The Book of Household Management by Mrs Beeton

Often and erroneously referred to as Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook, The Book of Household Management has a great deal more to it than just recipes. A portion of the book is set over to the duties of staff, including those responsible for the cellar:

2163. ...but the real duties of the butler are in the wine-cellar; there he should be competent to advise his master as to the price and quality of the wine to be laid in; "fine," bottle, cork, and seal it, and place it in the binns. Brewing, racking, and bottling malt liquors, belong to his office, as well as their distribution. These and other drinkables are brought from the cellar every day by his own hands, except where an under-butler is kept; and a careful entry of every bottle used, entered in the cellar-book; so that the book should always show the contents of the cellar.
2164. The office of butler is thus one of very great trust in a household. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is the best policy: the butler should make it his business to understand the proper treatment of the different wines under his charge, which he can easily do from the wine-merchant, and faithfully attend to it; his own reputation will soon compensate for the absence of bribes from unprincipled wine-merchants, if he serves a generous and hospitable master. Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar, and all that is required is wines well chosen and well cared for; and this a little knowledge, carefully applied, will soon supply.
2165. The butler, we have said, has charge of the contents of the cellars, and it is his duty to keep them in a proper condition, to fine down wine in wood, bottle it off, and store it away in places suited to the sorts. Where wine comes into the cellar ready bottled, it is usual to return the same number of empty bottles; the butler has not, in this case, the same inducements to keep the bottles of the different sorts separated; but where the wine is bottled in the house, he will find his account, not only in keeping them separate, but in rinsing them well, and even washing them with clean water as soon as they are empty.
2166. There are various modes of fining wine: isinglass, gelatine, and gum Arabic are all used for the purpose. Whichever of these articles is used, the process is always the same. Supposing eggs (the cheapest) to be used,—Draw a gallon or so of the wine, and mix one quart of it with the whites of four eggs, by stirring it with a whisk; afterwards, when thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the cask through the bunghole, and stir up the whole cask, in a rotatory direction, with a clean split stick inserted through the bunghole. Having stirred it sufficiently, pour in the remainder of the wine drawn off, until the cask is full; then stir again, skimming off the bubbles that rise to the surface. When thoroughly mixed by stirring, close the bunghole, and leave it to stand for three or four days. This quantity of clarified wine will fine thirteen dozen of port or sherry. The other clearing ingredients are applied in the same manner, the material being cut into small pieces, and dissolved in the quart of wine, and the cask stirred in the same manner.
2167. To Bottle Wine.—Having thoroughly washed and dried the bottles, supposing they have been before used for the same kind of wine, provide corks, which will be improved by being slightly boiled, or at least steeped in hot water,—a wooden hammer or mallet, a bottling-boot, and a squeezer for the corks. Bore a hole in the lower part of the cask with a gimlet, receiving the liquid stream which follows in the bottle and filterer, which is placed in a tub or basin. This operation is best performed by two persons, one to draw the wine, the other to cork the bottles. The drawer is to see that the bottles are up to the mark, but not too full, the bottle being placed in a clean tub to prevent waste. The corking-boot is buckled by a strap to the knee, the bottle placed in it, and the cork, after being squeezed in the press, driven in by a flat wooden mallet.
2168. As the wine draws near to the bottom of the cask, a thick piece of muslin is placed in the strainer, to prevent the viscous grounds from passing into the bottle.
2169. Having carefully counted the bottles, they are stored away in their respective binns, a layer of sand or sawdust being placed under the first tier, and another over it; a second tier is laid over this, protected by a lath, the head of the second being laid to the bottom of the first; over this another bed of sawdust is laid, not too thick, another lath; and so on till the binn is filled.
2170. Wine so laid in will be ready for use according to its quality and age. Port wine, old in the wood, will be ready to drink in five or six months; but if it is a fruity wine, it will improve every year. Sherry, if of good quality, will be fit to drink as soon as the "sickness" (as its first condition after bottling is called) ceases, and will also improve; but the cellar must be kept at a perfectly steady temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, but about 55° or 60°, and absolutely free from draughts of cold air.

She also explains the correct way of opening wine and champagne:

2192. In opening wine, let it be done quietly, and without shaking the bottle; if crusted, let it be inclined to the crusted side, and decanted while in that position. In opening champagne, it is not necessary to discharge it with a pop; properly cooled, the cork is easily extracted without an explosion; when the cork is out, the mouth of the bottle should be wiped with the napkin over the footman's arm.

Now you won’t find any of that in Nigella...

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

In the alternate universe of Carey’s 2010 novel, Olivier de Garmont is a thinly disguised cipher of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker who travelled to the USA in the nineteenth century and wrote Democracy in America after his observations there. In this version of events, Olivier is accompanied by a frustrated artist called Parrot, who has the misfortune to end up working as the former’s servant.

Carey flits between the two narrators – cynical, world weary Parrot and cosseted, naïve Olivier – although it could be argued that the whole text is in fact written by Parrot, who acts as Olivier’s secretary in an effort to hide the fact of the noble’s atrocious handwriting.

In his travels across the US, Olivier meets and falls in love with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a prison owner in Connecticut. Smitten, he allows himself to be taken on a tour of the south by his prospective father-in-law, a journey that does not bode well for his already parlous health.

After several weeks on the road, they make it as far as South Carolina, where their guest house boasts a wine list of some providence:

I forget the name of our hotel except it was considered the best place in Charleston. Godefroy had written to secure our lodging while we were still in Georgia. What he wrote, I do not know, but clearly an impression had been made, for although we arrived late at night we were greeted with much bowing and scraping and a boy was sent to the chef with an order to keep the fires alive. The landlord then held us under close engagement – I presumed to cover any likely delay in the kitchen – so by the time we were seated at table we knew he had purchased the cellar of the late Thomas Jefferson and had himself driven all the way to Monticello to collect his loot, sleeping beneath his carriage on return as he feared he would be robbed of his treasure by bandits or oenophiles or worse. Who knows how much he paid for his fifty cases? More, certainly, than he could afford, for we had been but a moment in the dining room – a place of extraordinary pretension – when hew as looming over us ready to discuss his carte de vin.

It’s the perfect opportunity for Olivier to indulge in a touch of wine snobbery:

He presented us each with his wine list explaining, ha-ha, that it would have been a good deal longer if my countryman Lafayette had not had such pleasure from it. I thought him tedious. Godefroy raised an apologetic eyebrow as the man happily recounted how the late president had died impoverished, and he had managed to get a great bargain from the estate. “The prices, monsieur,” the landlord said to me, “will gratify you, I am sure.” Grave-robbing to one side, the list saddened me, for it was not what you would expect in the cellar of a head of state. There was a Bergasse, a wine mixed together in some cellar in Marseille which was labelled claret in the English manner, also some Blanquette de Limoux, a great deal of Minervois and Languedoc. Only a Beune Grèves Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus seemed to rise above the ordinary.

