Never Trust A Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson

The non-performing member of the League of Gentlemen, Jeremy Dyson’s collections of short stories are dark, quirky morality tales dabbling in the supernatural and bizarre. Even the title of his first collection is gloriously obscure, coming from a Hungarian proverb that warns us “Never trust a rabbit. They may look like a child’s toy but they eat your crops.”

In the brilliantly creepy A Visit From Val Koran, Jason Feddy is a middle aged bar owner in Mdina on the island of Malta. He doesn’t make much money and seems to live a quiet, if lonely life, pining after his long dead girlfriend Miranda. However, his peace is rudely disturbed by news that someone has dropped by looking for him which gives Feddy a nasty attack of the heebie-jeebies.

Deciding to look his best for the meeting with a man who he describes as his executioner, he visits the barber for a shave and a quick trim:

“Ah, Mr Feddy, A pleasant surprise.” Shiloh the barber put down his broom and went to shake Feddy’s hand. “A drink for you, sir.” He reached behind a pile of pomade jars and brilliantine tins, producing a labelless bottle of what was presumably whisky.” “I won’t if you don’t mind.” “Oh yes you will.” He was already filling a teacup. “I hear you have had a visitor.”

In a town with no secrets and nowhere to hide, there is no avoiding his meeting with Koran, who appears at Feddy’s bar later that day. The barman provides the drinks, then leaves them alone together:

Aldi came out with a bottle of brandy, two large glasses and a small porcelain jug of water. He stole a quick look at Koran before scurrying back inside.

A former colleague of Feddy’s when he was a lecturer at university back in the late 1960s, Koran was Miranda’s lover before Feddy stole her from him. A practitioner of dark arts and black masses, Koran hasn’t seen Feddy since he kissed Miranda goodbye thirty years before. Four week’s later, Miranda had died, covered in a rash spreading from the spot where Koran had placed his lips, and Feddy went on the run, ending up in Malta. Still, it seems that Koran just wants to invite Feddy to join him in a visit to the catacombs in Rabat the next day. Even so, his departure leaves Feddy worried further still:

He poured himself more brandy. When he returned the bottle to the tray he noticed that his hand was shaking.

In the catacombs Koran makes Feddy drink a potion he has concocted, telling him that it is a curse. Feddy is now incapable of nostalgia, all his memories are perfect recollections of events and the narrative that he has built up around his life, and his lost love, is gone forever. He never really loved Miranda, he had stolen her from Koran simply because he could.

The following day Feddy sat outside the bar, cradling a glass of brandy... he knew these memories were the truth. He knew he had constructed something else around them, a structure he had built and built over many years. That structure had now had its foundations removed. It had collapsed silently around Feddy leaving him exposed and cold. He drained the glass and called for Aldi to fill it once more. Perhaps later he would go for a walk. Perhaps he would visit the catacombs and stare at the bones. It was going to be a long afternoon and an even longer night.

It looks like he’s going to need that drink...

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is a classic of the 1920s ‘Jazz Age’, exposing it as a playground of the idle rich, an orgy of excess and bootleg alcohol where people’s lives are carelessly thrown over in search of the next sensation, but its resonance for later generations makes it all the more pertinent today.

Nick Carraway comes to the East Coast to work in New York (something nebulous in bond selling) and moves in next door to the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a man of some considerable means who throws wild parties every weekend entertaining the city’s fast set.

Gatsby certainly knows how to show people a good time:

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars... On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

And as if to back up the rumours about where Gatsby got his money (some say he is a bootlegger, others that he has killed a man) there is plenty of hooch available, despite the Prohibition of alcohol:

In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

Half of the people who come are not even invited. They are bright young things, flitting like butterflies from party to party:

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

Nick is one of the few people actually invited to this particular party, and he wanders around looking for his host, accompanying the beautiful but dishonest Jordan Baker. Gatsby himself remains aloof from the saturnalia taking place in his home. He is pining after Daisy, Nick’s cousin who lives just across the sound, further along Long Island. Unfortunately, she is now married to the boorish womanising Tom Buchanan, but between Jordan and Nick, he hatches a plot to meet her again, hoping that she’ll come back to him after five lost years. The end result is tragedy.

Part of The Great Gatsby’s power lies in the fact that each new generation of readers sees themselves in the book. We might perceive ourselves to be once again in an era where ...careless people... smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made... but things were probably always thus, and always will be. For me, the poignancy is in Gatsby’s futile attempt to win back what has gone. He wants Daisy to deny that she ever loved Tom, he wants to wipe away that half decade as if it had never existed and start again. No can do, old sport.

The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over The World by Tom Feiling

To be frank, my idea of a snort of something South American is a glass of Chilean red, but the continent’s better known intoxicant is cocaine, that notorious preparation from the coca leaf. The Candy Machine book is a well researched examination into the trade of the drug, its use and what governments should be doing about it.

