlum, he passed the long summer evenings reacquainting himself with the riotous wartime Soho pub scene. Sometimes he went to the huge, high ceilinged Swiss Tavern on Old Compton Street, its subdued lighting lending it a murky intimacy. Normally abbreviated to ‘the Swiss’, it had a raffish ambience that made it popular with painters and writers... who didn’t mind the tarnished walls and the barman’s dirt-soiled white mess-jacket. Unable to afford pricey bottles of black-market booze, he had to rely on the normal quota of, at most, two pints of beer each night.

Supported by occasional publications and at one point full time employment working alongside Dylan Thomas (they drank together in a members bar stocked with Irish whiskey, its availability a perk of Ireland’s neutrality) MacLaren Ross slowly began his descent into the boozy caricature he was to end up:

Conscious of the Fitzroy’s associations, Julian preferred the Wheatsheaf. In the run-up to 6.00pm, he’d be waiting outside the front door. When opening-time at last arrived, he’d breeze through the Public Bar and into the Saloon Bar, always making a beeline for the extreme lefthand end of the counter, where it was easiest to get served... Finding himself in the company of devoted drinkers, nursing their precious pints, he began to increase his alcohol intake. Most of the time he drank acidic, suspiciously watery Scotch Ale, served by an ill-assorted trio of bar-staff... Apart from the way his normally unobtrusive eyelids lowered as the hours drifted by, Julian was capable of consuming any available alcohol with no tangible effect. He was so inordinately proud of this, he often used to boast about it. Slowly but steadily soaking up the booze, he’d cling tenaciously to his spot at the bar until closing-time approached. Or until the supply of beer ran out: a common occurrence on particularly busy nights in wartime pubs, where chalked signs declaring NO DRINK would spring up.

He continued writing at a tremendous rate between opening hours, staying up through the small hours with the assistance of green bombs of speed. In many respects though, his magnum opus was himself; Julian the raconteur, the ultimate writer and artist:

Bang on opening-time, Julian would make ‘his entrance, pushing the doors open with his malacca cane with the pinchbeck top. He entered, head held on high like a king, King Julian.’

After the war his writing became less sought after and he died broke in 1964. He was, as his biographer puts it, a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

The surprise winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Vernon God Little is a riotous satire of adolescence, death, crime and punishment in small-town Texas.

The protagonist, Vernon Little, has somehow managed to get himself into a world of shit without trying. His best friend Jesus Navarro, has shot the rest of his class and Vernon is under suspicion as an accessory, or worse still, an accomplice. His dysfunctional teenage life is now under intense scrutiny giving everything he does a air of perceived delinquency.

When he gets sent to a sinister psychiatrist, he decides the best thing to do is go on the lam to Mexico with Taylor Figueroa, a girl with whom he is besotted. Money, however, is a bit of an issue. In fact, he has none, so he decides to get drunk and think about things. Still, the barter economy is alive and well in Martirio; beer can be exchanged for online pornography with local amputee Silas:

“We-ell,” he says, stroking his chin. “How much ya want fer it?” “A case.” “Git outta here.” “No kidding, Sie, this list can save you a truckload of beer over the summer. A goddam truckload, at least.” “I’ll pay a six pack.” “We-ell,” I hesitate. You have to hesitate with Silas. “We-ell. I don’t know, Sie, plenty of kids’ll wanna kill me, after I bust the business like this.” “Six-packa Coors, I’ll go git it.” He swings a way into the house like a one legged monkey. You can’t drink until you’re twenty-one around here. I ain’t twenty-one. Good ole Silas always keeps some brews in stock, to trade for special pictures. Us Martirio kids are like his personal internet. He’s our personal bar. By seven thirty this morning, I’m sat in a dirt clearing behind some bushes at Keeter’s sucking beer and waiting for ideas about cash.

He finally pulls off a scheme for getting enough bucks together and manages to get to Mexico where he hitches a lift with a truck driver. Flat broke, he hasn’t even got enough for a drink.

A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say ‘Milk and fucken cookies’ in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit’s established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle. “Sa- lud!” he says.

