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...