In theory, the white marching powder should be outside of 120 Units' remit, but Feiling has several interesting points about booze as well, which I feel makes the book worthy of a mention. Unlike some drugs, alcohol and coke go together in an unholy matrimony of intoxication:

On his first day as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in February 2005, Sir Ian Blair informed the waiting press pack that “people are having dinner parties where they drink less wine and snort more cocaine”. In fact, they were drinking more wine and snorting more cocaine. The exotic newcomer cocaine is more often than not consumed in conjunction with alcohol. The two combine in the liver to produce coca-ethanol, a whole new buzz which stays active for twice as long as cocaine.

Feiling interviews users, dealers and couriers and his insights into the social culture in this country of the last ten to fifteen years are telling. One interviewee states:

“...As cocaine began to get cheaper and there were more and more bars, you’d have a couple of lines and go bar-hopping. I used to run bars and it was so in our interest to have people on coke because they just drink and drink and drink...”

Cocaine wasn’t always consumed in powdered form. It made its first appearance in the United States as a tonic, combined with wine, naturally:

The most popular brand of coca wine was ‘Mariani wine’ created by an Italian chemist called Angelo Mariani. He was called to the bedside of another American President, Ulysses Grant, who was suffering from cancer of the throat. Mariani found Grant being nursed by the writer Mark Twain, who was determined to keep Grant alive long enough to collect his memories of the American Civil War for his latest book. Mariani suggested that Twain encourage Grant to take coca wine for his condition. Grant soon affirmed that the enormous quantities of coca wine that he ingested daily were a great help, though he admitted finding it very hard to stop drinking it.

It wasn’t banned until the early twentieth century, and certainly wasn’t the biggest problem that the country faced:

The most worrisome mind-altering substance at the turn of the century was not cocaine or opium, but alcohol... American newspapers were chock-a-block with the yellow journalism of zealous moral entrepreneurs, who regularly claimed that booze lay at the root of most of the crime, insanity, poverty, divorce, illegitimacy and business failures in the United States.

Feiling draws the obvious comparison with the Prohibition of alcohol and the War on Drugs. Prohibition ended in failure:

The inability of the federal government to contain either the illegal trade in alcohol, or the violence and corruption of officialdom that it created, led to widespread disenchantment with Prohibition. Ultimately, neither higher prices, respect for the law, social pressure, nor the muck that passed for alcohol had put people off drinking, and the Dry Law was repealed in 1933. Many feared that the nation would drown in a torrent of cheap legal alcohol, but the repeal of the Prohibitionist laws had a surprisingly mild slight on how much the public drank. Consumption levels remained virtually the same immediately after the era of Prohibition was brought to an end, although they gradually returned to their pre-Prohibition level in the course of the following decade. With the restoration of standardization to the trade, drinkers were better able to gauge what and how much they were drinking, and the death rate from alcohol poisoning, which had increased sharply during Prohibition, fell back.

The conclusion that Feiling is nudging the reader to is that alcohol, like cocaine, is a drug, with its attendant risks, pleasures and wide variety of uses and users. Like a hangover the morning after, the statistics about the harm that this socially acceptable drug causes are alarming:

The health, social and crime-related costs of drug misuse in the United Kingdom have been estimated to be between £10 billion and £16 billion a year. Most arise from the use of legal drugs. Tobacco and alcohol account for about ninety per cent of all drug-related deaths in the UK. Forty percent of all hospital illnesses are estimated to be caused by tobacco smoking. Every year, half a million Britons go into hospital suffering the long and/or short term effects of alcohol abuse, and every year that abuse kills 25,000 of them.

Sobering stuff... Still, if anything is going to put the reader off both cocaine and drinking, it has to be the following quote:

Cocaine is likely to remain popular because it works with rather than in opposition to Britain’s drinking culture. As Alan the ad-man put it, “once I’ve had a line, I’m in pintage mode. It’s wet against dry. You need the wetness of the pint to match the dryness of the coke.”

What an absolute prick.

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Hermaphrodites in literature seem to be far more a far more common occurrence than in life, but the opportunities that a character of both sexes gives a writer appear too good to pass up. One of my favourite novels is Middlesex, where Jeffrey Eugenides examines twentieth century America through the family of a child born with the genitalia of both a boy and a girl, but mistaken at birth for a girl. Kathleen Winter’s Annabel is a worthy addition to this canon.

In 1968, Wayne Blake is born in a remote part of Newfoundland, Canada, with the visible parts of both male and female. An arbitrary decision is made almost at once by his father, Treadway, who wants to bring up a son in the intensely male world of fur trapping. His medical past is kept a secret and Wayne is raised a boy after corrective surgery, although this second self, named Annabel, is secretly nurtured by his mother, Jacinta, and her best friend Thomasina.

As Wayne grows older his father becomes acutely aware that his son is not cut from the same uber-masculine cloth as himself. Wayne’s subconscious knowledge of Annabel is suppressed, but unfortunately, his changing body has other ideas. When Wayne falls ill at school, it’s Thomasina who takes him to hospital: Treadway is out working and Jacinta has taken a well deserved night off to have a drink with a couple of friends:

One difference between Eliza Goudie and Joan Martin was that when they were drinking with the women for the night, Eliza bought piña coladas from the liquor store and Joan brought over a bottle of her husband’s single malt Scotch. Eliza liked fizzing concoctions with pineapple and coconut flavouring and palm trees on the bottle, while Joan just liked to get quietly wrecked... Joan drank from the bottle. “This is on the peaty side of single malts. It was made in a cave. Some tiny cave in the north of Scotland, more remote than we are here. My husband picked it out because of the cave. My husband, the caveman.”