After which, things get a little messy:

Don’t fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider’s web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I’m loaded off my ass... An aneurism wakes me Friday morning. I’m curled up on the floor behind a table. A brick in my head smashes into the back of my eyes when I look around.

Having traded the last of his possessions and the clothes he stood in for a night on the tiles, he’s once again desperate for money. Can he persuade Taylor to come down to Mexico with the money. You betcha! Especially if he starts talking to her as if he really did commit all those murders. She takes him to a hotel room and they raid the mini-bar:

“Welcome home,” she says. She pulls some tequila minatures out of the mini-bar, while I just stand here like a spare prick, then she curls up on the bed closest to the window... Taylor raises her bottle, and we slug our tequilas down. I lie back on the bed like I’m wearing guns. She crawls half off the bed to grab some beers, and as she does it, her ass strains into the air. Panty-line. Bikinis. I’m fucken slain.

All this drink and physical temptation. Young Vern couldn’t be being set up to say something foolish might he?

Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott

There’s a lazy train of thought that has reduced the 1970s simply to a decade that ‘taste forgot’, nothing more than a parade of kitsch, regurgitated on ‘I love the 70s shows’ with their fixation on Marc Bolan and the Bay City Rollers. Jake Arnott’s novel shifts the focus back from the fluff to radicalised politics, social deprivation and the vacuous heart behind the glam of the music scene.

Sweet Thing is a teenage hustler, a seventeen-year-old rent boy, plying his trade at Piccadilly Circus. His best punter is Johnny Chrome, a has been pop star who somehow flukes a number one hit. With a follow-up single demanded by the record company, Chrome falls apart under the pressure, washed out on tranquilisers and white wine:

“I’m ridiculous, ain’t I?” Sweet Thing didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to upset Johnny. He was a good customer, he reckoned. Johnny shakily poured himself another glass of wine and fumbled for his pills. Time to go, thought Sweet Thing.

Sweet Thing falls in with Pearson and his flat-mate Nina who live in a Somers Town squat off the Euston Road. Pearson’s lover has recently committed suicide, but what he doesn’t know is that he was also involved with the Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign. Sweet Thing’s arrival drives the fragile household apart: Pearson is smitten by the androgynous rent-boy and Nina seduces him. Oblivious to the chaos he is causing, Sweet Thing flits back to Johnny Chrome, now dependent on the boy to give him the courage to perform.

When they got back to Johnny Chrome’s house they sat and watched Top of the Pops. Johnny opened a bottle of white wine and poured them both a glass. He took the pills from his pocket and swallowed two of them. “What are they?” Sweet thing asked. “Downers,” replied Johnny. “Want some?” “Yeah, all right.” Johnny handed the boy a couple and Sweet Thing chased them down with the sweet wine. T. Rex was number one with ‘Metal Guru’.

As Sweet Thing starts to realise how much he has been exploited he hits the town with a pocket full of cash. Wired up on speed, he picks up a punter called Walter, a former male prostitute himself, who warns him that he is a lost soul:

Walter went to get a bottle of brandy and two tumblers. “Make yourself comfortable,” he implored. Sweet Thing slumped on to a sofa. Walther handed him a glass and poured out a couple of inches of spirit. He sat down next to him, one hand holding his own glass, the other snaking around the upholstery to rest on the nape of the boy’s neck. Sweet Thing’s shoulders spasmed. The man patted him gently. Sweet Thing leaned forward and took a gulp of brandy. “Are you OK?” asked Walter. Sweet Thing swallowed and sighed, breathing the spirit’s vapours. Another gob of speed-phlegm trickled down his throat. He felt the brandy glow inside him, his face blushing with its infusion.

Disorientated, he goes back to the squat. Pearson and Nina invite him along to a fund-raiser for the Stoke Newington Eight. Sweet Thing gets pissed on Bacardi and Coke:

“It’s Sweet Thing. He’s drunk. We better take him home.” They found him propped up at the bar. “Fucking hippies!” he was calling out... They hailed a cab and bundled him in. When they got back to the squat they pulled him out and steadied him up the stairs. They got him into his room and lowered him onto the bed. He looked up at them and grinned. The ceiling began to spin above his head.