Clearly the evening has not got off to a good start, and when Olivier finally leaves America, he has failed to secure Godefroy’s daughter’s hand in marriage...

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

I complained last week of having read a run of dud books, but this brilliant debut proved a glorious exception. I picked it up on a whim when passing the recommended titles pile in the local library and was hooked from the off.

Dissolute Glasgow auctioneer Rilke gets a lucky break when he’s offered the contents of a big house for clearance. It’s easy money, the furniture and nick-nacks are of high quality and he’s bound to make a tidy sum in fees. The elderly lady who has hired him is clearing the house for her recently deceased brother. She only asks that Rilke will be discreet. Of course he will...

Up in the old boy’s bedroom Rilke finds a hatch into an attic. With keys for the whole building, he makes his way up the ladder:

I was standing in a long, thin room, perhaps half the length of the house. Bare floorboards, clean for an attic. The ceiling began midway up the walls, angling to a peak. Three small windows that would let in a little light during the day. Along the right-hand wall were racks of metal shelving holding tidily stacked cardboard boxes. The left wall was covered in waist-high, dark oak bookcases, books neatly arranged. In the centre were a plain office desk and a chair, to their left a high-backed armchair, comfortable but scruffy, inherited from some other room, beside it a bottle of malt, Lagavulin. Dead man’s drink. I unscrewed the cap and inhaled a quick scent of iodine and peat which caught the back of my throat. It was the good stuff, right enough. There was no cup so I too the end of my shirt and rubbed it along the mouth of the bottle before taking a good slug.

Rilke has stumbled on an Aladdin’s cave of pornography and erotica. Worth a pretty penny some of it as well, although he’s been sworn to secrecy if he finds anything scandalous. Even so, he gives the drawers and boxes a good going over. He finds a strange card for a ‘camera club’ before realising it’s probably time to knock off for the day:

I considered stopping, almost left right there. It was the whisky that drew me back. One more drink, leave the van in the driveway until morning, last orders at the Melrose, then a walk through the park and see what gave. It was the good stuff. A reward for working so hard, being clever enough to arrange a big deal, a pat on the back from me to me. I should have known myself: that bottle was too full and I was too empty.

His next discovery is a bundle of sexually horrific photographs. Ignoring his better judgement to leave well alone, Rilke decides to investigate, and begins a disturbing journey into Glasgow’s underworld...

Guernica by Dave Boling

It’s highly frustrating that the first post I’ve managed in several weeks is from a dud, but I’ve had a run of bad luck with books in the past month, partly my own fault, partly the choice of reading groups. Well, that’s the way it goes.

Guernica is the back story to the terrible dive bombing raid that the Luftwaffe perpetrated on the Basque town of the same name. Picasso’s most famous painting is a vision of the hell that took place there, so it’s a shame that a novel based on the atrocity and the work it inspired is such a mess of hackneyed prose and clichéd characterisation.

Even so, there are moments of diversion. The heroine’s dance on top of a wine glass during a traditional Basque dance is lively enough, and took my mind off the fact that there are still over 200 pages to go at this point:

Miren alone was the focus of the next dance, and cheers rose when she gathered a glass off a nearby table, filled it with wine, and placed it in the middle of the dance area. To a quickening beat, she stepped lightly on all sides of the glass. Without looking down, she stepped over it and beside it, side to side, front to back, barely missing it as her feet wove an intricate pattern. The breadth of her skirts at all times impeded her vision of the glass, making her avoidance of it an act of unfathomable precision. Then, impossibly, she rose and seemed to hover before gently landing atop the glass, one slipper on each side of the lip. And she was off again, levitating, flitting on each side, and then once more leaped back onto the glass, alighting softly with bent knees. Miguel was stunned to watch a girl so feathery and deft that she could dance on the lip of a wine glass. It was not stemmed crystal or a delicate flute, but it was nonetheless glass, and she danced so joyfully atop it, oblivious to the possibility that it could shatter beneath her. She not only didn’t break the glass but didn’t spill a drop of wine, either.A final leap, on and off, coincided with the last bar of music, and a greater cheer echoed across the courtyard. Accepting the applause with a deep curtsy, Miren retrieved the wineglass and drained the deep-red contents in a single gulp. She saluted the cheering crowd with the empty glass and licked her lips in theatrical enjoyment of the wine.

It’s a real feat and Miguel is suitably impressed:

“How could you possibly dance on a glass?” Miguel asked before she could speak. “Well, first you have to get a very strong wine,” Miren said.

Now there’s a thought...

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

There are a few books that I come across that fall into the category of ‘too good not to share’. I was only partway into Everett’s first volume of memoirs when I found myself sending paragraphs by email to friends. It really is that good...

His account of making the film Hearts of Fire qualifies it for this blog as he seems to have spent the whole shoot permanently soused, although that could be said for quite a few other occasions. The finished film was a disaster, the full-on, no-survivors crash of my career, as he puts it. He hasn’t made The Next Best Thing with Madonna by this point...

Things don’t really get off to a good start with Hearts of Fire, despite Bob Dylan being cast. Everett really doesn’t gel with his leading lady, and when it comes for them to film a ‘bedroom’ scene, she runs screaming from the set. Help is at hand from his make up team, however:

Meinir sidled up to the bed, as the producer, the director and the lighting cameraman stood around my naked body, deciding what they could shoot instead. She winked as she opened her little Aladin’s cave of a kit. Inside gleamed a bottle of vodka. Well, if one couldn’t get legless after one’s leading lady had fled the lovemaking scene, when could one? I settled down on the floor in the corner of the set and drank the whole bottle with the help of hair and make-up; when the powers that be finally decided on the next scene, I could barely walk.

Meinir seems to be keeping the cast properly refreshed, including the star, Dylan, whose tipple is Jim Beam:

One day Meinir was walking across the lot at Shepperton when a bottle broke inside her kit and began to leak, leaving an incriminating and odorous trail in her wake. The producer was following behind. Pat and I were behind him. We watched in horror as he bent down and sniffed. “Meinir, what have you got in your kit?” he asked. Meinir gasped slightly as she observed the stream of whisky dripping from Aladdin’s cave. But this girl was quick on her feet. “I’m washing my brushes. It’s alcohol. Must have spilt! Oh dear, I’d better nip back to the truck, hadn’t I?” And she beat a retreat before our producer could move on to the next question.

The production moves to Toronto, where they are to film a live show in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, they have time to kill before the shooting starts, and make use of the minibar in Dylan’s trailer:

We all piled into his trailer before the show and got incredibly drunk. Bob strummed on his guitar. Assistants came and went. Richard dropped in. By the time we got to the wings we were in extremely high spirits, but Bob was too wobbly to make it up the very steep steps to the stage.

