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...