The hangover is going to last a while. As Johnny Chrome’s Faustian pact with Sweet Thing lurches to its terrible conclusion, Pearson plans one last spectacle in the name of the Angry Brigade. Like the decade itself, the results are explosive...

Drunkards Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

I felt that it was time to return to Hašek’s book of short stories. A notorious toper himself, Hašek seems to have little time for the practice of abstinence and attempts to give up the sauce usually meet in failure in this collection. Take, for example, the case of Professor Dr. Sahula in Fighting Against Alcohol:

Professor Dr. Sahula used to be a severe alcoholic in his youth. He used to drink up to thirty beers a day. Then he got kidney disease, an expansion of the stomach, fat around the heart and the result was, that he stopped drinking beer, spirits and wine, and began drinking mineral water.

Unfortunately, Sahula develops a prodigious appetite for Geisshübel saltzer and starts corroding his stomach with that instead. Finally forgoing restaurants as well, he has no choice but to apply himself to his studies, where he consumed learning just like alcohol before, with zest, with vigour and in unusually large quantities.

After several unorthodox treatments for insanity are patented, (the Sahula system sees a madman locked in a cell for three months with a sane man: when released the madman is sane, the sane man is mad. Repeat ad infinitum...) he turns his attention to his old nemesis, alcohol:

...at first he based his attempts on a principle that alcohol must be despised. He carried with him a small bottle of some loathsome liquid for retching, and went around to pubs and bars. There he treated all drunks and secretly dripped his poison into their glasses. They drank it like water and when he was discovered, one even begged, “Give us a drop as well, it gives me a devil of a thirst.”

Seeing that the emetic doesn’t work, Sahula investigates the side effects of booze:

According to his discoveries, alcohol works like radiation at a distance. Therefore, a photographer taking pictures of some drunken group cannot be sure that his children will not be born stupid. His book “About the Effects of Alcoholism” is a colourful collection of interesting documents showing the rampages of alcohol from a distance. An example, An eight-year-old son of a cooper fell into an unfinished barrel. When they pulled him out, he had a red nose.

His book lists 116 illustrations similar to the above, but what he really wanted was a live audience on the lecture circuit:

He managed to obtain a typical example of acute alcoholism. A man with a red nose stands in front of him, with a swollen face and shaking hands. “You are an alcoholic Bezděk.” “You bet!” says Bezděk happily. “Are you married?” “Somewhere in the Hradčany area,” replies Bezděk...

Now all he needs is the wretched man’s family. Mrs Bezděk makes an appearance with five kids and Sahula is ready to test his theory on the offspring of a man who drank up to two litres of slivovitz daily, and was able to stand fifty beers and five litres of wine at the same time. Sadly, his hypothesis never gets off the ground. Mrs Bezděk hasn’t seen her husband in twenty years and the kids are someone else’s. Sahula gives up:

When professor Dr. Sahula was crossing the square on his way home from the lecture, people walking behind him heard him pound the pavement and mutter, “I am going to get smashed tonight.”

Trix by Stephanie Theobald

Another road-trip across the US, this time from Florida to California, in the company of the volatile and unpredictable Ruby Rose, small time hustler, dominatrix and California courtesan...

Shy and uptight Mo is on holiday from Scarborough when she runs into Ruby in a New Orleans diner and is equally captivated and appalled by her. At six foot and fifteen stone, Ruby is larger than life in more than one sense, with an interesting taste in drinks, Mo notes, as a jug of fizzy stuff the colour of the ocean in Biloxi appears:

She pours a slug of Jack Daniel’s into her glass, followed by some of the yellowy brown liquid. “Damn climate,” she says, “God’s punishment for country music.” She takes a swig and bangs the glass down on the counter, panting. “Jack Daniel’s and root beer: best drink in the world.”

Agreeing to give her a lift to New Mexico, Mo finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed by her new friend, a woman with an insatiable thirst for food, drink, drugs and sex. She is also beginning to wonder if Ruby isn’t in fact bonkers. In the darkness of a power cut, Ruby starts on the sauce again:

Another match is struck. The blackness shrinks back to reveal a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a brown and orange can. An ear of flame appears from a hand on the bed. “Are you mad?” “So I’ve been told,” she says, with a ripple of laughter... “Once, I set fire to three acres of hillside,” she says, taking a swig from the Jack Daniel’s bottle and slashing another match.