Somehow they keep it together long enough to film the gig. The shoot finally comes to the end with one last scene to do:

On the last day, we shot a scene in a limo... We played the scene over and over. We chatted between takes. We had drinks in the scene and they were constantly refilled – the real thing, needless to say. The props guys who were in charge of administering the drinks didn’t even ask. Apple juice was for babies. Bob dozed off, sinking into himself like a parrot. We must have been there for a couple of hours. When we finished the first assistant opened the car door. Bob climbed out. He looked around, squinting. “Where’s the hotel?” he said, apparently confused, thinking he had been driven home.

The end result wasn’t a hit, or, in Everett’s words:

The film brought my career to a standstill...

Millennium People by JG Ballard

Middle-class revolt... Millenium People is a Ballardian examination of the vacuity of bourgeois existence, and the subsequent search for meaning that leads professionals in their thirties and forties to start a random bombing campaign in London.

David Markham, a psychologist living in North London, is drawn into the conspiracy after his ex wife is killed by a bomb at Heathrow Airport. Going under cover, he infiltrates a group of dissatisfied home owners living in Chelsea Marina who, fed up with negative equity and the exorbitant cost of living, have begun to wage a campaign of arson against video stores in the area. Suspecting that they are behind the larger, more deadly explosion at Heathrow, he quickly gets involved, putting smoke bombs onto tape racks in Blockbuster and quickly graduating to helping his new friends set fire to the National Film Theatre.

As the South Bank disintegrates into an inferno, Markham flees the scene, already abandoned by the others. He finds himself on the Millennium Wheel, the perfect observatory for his crimes:

I stepped into the gondola and leaned on the rail overlooking the river, almost too weary to breathe. While we moved along the boarding platform an off-duty waiter swung himself through the door, a tray bearing two champagne flutes in his hand. He placed the tray on the seat and sat beside it, searching his pockets for a cigarette. As we rose above County Hall the fires lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within. The waiter pointed to a champagne glass on the tray. Without thanking him, I tasted the warm wine. The bubbles stung my lips, cracked by the fierce heat in the auditorium. I though of the smoke-swept corridors lined with portraits of the film world’s greatest stars. The fires set by Vera Blackburn had taken hold, burning fiercely throughout the NFT, engulfing the smiles of James Stewart and Orson Welles, Chaplin and Joan Crawford. My memories of them seemed to rise with the turning Wheel, escaping from a depot of dreams that was giving its ghosts to the night. I crossed the gondola, my back to the smoking waiter and the Thames, and searched the streets around County Hall. I almost expected to see Kay and Joan Chang darting from one doorway to another as the police cars sped past, sirens wailing down the night. Needless to say, they had escaped without warning me, through the riverside entrance to the theatre café, which they had left open to create a fire-spurring draught. The first smoke had reached the windows of the gondola, laying itself across the curved panes. I began to cough, tasting the acrid vapour that had churned outside the manager’s office. I retched onto the rail, and spilled the champagne over the floor at my feet.

The waiter is in fact Richard Gould, a disgraced doctor who acts as the movement’s Svengali. Markham already suspects how far Gould is prepared to go, the question is, how far is Markham prepared to follow him?

A fantastic and darkly humorous novel, Millenium People also contains this gem from the author in the Q&A at the back:

Q: How do you organize your time? Do you write by timetable? A: Yes. Unless you’re disciplined, all you end up with is a lot of empty wine bottles. All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re a professional. There’s no other way.

I’ll raise a glass to that.

The Time Machine by HG Wells

One of Wells most famous books, The Time Machine is an account by a scientist known only as the time traveller, who relates to his dinner guests one night the story of his visit to the far flung future.

His guests are waiting for him to join them at the dinner table when he appears at the door in a dreadful state:

He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer — either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it — a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. “What on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor.

Small wonder he’s thirsty. He has just spent over a week in the year 802,701 where the human race has split into two – the innocent, childlike Eloi, and the cave-dwelling, photosensitive Morlocks who prey on them. It has been a trying experience, to say the least:

The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us. “I suppose I must apologize,” he said. “I was simply starving. I've had a most amazing time.”

His account is incredible; the future of the human race depicted as degenerate and ultimately doomed. The time traveller finishes his sojourn on a dying planet Earth, where the last living things, now little more than jellyfish, flop about on the blood red shoreline.

The Time Machine’s influence is undeniable. Time travel in fiction starts here, and with the brassy finish of Victorian engineering on eponymous time machine itself, arguably, so does Steampunk...

Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Marx Brothers, but had never got around to reading Harpo’s biography until now.

The famous dumb act of the show – he never spoke on stage or screen – Harpo was second eldest of the brothers, and between leaving school at eight and starting out on the stage with his family, he did a multitude of jobs around New York, where he grew up. After several years of getting fired from one position after another, he tries out as a piano player, having learned two pieces from his brother Chico:

The address in the ad I answered for a piano player was on the Bowery. It turned out to be a saloon. When I told the bartender why I was there he jerked a thumb toward the back room and said, “Mrs. Schang.” In the back room stood the biggest woman I had ever seen. She was about six-foot-two and none of it fat, but all bone and muscle, a Powerful Katinka in the flesh. She was leaning on a piano, smoking a cigarette and drinking straight gin.

Mrs. Schang runs a honky tonk on Long Island called the Happy Times Tavern, which serves booze to the men digging the canals nearby and supplies them with girls later:

My job as Mrs. Schang outlined it was simple. “When I tell you to start playing the piano, you play,” she said. “If a fight starts you get behind the piano and stay there – understand? – until I tell you it’s safe to come out. I take care of all the fights around here.”

There are plenty of those in the place. The clientele thirsting for liquor, women and roughhouse. Sure enough on the first Saturday night, things kick off:

The brawl didn’t last long. Mrs. Schang waded into the thick of it swinging a bung-starter. By the time she’d heaved six guys out the back door, two at a time, the rest of the crew got the idea and quieted down. The seventh guy she grabbed was me. She hoisted me out from behind the piano and dropped me onto the stool. “I’m paying you to play, you son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Play!”

Harpo works alongside Max the bartender, Mr. Schang and Christopher Schang, the landlady’s son.

Both Mr. Schang and Christopher took orders from the Madam the same as Max and all the rest of us. And like any of us, they would pass the warning along if the Madam started hitting the gin. When Mrs. Schang went on a binge, she would roar around the joint like a wounded bull. It was wise to stay out of her path on such occasions.