As Wayne is going under the knife in Goose Bay hospital, his mother is getting stuck into the plonk:

Jacinta had a bottle of Mateus that had been in the freezer for half an hour. She liked how frost steamed around the gold label, the fffftz and puff of fruity scent. If she was going to drink, Jacinta wanted fizz. She wanted Spain. She wanted celebration and the word rosé... The third glass of wine was for her the magic glass. At Christmas or an evening out with other families, she had two glasses. The third glass was the glass that floated her above. She did not have that glass as a rule, but this was not a night when the rule applied.

Like millions of others, Jacinta and her friends get sloshed and put the world to rights. Unfortunately, she’s just chosen the wrong night to do it. Treadway has now been summoned to hospital and stops off to get her. Jacinta’s too pickled to make the trip:

By the time Treadway knocked on Eliza Goudie’s door, Joan and Eliza had forgotten what a husband looked like. They had drunk so much that the sight of Treadway on the doorstep puzzled them. An alien creature had found its way to the house. Only Jacinta recognised him, and he knew, when he saw her, he did not want her to accompany him to the hospital in that state.

In a second arbitrary decision, Jacinta is kept ignorant of the unexpected complication of Wayne’s condition. She starts to fade out of his life as he finishes his journey into adulthood. Heartbreaking and beautiful, Annabel is not just about the binary choices that make us who we are, but is also a touching description of a way of life in the Canadian wilderness that is now in decline.

A Week In December by Sebastian Faulks

Faulks is a writer of considerable acclaim, but I have to admit that I struggled with A Week In December. A state of the nation novel that weaves together several plots, Faulks covers politics, banking, the evils of reality television, skunk cannabis, mental illness and Islamist terrorism with the end result that no box is left unticked.

By the time I got to the final day in the book, hedge fund manager John Veals is about to pull off a deal which will bankrupt several banks, starve millions in Africa, bring the economy to its knees and swell his already bloated wealth by billions of pounds. Student Hassan, pumped up on righteousness, is on his way to bomb a civilian target in South London, and Sophie Topping is throwing a dinner party for her newly elected MP husband, Lance, inviting the great and the good. Among the guests are the reptilian Veals and a walk on part, Roger Malpasse, a former city lawyer who has now retired to the countryside and the bottle:

Roger was reluctant to leave the countryside on a Saturday, as his routine was one to which he’d grown attached. An early dog walk, then an hour’s vigorous gardening and a game of doubles on the all-weather tennis court of a village neighbour gave him a righteous thirst that beer, gin and tonic and a half-bottle of white burgundy, in that order, exactly satisfied.

Sadly he’s got to go to the ghastly dinner party at the Toppings on this particular Saturday. His wife issues a word of warning before they leave for London:

“Just don’t drink too much, Roger,” she said, cracking a lunchtime breadstick and sipping her aperitif. “I don’t want you getting pissed and making a scene at the Toppings’ tonight.” “Would I ever?” said Roger.

I suppose it depends entirely on what you’d describe as drinking too much:

In Roger’s vocabulary, there were many different kinds of drink. A ‘primer’ was a preparation for a social event, or ordeal. Essentially philanthropic, it’s aim was to render him benign, so that from the moment he arrived he could be a good guest. A ‘phlegm-cracker’ would be the first of the day, and not a serious one – a small glass of white wine, perhaps, left over from the night before, taken after mowing the huge lawn in the country. A ‘heart-starter’ performed the same function, but a shade more vigorously; it often entailed gin. A ‘sharpener’ preceded food. Roger’s favourite drink was a ‘zonker’, and his evenings at home would consist of two zonkers before dinner, then wine with. The zonker itself might be a champagne cocktail – a finger of three-star cognac, a lump of sugar, a single drop of bitters and a tumblerful of very cold biscuity champagne; or it might be a dry or martini or a straightforward whisky with ice and soda. The zonker was the king of drinks; its opposite was the dismissive ‘just a pub one’, which involved barely dampening the bottom of the glass.

He’s also not wrong about the evening being an ordeal, luckily, he’s had a crafty second primer (almost a zonker) before leaving home and feels in fine fettle, ready for combative conversation as the wine starts flowing.

Roger had promised himself to drink no more than three glasses, but since the level had never dipped below halfway he could technically say he was still on his first. But whatever the exact volume of wine that sat on top of the double-zonker base and half a bottle of champagne before dinner, it filled him with exuberance and geniality.

Unfortunately, he’s now sitting opposite Veals and doesn’t miss the opportunity to take him to task for effectively committing fraud. As the chatter quietens around the table Roger informs Veals that in the aftermath everyone else will suffer, except for the bankers and hedge fund managers, which is ironic, because they should be in prison for what they’ve done. I have to say, I’d come to that conclusion about halfway through the book, without the assistance of a single primer or even just a pub one. O tempora! O mores!