Beneath her chaotic exterior, Ruby is hiding deep and terrible secrets, which are slowly coming to the surface in a haze of whiskey and marijuana. Between drinking bouts she scribbles a memoir of her troubled childhood in a diary and Mo cannot help sneaking a read. Their arrival in small town New Mexico sees them at a tiny motel run by the sexagenarian Vera who at least is up for a glass of something herself:

Vera looks pleased to see us. “Good to see you girls made it!” she says, thumping the bar. She asks us what we’d like to drink and Billie orders tequila for both of us... “Let’s get really hammered?” Billie says, to nobody in particular, slugging back her tequila. “You go, girl!” Vera says, downing her whiskey in a few gulps. “They say that the beginning’s one half of the deed.”

While a drunken and shocked Mo contemplates what she has read in Ruby’s diary, he friend is coaxed into performing her burlesque of Doris Day/Courtney Love. Truly unhinged, it’s Ruby’s tour de force, complete with stage props of fake drugs and a bottle of vodka:

She wraps the pink dress around her hurriedly and carries on lip-synching ‘Que Sera Sera’, mouthing sweetly about what she’s going to do when she grows up. And then it comes again: the music rips savagely into Courtney Love and the deranged, twisted Doris comes back to life. She gulps down the rest of the vodka, she chucks a handful of Valium down her neck, she tears open the cocaine envelope, throws the contents all over her face and cleavage, then rips off the dolls head and pulls out the day-glo red and blue brains with such frenzy that I’m not sure this is play acting any more. I think that maybe she’s gone completely off the rails and as the Love music becomes slower she takes the vodka bottle and licks the rim suggestively, ominously... The only thing that keeps coming back to me is the line from the Doris Day song when the little girl asks her mother what the future holds. And I want to cry but I can’t do that or I’ll give the game away. So I drink. I drink and drink.

With still two states to drive through before they reach the Pacific Ocean, none of this augurs well...

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

The Difference Engine is a wonderful piece of speculative fiction set in the19th century where Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer of the same name succeeds in bringing forward the information revolution by over one hundred years. Part Victorian pastiche, part pseudo-historical document, it’s debatable whether it is a novel at all, though this is in no way a criticism. One of the more remarkable books I’ve read of late, (and my first proper foray into the genre of steampunk), The Difference Engine is something I’ll almost certainly return to.

The authors’ research is impressive and the characters only have to step into a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with fishtail gas-jets for me to be able to smell the sawdust on the floor. Sadly the drinks themselves are less impressive:

He’d bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him. “You did well, girl,” he said, and slid the glass towards her. The place was full of Crimean soldiers on furlough. Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growling red-nosed and screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with mill-knocker clubs behind the bar. “Gin’s a whore’s drink, Mick.” ... He sipped his gin-twist, rolled it over his tongue with an unhappy look, and swallowed. “Never mind, dear – they’ve cut this with turpentine or I’m a Jew.”

The book’s focus flits between Sybil Gerard, a ruined woman whose father was a famous Luddite, Laurence Oliphant, journalist and secret government agent, and Edward Mallory, discoverer of the Leviathan, a set of Brontosaurus bones in Wyoming. Mallory is first encountered at the Epsom Derby, attending the steam races:

He put it from his mind, seeing that drink was being sold from a striped canvas tent, men crowding the counter, wiping foam from their mouths. A thirst struck him at the sight of it. Veering around at trio of sporting-gents, crops under their arms, who argued the day’s odds, he reached the counter and tapped it with a shilling. “Pleasure, sar?” asked the barman. “A huckle-buff.” “Sussex man, sar?” “I am. Why?” “Can’t make you a proper huckle-buff, sar, as I haven’t barley-water,” the fellow explained, looking briskly sad. “Not much call for it outside Sussex...Mix you a lovely bumboo, sar. Much like a huckle-buff. No? A good cigar, then. Only tuppence! Fine Virginia weed.” The barman presented a crooked cheroot from a wooden box.