More than that, the rest of the staff aren’t all that they seem. Max, Christopher and Mrs. Schang are making an increasing number of mysterious nighttime “business trips” leaving Harpo to mind the bar while they’re gone. One night, Max doesn’t return and nothing is said of him again.

After Max’s disappearance Christopher stewed in a perpetual state of the jitters and the Madam got roaring drunk and stayed drunk. The mysterious business trips stopped. A week later Mrs. Schang finally sobered up. She had absorbed so much gin it stopped having any effect, and this seemed to make her madder than ever before. She came into the back room and grabbed me off the piano stool. “Get in the buggy, out front,” she said. “You’re driving tonight.” By the time I got in the buggy she was already there, waiting for me. then she told me to run to the kitchen and get a meat knife. When I did, she slit her pocketbook and stuck a pistol and a pint of gin between the cover and the lining. She said to get going, and fast. I asked where we were going. Mrs. Schang said, “Keep driving east until we get to the Pot O’ Gold. I’m going to kill Louie Neidorf.”

Sensibly, Neidorf doesn’t show up:

The Madam charged out of the Pot O’ Gold cursing a blue streak, with me running to keep up with her. Her eyes were wild and her hair was flying all over the place. She plotzed herself in the carriage and took out her gin bottle and took a long swig. I never saw anybody get so drunk so fast. All of a sudden she got the idea she had fired at Louie Neidorf and missed him. “You little son-of-a-bitch!” she screamed. “I missed!” Now it was all my fault.

After draining the gin bottle and letting out a curse I’d never heard from a woman’s lips before, Mrs. Schang takes over the reins and drives the horse back to the Happy Times Tavern as quickly as possible. Harpo wisely hides in the stable with the horse. The next night he passes out while at the piano, his head swimming with measles. The girls working the joint club together and get him a rail ticket back to the Upper East Side.

Harpo’s exit is timely, to say the least. As he recovers from measles his former employers are indicted as a violent gang of robbers who’d turned over at least twenty properties on Long Island. His years working Vaudeville afterwards are quiet in comparison...

Drunkard's Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

The more I read Hašek’s Drunkard’s Tales from Old Prague the more I’m convinced that he was pissed when he wrote them (he is recorded as being drunk while writing parts of The Good Soldier Švejk, and it shows in several places...) as it’s getting harder and harder to find stories for the blog that actually make sense from start to finish. That said, his boozy celebration of Czechs living in Vienna during the final years of the Hapsburg Empire is one of the more coherent offerings.

He begins with a quick introduction to Czech society in the imperial capital:

Viennese Czechs divide themselves into two classes, the richer and the poorer one. The poorer ones have their workers’ societies and the richer classes have their Beseda clubs. All of the Czech social life takes place in these Beseda clubs. News keeps coming to us in the Czech lands, how the Czechs in Vienna are oppressed, how 300,000 of the Czech people languish under deprivation, grief, and unhappiness in the cursed bastion over the Danube. Certainly, it would have been a sad for the Czechs if they did not have their Beseda clubs. What would inspire the Czech soul, what could support it in its struggle with the Teutons – the Czech beer in the Czech Beseda clubs! Mainly two beers fortify the gallant Vienna Czechs, two brands that gained an indisputable merit in the Czech cause in Vienna – Třeboň beer and Budějovice beer. These two beers are drunk not as an intoxicating drink, but as a greeting from the old country.

Of course, someone has to pick up the tab, and the Czechs back in Prague hold parade days to fund their compatriots’ exploits away from home. Various floats and carts, sponsored by local shops and companies, are rolled down the street, the procession ending with a tribute to the culture sustaining nectar served in the Beseda clubs:

Then follows an allegorical lorry from the Vinohrady brewery. Eight men in medieval costume sit around a barrel, waving beer mugs and shouting, “Try Vinohrady beer!” They are pretending to be drunk, which they really are. The carriage stops suddenly and the lorry driver straps the best actor to the carriage, so that he would not fall off. This allegorical float is the most popular and is greeted with the most enthusiasm.

After all this, the hat is passed around and everyone gives generously. Thousands of crowns are sent to Vienna to educate and assist their unfortunate Czech brethren. Needless to say, they’re rather popular when they turn up in person:

When a Czech tourist arrives from Prague at such a happy moment to one of the Czech Beseda clubs, it is no wonder that in the atmosphere, warmed up by 10,000 crowns, he is greeted with great affection.

And so he should be!

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

I first encountered the infamous triffid when I was a young boy and the BBC were broadcasting Wyndham’s classic catastrophe novel as a six-parter. I think I lasted all of twenty minutes before the killer plants ambled onto the screen and I fled screaming out of the room. It took a few more years for me to summon up the nerve to pick up the book, and even over two decades later when I come to reread it, the sheer horror of the situation, a world blind and at the mercy of carnivorous plants, still retains its ability to shock and terrify.

Bill Masen wakes up in hospital one morning with the acute sense that something is wrong. His head bandaged and his eyes covered, he has been recovering from a triffid sting (the eponymous plants have long poisonous lashes that they use to kill their prey), when one night a fabulous green light illuminates the sky. Said to be the tail of a comet, everyone in the world goes outside to look at the free fireworks. The next morning, anyone who watched the lights has been rendered totally blind and Masen finds himself in a silent hospital, filled with shuffling patients unable to comprehend what has happened to them.

His sight saved because of the bandages, Masen tries to get out of the hospital as fast as he can. The gravity of the situation quickly becomes apparent: London, Britain, the whole world, in fact, is blind. Masen decides he needs a stiff drink:

But one thing I was perfectly certain about. Reality or nightmare, I needed a drink as I had seldom needed one before. There was nobody in sight in the little side street outside the yard gates, but almost opposite stood a pub. I can recall its name now – ‘The Alamein Arms’. There was a board bearing a reputed likeness of Viscount Montgomery hanging from an iron bracket, and below, one of the doors stood open. I made straight for it. Stepping into the public bar game me for the moment a comforting sense of normality. It was prosaically and familiarly like dozens of others. But although there was no one in that part, there was certainly something going on in the saloon bar, round the corner. I heard heavy breathing. A cork left its bottle with a pop. A pause. Then a voice remarked: “Gin, blast it! T’hell with gin!” There followed a shattering crash.

He finds the landlord, who is blind’s a bat, trying to locate a bottle of Scotch:

I took down a bottle of whisky from the shelf, opened it, and handed it to him with a glass. For myself I chose a stiff brandy with very little soda, and then another. After that my hand wasn’t shaking so much. I looked at my companion. He was taking his whisky neat, out of the bottle. “You’ll get drunk,” I said. He paused and turned his head towards me. I could have sworn that his eyes really saw me. “Get drunk! Damn it, I am drunk,” he said scornfully. He was so perfectly right that I didn’t comment. He brooded a moment before he announced: “Gotta get mush drunker.”

The publican has deduced that it was the comets that did the damage, an opinion reinforced by the fact that Masen didn’t watch them and can still see.

I poured myself a third brandy, wondering whether there might not be something in what he was saying. “Everyone blind?” I repeated. “Thash it. All of ‘em. Prob’ly everyone in th’ world – ‘cept you,” he added, as an after thought. “How do you know?” I asked. “S’easy. Listen!” he said. We stood side by side leaning on the bar of the dingy pub, and listened. There was nothing to be heard – nothing but the rustle of a dirty newspaper blown down the empty street. Such a quietness held everything as cannot have been known in these parts for a thousand years and more.

Masen is now faced with having to survive in a hostile world where only a handful of sighted people remain. The void left by the human race leaves space for the triffids, and Masen is suddenly at the wrong end of the food chain...

Drink Me! How to Choose, Taste and Enjoy Wine by Matt Walls

I discovered this book through Henry’s World of Booze and given that my tastes in wine normally veers nearer to ‘pish’ than ‘posh’, I decided that a easy reading guide to getting more out of your glass was just what I needed and promptly ordered in a copy. What more do you need than a simple crib to which wines will impress the father-in-law, how to tell what a wine tastes like by the name of the grape variety, and which wines work with which foods?

It is, of course, a serious book on enjoying wine, and I’m learning a lot while reading it. That said, Walls has a good turn of phrase and not all the book is dedicated to the more erudite pleasures of oenophily. There are, for instance, occasions when you need to pretend to know more than you actually do. His chapter on ‘Blagging it’ is a good place to start:

At certain times you need to look like you know what you’re doing: at a wine tasting, for example, or if you’re going on a date with someone who’s really into wine. Here are a few things to remember to make you look like a pro.

1. Only fill a wine glass a third of the way up. This gives you room to swirl it around the glass before you take a sip – without getting it all over your companion’s shirt/dress.
2. Swirl the wine around the glass before you take a sip! Don’t just dive in, take a slurp, gulp it down and go ‘aaaah’. First, look at the wine to gauge its colour. Then take a sniff to see what it smells like. Only then take a sip.
3. Pause briefly after you’ve swallowed to make you look like you’re thinking about what you’ve just tasted.
4. Now say one of the following:
- If it’s a recent vintage: “Quite developed for a young wine.”
- If it’s an older bottle: “Lovely aromas coming through.”
- If it’s a red: “Interesting tannins.”
- If it’s a white: “Good minerality.”
- If it’s from the New World (i.e. not Europe): “Clearly New World; lovely, vibrant fruit.”
- If it’s from the Old World (e.g. France, Spain, Italy, Portugal or Germany): “Beautiful Old World character; not too obvious.”
5. Chuck in a few words listed in the glossary and you’re golden.
6. Now change the subject fast – or read the rest of this book.

I can recommend the second option in that last point...

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Every now and again I read a book that makes such an impression on me that I want to give copies to all my friends. Patchett’s Bel Canto is one of them, a novel ostensibly about the effect of a lengthy kidnap saga in an unnamed South American country, but which covers tragedy and high drama, romance and the redeeming qualities of opera.

A powerful Japanese businessman is persuaded to visit the unnamed country when the president manages to book the man’s favourite opera soprano, Roxanne Coss, to sing at a party in his honour. As the house lights go out at the end of her performance, a motley band of terrorists storm the house, looking for the president. Unfortunately, their target is at home, watching his favourite telenovela. Their plan in disarray, the terrorists take everyone hostage and a siege lasting several months ensues.

Patchett is unsparing in the violence that accompanies the armed group’s entrance, but as the standoff between the three ringleaders (‘the generals’) and the government outside develops into stalemate, the occupants of the house, both hostage and hostage-taker, find themselves adapting to their new life, trapped in the luxurious home of the vice-president. Illicit relationships quietly flourish; Roxanne Coss begins to sing again, enchanting the occupants of the house; the foot soldiers, barely older than children, begin to warm to their prisoners and vice versa. Now allowed the luxury of time for introspection, many re-evaluate their lives. French Ambassador, Simon Thibault, devotes his thoughts to his wife, safely on the other side of the vice presidential compound. His uxoriousness is ever present (as is her discarded shawl, which he keeps wrapped around his neck at all times) and he finds himself thinking about Edith even when he’s trying to make supper for nearly sixty people, without being allowed to use knives, or even obtain that ubiquitous ingredient in French cuisine, wine:

“What about a simple coq au vin?” Thibault said. “They confiscated all the vin,” Ruben said. “We could always send Gen out for another request. It’s probably locked up around here somewhere unless they drank it all.” “No vin,” Simon Thibault said sadly, as if it were something dangerous, as if it were a knife. How impossible. In Paris one could be careless, one could afford to run out completely because anything you wanted was half a block away, a case, a bottle, a glass. a glass of Burgundy in the autumn at a back table at Brasserie Lipp, the light warm and yellowed where it reflected off the brass railings around the bar. Edith in her navy sweater, her hair pulled back and twisted into a casual knot, her pale hands cupping the bowl of the glass. how clearly he can see it, the light, the sweater, the dark red of the wine beneath Edith’s fingers. When they moved to the Heart of Darkness they had wine shipped two dozen cases at a time, enough wine to quench an entire city through a drought. Thibault tried to make a cellar out of what was merely a wet dirt basement. French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. He handed it out like peppermints. Guests stayed later at their parties. They stood forever on the walk that led down to the gate and said good night, good night, but never seemed to leave. Edith would finally go inside and bring them each a bottle, press it into their resisting hands. Then they scattered into the darkness, each back to his or her car and driver, holding the prize. “This is my blood.” Thibault raised his glass to his wife when the guests had finally gone.” It will be shed for you and for no men.”

The siege can’t last forever, of course, and the end when it comes is as tragic as the operas that Roxanne sings so beautifully.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by Willam Boyd

What happens when your whole life changes in an afternoon? Everything you own, even your reputation and very identity, are taken away from you in an instant, leaving you hunted and hiding in the anonymity of London. In Boyd’s thriller about big pharmaceutical business, this is exactly what happens to Adam Kindred when he is framed for the murder of a whistleblower.