Poor fellow has to make do with beer, but before the racing is done, he has found himself mixed up with a wayward Ada Byron and in possession of a very dangerous box. In short, he is in trouble, and ends up under the protection of the mysterious Oliphant, who later rescues him from assault, with the help of five visitors from Japan. Oliphant then proposes that it’s tincture time:

“Under the circumstances,” Oliphant mused, “Dreadful hot day, a tiring foray after enemies of the realm – a small libation is in order.” He lifted a brass bell from the table and rang it. “So, let’s get friendly, eh? Nani o onomi ni narimasu ka?” The Japanese conferred, their eyes widening, with happy nods and sharp grunts of approval. “Uisuki...” “Whisky, an excellent choice,” said Oliphant.

Not that Mallory, a bluff lad from Lewes, wants protecting. He’s soon slipped his guardians and is off to the Cremorne Gardens, looking for a dollymop to take him home. First, he needs to get up a bit of Dutch Courage:

Mallory had two more whiskys at the platform’s bar. The whisky was cheap and smelled peculiar, either tainted by the Stink or doctored with hartshorn or potash or quassia. Or perhaps indian-berry, for the stuff had the colour of bad stout. The whisky shots sat in his stomach like a pair of hot coals.

Even so, he succeeds, and for the promise of a guinea, goes back to Whitechapel with a young lady called Hetty. He tries to explain how London works:

“London is a complex system out of equilibrium. It’s like – it’s like a drunken man, blind drunk, in a room with whisky bottles. The whisky is hidden – so he’s always walking about looking for it. When he finds a bottle, he takes a long drink, but puts is down and forgets it at once. Then he wanders and looks again, over and over.”

Unfortunately, the bottle is about to explode. A combination of the Great Stink and pea souper fogs has led to riots and looting. Mallory is going to wake up in Whitechapel with a dreadful hangover and a hellish walk back to Kensington through a city in the grip of Luddite revolt...

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

I have to confess that once again I’m allowing my reading choice to be dictated by listening to my old Hawkwind records, in this case the song of the same name from their 1977 album Quark, Strangeness & Charm. A post-atomic apocalypse road trip from LA to Boston to deliver a serum to a dying city, Damnation Alley is pretty pulpy stuff, both on vinyl and in paperback.

Hell Tanner is the last of the Angels, a motorcycle outlaw whose gang has been destroyed by the Nation of California, one of three cities left in North America after a catastrophic nuclear war. He’s given an ultimatum; either spend the rest of his life behind bars or help drive medicine to bubonic plague ridden Boston through the nightmare of Damnation Alley, a deadly landscape spanning America, full of rock storms, tornadoes, giant snakes and vampire bats and Gila monsters the size of barns.

Damnation Alley is a book about redemption and Tanner is no hero at the start. As the man releasing him at the beginning of the book puts it:

You’re a drunk and a degenerate, and I don’t think you’ve had a bath since the day you were born... You are not a human being, except from a biological standpoint.

Tanner’s ride is exhilarating stuff; he is part of a convoy of eight-wheeled cars, armed with flame throwers, rockets, grenades and heavy machine guns. The empty wastes of the Mid-West see him pass through the empty remains of Kansas City and St Louis, crossing the mighty Missus Hip on a creaking bridge cluttered with broken down cars. By the time he’s made it to what used to be the state of New York, he’s in need of refreshment:

He drew up in front of a flickering red sign that said: “Bar and Grill”, parked, and entered. It was small, and there was jukebox music playing, tunes he’d never heard before, and the lighting was poor, and there was sawdust on the floor. He sat down at the bar and pushed the Magnum way down behind his belt so that it didn’t show... When the man in white apron approached, he said: “Give me a shot and a beer and a ham sandwich.”

It’s not over yet. He still has to get to Boston and he quickly tangles with a motorcycle gang. Killing all but one, he picks up the survivor who is a chick and who he quickly takes a shine to. Especially when it turns out she has a bottle of hooch on her:

“I can buy you a drink.” “What do you mean?” She drew a plastic flask from the right side pocket of her jacket. She uncapped it and passed it to him. “Here.” He took a mouthful and gulped it, coughed, took a second, then handed it back. “Great! You’re a woman of unsuspected potential and I like that. Thanks.”