Realising that this isn’t going to look good with the law, Adam puts off calling the police and instead makes his way back to the hotel he’s staying in, stopping in a pub on the way:

Adam asked directions to Pimlico and set off, once sure of where he should be heading. On his way there he found a pub, reassuringly mediocre – indeed, as if ‘average’ subsumed all its ambitions: an averagely stained patterned carpet, middle-of-the-road muzak playing, three gaming machines pinging and gonging away not too loudly, a shabby-looking blue-collar clientele, a perfectly acceptable number of beers available and unexceptionable pub food on offer – pies, sandwiches and a dish of the day (smearily erased). Adam felt oddly reassured by this pointed decision to settle for the accepted norm, to strive for nothing higher than the tolerable median. He would remember this place. He ordered a large whisky with ice and a pack of peanuts, took his drink to a table in the corner and began to reflect... Adam drank his whisky and consumed his peanuts with a velocity and hunger that surprised him, emptying the packet into his cupped palm and tipping the nuts carelessly into his mouth in an almost ape-like way (stray peanuts bouncing off the table top in front of him). The packet was empty in seconds, crumpled and placed on the table where it cracklingly tried to uncrumple itself for a further few seconds, while Adam picked up and ate the individual peanuts that had escaped his immediate furious appetite. He wondered, as he savoured the salty, waxy peanut taste, if there were a more nutritious or satisfying foodstuff on the planet – sometimes salted peanuts were all that man required.

Unfortunately for Adam, this is a problem that is going to require more than whisky and bar snacks...

The Collector by John Fowles

Lonely and socially inept, Frederick Clegg works as a clerk in a town hall and collects butterflies as a hobby. Relieved off his life of drudgery by a huge win on the football pools, Fred decides to collect another specimen, young art student Miranda, whom he has obsessed about for years.

Locking her up in the cellar of his new home deep in the Sussex countryside, Frederick thinks that she will fall in love with him and be his wife, but the plan quickly unravels as the unfortunate object of his desire finds him brutal, boring and a raging philistine to boot. She doesn’t even like his collection of butterflies, finding them macabre and anti-life.

Fowles divides the book into two parts, the first half portraying Frederick’s painful self-justification as he asserts, quite reasonably (at least to himself), that he has done the right thing in capturing his ideal woman. To the reader, it is obvious that Miranda is desperate to escape, and will try anything to get him to let her go, even seduction:

Well she went up to her bath and it was all like as usual. When she came out I did her hands, no gag, and I followed her downstairs. I noticed she had a lot of her French scent on, she’d done her hair up the way she did it before, and she was wearing a purple and white housecoat I bought her. She wanted some of the sherry we never finished (there was still half a bottle there) and I poured it out and she stood by the log fire looking down into it, holding out her bare feet turn by turn to warm them. We stood there drinking; we didn’t say anything but she gave me one or two funny looks, like she knew something I didn’t and that made me nervous. Well she had another glass, and drank it off in a minute and then wanted another. “Sit down,” she said, so I sat down on the sofa where she pointed. For a moment she watched me sitting there. Then she stood in front of me, very funny, looking down at me, moving from foot to foot. The she came, twist, bang she sat on my knees. It took me right by surprise. Somehow she got her arms right round my head and the next thing she was kissing me at the mouth. Then laying her head on my shoulder.

Despite the fortifying effects of fortified wine, Miranda is on a hiding to nothing. Fred’s interests are more voyeuristic than physical, and the plan doesn’t come off. The second half of the book collects a rough diary that Miranda makes of her imprisonment. She dubs Frederick Caliban, (he in turn renames himself Ferdinand, although he is completely unaware of the allusions to The Tempest), and the sheer cruelty of what he has done to her is shown here in much sharper relief. Her attempt at seduction is clearly a desperate act:

I dolled myself up after the bath. Oceans of Mitsouko. I stood in front of the fire, showing my bare feet for his benefit. I was nervous. I didn’t know if I could go through with it. and having my hands bound. But I had three glasses of sherry quickly. I shut my eyes and went to work. I made him sit down and then I sat down on his lap. He was so stiff, so shocked, that I had to go on. If he’d clutched at me, perhaps I’d have stopped. I let the housecoat fall open, but he just sat there with me on his lap. As if we had never met before and this was some silly party game. Two strangers at a party, who didn’t much like each other. In a nasty perverted way it was exciting. A woman-in-me reaching to the man-in-him. I can’t explain, it was also the feeling that he didn’t know what to do. That he was a sheer virgin. There was an old lady of Cork who took a young priest for a walk. I must have been drunk.

Fowles was a master of psychological suspense (his novel The Magus is equally powerful and disturbing) but it’s clear from the start that this isn’t going to end well.

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Its obligatory place on the school reading list meant that I first read Remarque’s devastating novel about the German experience in the Great War when I was fourteen. Over twenty years later it feels far more poignant; the young soldiers of nineteen seemed impossibly adult back then, they don’t now.

The story follows Paul Bäumer and three of his friends from school who join up at the behest of their schoolmaster. All now nineteen, they are trying to survive in the hell that is the Western Front, under constant bombardment and the threat of sniper fire, not to mention the periodic sorties across no-man’s-land in futile attempt to seize a few more square yards of land from the other side.

Relieved from active service at the front for a few days they are staying behind their lines in a French village. Swimming in the river one day, they attract the attention of three local women who indicate that they might want to bring some food around to their house that evening... A bit of Dutch courage is needed first, and to shake off one of their pals:

No one can cross the bridge without leave, so we will simply have to swim over tonight. We are full of excitement. We cannot last without a drink, so we go to the canteen where there is beer and a kind of punch. We drink punch and tell one another lying games of our experiences. Each man gladly believes the other man’s story, only waiting impatiently till he can cap it with a taller tale. Our hands are fidgety, we smoke countless cigarettes, until Kropp says: “We might as well take them a few cigarettes too.” So we put some inside our caps to keep them. The sky turns apple green. There are four of us, but only three can go; we must shake off Tjaden, so ply him with rum and punch until he rocks.  As it turns dark we go to our billets. Tjaden in the centre. We are glowing and full of a lost for adventure. The little brunette is mine, we have settled all that. Tjaden drops on his sack of straw and snores. Once he wakes up and grins so craftily that we are alarmed and begin to think that he is cheating, and that we have given him the punch to no purpose. Then he drops back again and sleeps on.

The evening is a success, although Paul leaves depressed. Later, he is given two weeks leave and makes his way back home. He makes the mistake of falling in with some of his old school masters and accepting a smoke. After the reality of the front, their enthusiasm for the war is shocking:

Unfortunately, I have accepted the cigar, so I have to remain. And they are all so dripping with good will that it is impossible to object. All the same, I feel annoyed and smoke like a chimney as hard as I can. In order to make at least some show of appreciation I toss off the beer in one gulp. Immediately a second is ordered; people know how much they are indebted to the soldiers. They argue about what we ought to annex. The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia. He produces reasons why we must have them and is quite inflexible until at last the others give in to him. Then he beings to expound just whereabouts in France the break-through must come, and turns to me: “Now, shove ahead a bit there with your everlasting trench warfare – Smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace.” In reply that in our opinion a break-through may not be possible. The enemy may have too many reserves. Besides, the war may be rather different from what people think. He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “But this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only your little sector and so you cannot have any general survey. You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour – every man on you ought to have the Iron Cross – but first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top.” He blows his nose and wipes his beard. “Completely rolled up they must be, from the top to the bottom. And then to Paris.” I would like to know how he pictures it to himself, and pour the third glass of beer into me. Immediately he orders another.