Too bad she doesn’t make it to Boston with Tanner, but it’s a rough world out there in the post-apocalypse.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

A fantastic book that came my way by chance (the vagaries of choosing a title in a reading group to be precise...) The Help tells the story of three women in Civil Rights era Mississippi, two black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and local college girl Miss Skeeter.

What brings these women together is an idea that Skeeter has for a book, a factual report of what life is like in Jackson MS for black women working for the rich white ladies in the city. Initially reluctant and always fearing reprisal, the maids slowly tell Skeeter their stories and the book is written.

Stockett’s extremely moving and powerful novel flips between the three main characters, each of whom have more than their fair share of problems. Of the three, I found myself enjoying the chapters about Minny the most. A woman whose sassy tongue has lost her several jobs, her attitude to drink (hence the inclusion in 120 Units) is forthright. Thinking that she has discovered her new boss, Miss Celia, drinking shined whiskey in her bedroom, Minny boils over into a rage:

She’s sitting on the yellow twin bed by the window and she’s not smiling. The package I toted in from the mailbox is open sand on the bed are a dozen bottles filled with brown liquid. It’s a slow burn that rises up my bosoms, my chin, my mouth. I know the look of those flat bottles. I nursed a worthless pint drinker for twelve years and when my lazy, life sucking daddy finally died, I swore to God with tears I my eyes I’d never marry one. And then I did. And now here I am nursing another goddam drinker. These aren’t even store-bought bottles, these have a red wax top like my Uncle Toad used to cap his moonshine with. Mama always told me the real alcoholics, like my daddy, drink the homemade stuff because it’s stronger. Now I know she’s as much a fool as my daddy was and as Leroy is when he gets on the Old Crow, only she doesn’t chase me with the frying pan. Miss Celia picks a bottle up and looks at it like it’s Jesus in there and she can’t wait to get saved. She uncorks it, sips it and sighs. The she drinks three hard swallows and lays back on her fancy pillows.

Worse still, it’s a case of mistaken identity – the bottles of brown liquid are a quack remedy that Celia has mailed off for in an attempt to ward off another miscarriage, sadly unsuccessfully. She does, however, make up for things on the booze front later on in the book. Come the society annual dinner that Celia is desperate to go to, she starts early:

“Miss Celia, now what is going on in here?” I mean, she’s got stockings dangling from chairs, pocketbooks on the floor, enough costume jewelry for a whole family of hookers, forty-five pairs of high-heel shoes, underthings, overcoats, panties, brassieres, and a half-empty bottle of white wine on the chifforobe with no coaster under it.

In fact, by the time she gets there she’s drunk as a Injun on payday:

Celia grabs for Johnny’s arm as they make their way into the room. She teeters a bit as she walks, but it’s not clear if it’s from the alcohol or the high heels... Johnny squeezes her hand, gets her another drink from the bar, her fifth, although he doesn’t know this.

Determined to fit in and make a good impression with the snooty queen bee, Hilly, Celia does everything wrong, from turning up half cut in a ghastly pink dress (Minny’s account of this is worth picking up the book for alone) to trying to corner Hilly and ask her why she won’t talk to her. Johnny runs into a friend and more drinks are procured:

Celia lets out a loud hiccup and she frowns, covers her mouth with a tissue. “You getting tipsy?” asks Johnny. “She’s just having fun, aren’t you, Celia?” Richard says. “In fact, I’m fixing to get you a drink you’re gonna love. It’s called an Alabama Slammer.” Johnny rolls his eyes at his friend. “And then we’re going home.” Three Alabama Slammers later...

Which is when Celia manages to get Hilly alone for a moment and disaster strikes. Not only does she managed to tear the cuff off Hilly’s dress, the combination of wine and Alabama Slammers finally catches up with Celia’s beleagaured digestion causing the dreaded anti-peristalsis and she parks a leopard in the middle of the party:

Celia stops, looks around like she recognises no one around her. She has tears in her eyes. Then she groans and convulses. Vomit spatters onto the carpet.

Needless to say, the subsequent hangover lasts for several days...

Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel by Lucinda Hawksley

An icon of the Victorian age, thanks in no small way to the portrait of her as Ophelia by John Millais, Lizzie Siddal is the tragic heroine of the Pre-Raphaelite era, the doomed wife and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the suicide dead of an overdose at the age of thirty two.


A stunner, spotted by Walter Howell Deverell while she worked in a millinery shop near Leicester Square, Lizzie started modeling for painting at the age of nineteen. She soon caught the eye of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and quickly became her muse. Unfortunately, Dante could never quite bring himself to introduce her to his family, let alone propose marriage.

Lizzie endured poor health most of her life, and although there is no precise diagnosis of what exactly it was that ailed her, the Hawksley’s biography suggests that it may well have been an eating disorder combined with bouts of depression. It wasn’t long before she began self medicating:

Whatever the original ailment was, Lizzie began alleviating it with one of the nineteenth century’s most common drugs, laudanum. It was that which was prove her downfall… Laudanum, otherwise known as “tincture of opium”, was a mixture of opium and alcohol. It was available widely and without prescription. Laudanum was perceived as a cure-all-painkiller, much as aspirin or paracetamol are viewed today.

Laudanum, still available today under strict prescription, was available without license just about anywhere. It was a panacea:

To understand why laudanum was so widely taken, one needs to look at the vast list of disparate symptoms it was claimed to alleviate. These included symptoms of alcoholism (even though alcohol was the main ingredient of the “medicine”), bedwetting, bronchitis, chilblains, cholera, coughs and colds, depression, diarrhoea, dysentery, earache, flatulence, gout, gynaecological problems, headaches, hysteria, insanity, menopause, morning sickness, muscle fatigue, nausea, nervous tension, period pains, rheumatism, stomachache, teething in babies and toothache in adults.

By the mid 1850s, Lizzie, still hanging on for an offer of marriage from Dante Gabriel, was addicted and laudanum was a constant companion in their relationship. She was no mean artist and poet herself, although her output suffered from her intake of the noxious stuff:

Her style is erratic, sometimes drawn with clarity, at other times sketchy and rough – indicative of the amount of laudanum she had taken before starting.

As the decade wore to a close, Lizzie’s illness grew worse and more life threatening. Sojourning in Matlock to take the waters, she fell desperately ill:

The years of laudanum addiction had taken hold and her symptoms were advanced and pathetic. She was unable to ingest anything without vomiting, she was weak, terribly thin and could summon up little creative energy.

Dante Gabriel came to see her and she recovered, but when he left again, fuelling her (not unjustified) suspicions that he was fooling around with other women she grew sick once more. In Hastings in 1860 she was at death’s door, and Rossetti finally married her, convinced that she wouldn’t make it to the church. Once again, she rallied, soon falling pregnant, but tragically, the baby was still-born. Lizzie was destroyed by grief:

Her usual tendency to depression, combined with a new pressure of post-natal depression, led to a dangerously increased dependence on laudanum… Rossetti later admitted that he had known her to take up to a hundred drops of laudanum in one dose.

In February 1862, Dante Gabriel went out for supper:

When he returned home at half past eleven, Rossetti found Lizzie snoring very loudly and disconcertingly. The bottle of laudanum beside the bed, which had been half-full earlier in the day, was now empty and ominously a note addressed to him was pinned to her nightgown.

The note was burned: as a suicide she would have been denied Christian burial as well as being deemed to have broken the law. As he mourned, Dante Gabriel slipped a book of poetry into her coffin before the burial. The sad coda to this tale is that seven years later, finding himself in an artistic rut, he regretted this noble act and was persuaded to have the poems exhumed.

Hawksley’s biography is a sympathetic and touching account of the tragically short life of one of the most famous faces of the 19th century; definitely one to be filed under the ‘perils and pains’...

And what did you learn?

The fruit of one of those great ideas that I get, when I fail to bear in mind how much work the whole project is actually going to involve, A Good Old Fashioned 120 Unit Week came into existence 13 months and 99 books ago, last July. For my 100th post, I have decided to look back on the whole boozy enterprise and ask myself “...and what did you learn?” Well, what indeed...