Paul makes his excuses and leaves. Even though he has survived the war so far, inside he was killed long ago.

The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit

A quite incredible book on how flavours work together, Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus is part cookbook part reference work, with frequent digressions into anecdote á la Elizabeth David.
 

She devotes a whole chapter on the culinary properties of Globe Artichoke, a vegetable related to the thistle: 

Globe artichokes contain a phenolic compound called cynarin, which has the peculiar effect of making anything you eat directly afterwards taste sweet. It temporarily inhibits the sweet receptors in your taste buds, so that when you follow a bit of artichoke with, say, a sip of water, flushing the compound off your tongue, the receptors start working again and the abrupt contrast fools the brain into thinking you’ve just swallowed a mouthful of sugar solution. This makes for a diverting, if swiftly tedious, party game – sweet radicchio! – but it’s bad news for wine. And the enemy of wine is my enemy. The problem can be minimised by using ingredients that create a bridge between the wine and the artichoke (or simply taking a bit of something else before you take a sip of wine). Or you could ditch the wine altogether and drink Cynar, an artichoke-flavoured liqueur from Italy.

The obligatory recipe and anecdote follow. I reproduce it here with an eye to purchasing both a jar of artichokes and a bottle of cheap Italian white:

Globe Artichoke & Bacon: In Lazio, a boyfriend and I were speeding through a landscape of fairytale castles, well on our way to not living happily ever after. We had been arguing with such uninterrupted intensity that it was only a promising road sign that reminded us that it was well past lunchtime and we were hungry. Our motherly Italian hostess, perhaps picking up on the friction between us, took pity and led us to a table under an olive tree. Mercifully soon, she brought a label-less bottle of cold, dry white wine, an enormous spoon and a terracotta dish of something covered in breadcrumbs and cheese, molten bubbles popping on the surface like the meniscus of a volcano. My boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, or whatever he was at that moment, took the spoon and, breaking through the crust, emerged with a steaming heap of rigatoni, pancetta and artichokes, in a rich béchamel savoury-sweet with Parmesan. They say hunger is the best sauce, but if that lunch under the olive tree is anything to go by, the point in a relationship where it doesn’t matter any more runs it a close second. We smiled at each other. I topped up our glasses. He piled the pasta on our plates. The bitter, nutty greenness of the artichoke cut through the richness of pancetta and cheese. It was by far the best last date I’ve ever had. If your relationship is on the rocks, get 200g of rigatoni on to cook. Soften a finely chopped onion and 2 garlic cloves in olive oil with 75g sliced pancetta. Add 4-6 cooked artichoke bottoms (good jar ones will do), sliced into sixths. In a bowl, mix 125ml milk with 150ml double cream and 50g grated Parmesan. The pasta should be al dente now. Drain it, empty back into the pan and add the milky, creamy, cheesy mixture and the onion and artichokes. Stir and check for seasoning, then transfer to a baking dish. Cut a ball of mozzarella into slices and lay them on top. Cover with a mixture of 50g breadcrumbs and 25g grated Parmesan and bake for 30 minutes at 200oC/Gas Mark 6, covering it with foil if it looks in danger of burning. Serve with a bottle of cold, cheap Italian white.

It definitely sounds worth the trouble...

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

I’ve briefly touched on Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels, specifically Tipping the Velvet, but The Little Stranger, although still in the realm of historical fiction, sees her in the twentieth century, an area she has also visited in The Night Watch. With its sense of dread and litany of things that go bump in the night, I was put in mind of my favourite of her books, Afinity, although this is a very different beast, with elements of the country house thriller, and a knowing analysis of the decline of the upper class in Britain immediately after the Second World War.

Rural GP Dr Faraday is called to the Georgian pile in his village, Hundreds Hall, which has been the home of the Ayers family for 200 years. The remaining Ayers, mother, daughter Caroline and son Roderick, are living in penury, the house collapsing around them, as death duties, taxes and the new Labour government of Clement Atlee do their best to drive them into the ground. The stress has started to get to them, especially Roderick, badly wounded in the war and already of a distinctly nervous disposition. The gradual build up of seemingly unexplained events – objects moving around, ghostly sounds – has served to finally tip him over the edge, or at least to the bottle.

Faraday has been invited to supper at Hundreds Hall, but he notes with disdain that Roderick has been at the sauce:

There was something else, which troubled me more. His whole manner had changed. Where before he’d carried himself in the tense, hunted way of someone braced against disaster, now he seemed to slouch, as if barely caring whether disaster struck or not. While Mrs Ayers and Caroline and I chatted together, with an attempt at normality, of county matters and local gossip, he sat the whole time in his chair, watching us from under his brows but saying nothing. He rose only once, and that was to go to the drinks table to top up his glass of gin and French. And from the way he handled the bottles, and from the stiffness of the cocktail he mixed, I realised that he must have been drinking steadily for some time.

After a dreadful dinner when the young man insults their guest, Faraday insists on seeing him in his room before he goes. It’s for medical reasons, of course, not just so that he can give Rod a piece of his mind:

“Why are you doing this to yourself? The estate’s falling to pieces around you, and look at you! You’ve had gin, vermouth, wine, and,” – I nodded to his glass, which was sitting on a mess of papers at his elbow – “What’s in there? Gin again?” He cursed quietly. “Jesus! What of it? Can’t a bloke get lit up now and then?” I said, “Not a bloke in your position, no.”

He leaves in a foul mood, and Roderick goes back to the bottle. But the spooky goings on are about to take a turn for the worse. As Faraday sleeps off his supper that night ...something dreadful happened out at Hundreds Hall.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I had McCarthy’s The Road inflicted on me as a reading group choice, and plodded my way from start to finish without ever taking to it. The post-apocalyptic shtick grated from page one, but I found myself dragged to the end of the book by McCarthy’s spare style. Despite all the rude things I have said since about The Road, I said that I was determined to revisit his writing, and I finally took out No Country For Old Men from the library to make good on my promise.

Set in 1980, it starts with a man coming across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong in a deserted location on the Texas-Mexico border. He finds a case with over $2,000,000 in it and takes the rather hasty decision to nick off with the cash. After that, he’s on the run from a bloodthirsty Mexican drug gang, and the even more deadly and relentless Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic hit-man whose preferred method of execution is a metal bolt gun normally used for dispatching cattle at the abattoir.