The premise of the blog is still as it was when it started, to chronicle the pleasures, pains and perils of alcohol, in all its guises, as described by the world’s writers. These criteria are so woolly that I’ve managed to squeeze numerous biographies, a history of the Tour de France, Elizabeth David’s cookery books, and two references to the Bible into my posts, in between the usual boozy suspects such as Kingsley Amis and Jaroslav Hašek. It has kept me busy, at any rate. Oh, and before anyone asks, the most frequent references to alcohol I've found have been on wine...

I don’t think any feelings I had about the sauce have changed significantly since starting the blog. I have, however, learned the origin of the phrase “On the wagon” and have discovered a good bit about the workings of AA (I particularly liked Clarissa Dickson Wright’s line that the higher power one of her fellow members looked to was The Times Crossword).

Regarding writers and writing, I’ve introduced myself to Martina Cole and Helen Fielding, (Cole is a lot more fun...), I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably learned more about the craft of writing in three chapters of Stephen King’s The Shining that I did struggling through John Updike’s Couples, I was unexpectedly impressed by Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and sadly disappointed by the Leslie Thomas’s Tropic of Ruislip.

Favourite book? Not telling. Not because I’m trying to cultivate an air of mystery, but because I genuinely can’t decide. I’m eternally grateful for the train of thought that delivered me to Dan Farson’s autobiography, as I am also to the set of events that found me taking out Denise Hooker’s biog of Nina Hamnett. I will say though that I thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the best book I read last year...

Back to normal next week – I’m now posting weekly now, in an effort to getting something done in my spare time other than scouring books for references to electric soup. In the meantime, please feel free to comment on your own favourites, or on anything that you feel ought to be covered in the next year of 120 Units. Chin chin until then...

The Shining by Stephen King

A bit like Jaws (qv) I came to The Shining having originally seen the film with its iconic performance by Jack Nicholson (“Here’s Johnny!”) and direction by Stanley Kubrick. A step back to the original source material is well worth the effort; The Shining is easily one of King’s best novels.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Disgraced English teacher and retired alcoholic Jack Torrance is hired to looked after The Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies during the closed winter season. Isolated there with his wife and son, whose telepathic abilities are dubbed shining, he succumbs to cabin fever and tries to kill his family, aided and abetted in no small way by the supernatural forces in the hotel itself. King sets this up in a few chapters, and then spends the next four hundred pages scaring heck out of the reader...

It’s certainly a drinker’s book. By all accounts King was shifting it a bit around the time of writing, and Jack’s struggles with the sauce are heartfelt and visceral. Sober for over a year since he broke his son’s arm, Jack has ‘white knuckled’ his withdrawal from the drink with no AA meetings or medical assistance, no help whatsoever, just his ever weakening resolve:

...a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shrivelling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.

Having just been accused of trying to strangle his son, he has left his terrified wife locked in the staff quarters upstairs in the hotel and wandered into the deserted Colorado Lounge. Peering into the dark, he sees bottles on the empty shelves.

The shelves were totally bare. But now, lit only murkily by the light which filtered through from the dining room (which was itself only dimly lit because of the snow blocking the windows), he thought he saw ranks and ranks of bottles twinkling mutedly behind the bar, and siphons, and even beer dripping from the spigots of all three highly polished taps.

Hallucinating, play acting, reminiscing, Jack approaches the bar:

“Hi Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd said it was. Lloyd asked him what it would be. “Now, I’m really glad you asked me that,” Jack said, “Really glad. Because I happen to have two twenties and two tens in my wallet and I was afraid they’d be sitting right there until sometime next April. There isn’t a Seven-Eleven around here, would you believe it? And I thought they had Seven-Elevens on the fucking moon.” Lloyd sympathized. “So here’s what,” Jack said. “You set me up an even twenty martinis. An even twenty, just like that, kazang. One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on. You can do that, can’t you? You aren’t too busy?”

And somewhere in Jacks mind it’s very real indeed:

Jack contemplated the twenty imaginary drinks, the martini glasses blushing droplets of condensation, each with a swizzle poked through a plump green olive. He could almost smell gin on the air.

As Jack starts his inexorable descent into madness and violence, The Shining shows itself to be a masterpiece of psychological terror.