Realising pretty quickly that he’s in a world of trouble, Llewellyn Moss, the unwilling fugitive with the cash, is chased from motel to motel across Southern Texas as the body count stacks up behind him. Finally, after being shot and injured and patched up again in a Mexican border town, he tries to arrange a secret assignation with his wife, also in hiding. On the way he picks up a hitchhiker, a fifteen year old runaway. Tempted into a rare bout of sociability, Moss gets a couple of cold beers when they’re staying at a motel:

He walked down to her room and tapped at the door. He waited. He tapped again. He saw the curtain move and then she opened the door. She stood there in the same jeans and T-shirt. She looked like she’d just woken up.
I know you aint old enough to drink but I thought I’d see if you wanted a beer.
Yeah, she said. I’d drink a beer.
He lifted one of the cold bottles out of the brown paper bag and handed it to her. Here you go, he said.
He’d already turned to go. She stepped out and let the door shut behind her. You don’t need to rush off thataway, she said.
He stopped on the lower step.
You got another one of these in that sack?
Yeah, I got two more. And I aim to drink both of em.
I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me.
He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think it starts about age three.

Not exactly a conversationalist, Moss gets stuck into his brew:

He sat on the step and pulled one of the beers from the bag and twisted off the cap and tilted the bottle and drank. She sat on the step next up and did the same.
You sleep a lot? he said.
I sleep when I get the chance. Yeah. You?
I aint had a night’s sleep in about two weeks. I don’t know what it would feel like. I think it’s beginnin to make me stupid.

It’s a bit late to worry about that. With luck he’ll have time to enjoy the beer before Chigurh and the Mexicans catch up with him.

There’s a lesson to be learned here: if ever you find yourself in the Texas desert next to a lot of dead bodies, a bale of heroin and a satchel full of used dollar bills, walk away. Just walk away...

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I’ve been meaning to read Pynchon for a while now, and stumbling across The Crying of Lot 49 in the library, I decided to start with one of his shorter novels. Showing a complete lack of culture on my part of any kind, I came to the conclusion that I had made a wise decision. The book, I enjoyed immensely (any novel that describes the violent finale of a Jacobean revenge play as like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse is worth reading for that line alone) but Pynchon’s prose is so dense, and the avalanche of ideas so unrelenting, that it is entirely unsuited for the commute to work by train and its attendant bouts of motion induced narcolepsy.

Back to the story: The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, former lover of Pierce Inverarity, who has just died and rather inconsiderately named her as joint executor of his will. Leaving behind her disk jockey husband, Waldo ‘Mucho’ Maas, at their home in Kinneret, CA, she drives south to San Narciso, where Pierce had extensive business dealings. Checking into a motel, she is surprised by the arrival of her co-executor, a lawyer called Metzger, who has brought a bottle of wine with him.

He turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first that They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor. He stood at her door, behind him the oblong swimming pool shimmering silent in a mild diffusion of light from the night-time sky, saying, “Mrs Maas,” like a reproach. His enormous eyes, lambent, extravagantly lashed, smiled out at her wickedly; she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling, but there was only himself and a debonair bottle of French Beaujolais, which he claimed to’ve smuggled last year into California, this rollicking lawbreaker, past the frontier guards. “So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in, can’t I?” Oedipa had planned on nothing more involved that evening than watching Bonanza on the tube. She shifted into stretch denim slacks and a shaggy black sweater, and had her hair all the way down. She knew she looked pretty good. “Come in,” she said, “But I only have one glass.” “I,” the gallant Metzger let her know, “can drink out of the bottle.”

Actually, Metzger is an actor, or he was once. One of his films is being shown on the television that night, back from the days when he was a child star. He tries to explain the plot of Cashiered, but the reels are being played in the wrong order and Oedipa is having trouble keeping up:

“But,” began Oedipa, then saw how they were suddenly out of wine. “Aha,” said Metzger, from inside a coat pocket producing a bottle of tequila. “No lemons?” she asked, with movie-gaiety. “No salt?” “A tourist thing. Did Inverarity use lemons when you were there?”

All this booze is bound to lead to horseplay, and Oedipa and Metzger embark on an affair. It’s the first of many peculiar happenings as Oedipa discovers that Inverarity’s legacy is proof of an alternative mail service called Tristero, locked in a centuries long conflict with Thurn & Taxis, the first official mail courier of Europe. Finding the muted trumpet logo of Tristero all over California, Oedipa believes that she is on the verge of uncovering an enormous conspiracy. Of course, it could just be an elaborate hoax, or even a product of Oedipa’s over analysed mind...

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

I’ve been meaning to read Angela Carter for a while now, and after a failed attempt at The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (in retrospect, not the best place to start with her novels) I picked up The Magic Toyshop from the library. An absolute treat full of powerful surreal imagery and Carter’s strong feminist writing, it’s a formidable early work in her career.

Melanie is fifteen years old and fears that she will die unloved and a virgin. One night while her parents are away, she wanders out into the garden in her mother’s wedding dress but is locked out of the house. Her desperate attempt to get back in through her bedroom window by climbing up the apple tree see the dress destroyed and Melanie goes to bed distraught. The next day she and her brother and sister are told that their parents have died in a plane crash.

After this spellbinding beginning, Carter sends the newly orphaned Melanie, along with siblings Jonathan and Victoria, to live with her Uncle Philip, a toymaker in South London. He lives in a cold house without running hot water over his toy shop with his wife Margaret, who hasn’t spoken a word since they were married and communicates through a blackboard, and her brothers Francie, a sensitive musician, and the volatile Finn, a talented painter who spies on Melanie and kisses her in the ruins of Crystal Palace park one night. Philip dominates the household, forcing the children to work for their keep and forbidding Melanie to wear trousers.

Uncle Philip’s toys are hand-crafted wonders, but his main passion is for puppets, creating puppet shows in the shop’s basement for his wife and the children to watch. After Finn drops one the puppets, the belligerent and brutish Philip demands that Melanie acts in his next show instead – a rendering of Leda and the Swan in which Melanie plays Leda, molested by a huge mechanical swan...

Philip’s tyranny over the women finally breaks when Finn gets drunk and destroys the swan. The next day Philip is out of the house, leaving the place in near revolution. Free for a few hours, the brothers play music and rejoice:

Francie sat in the kitchen with his fiddle in one hand and a half-empty bottle of whisky in the other. “Jesus,” he said to Finn, “You made free with the Scotch last night!” “It was Chrismas, after all,” said Finn. “Besides, I was thirsty in the middle of the night.” “I can see that,” said Francie half derisively. “You must have been drunk as a lord, waving your little hatchet.”

Finn, especially, gets stuck in:

He was drinking Scotch again. Soon he would become sentimental. But he was not grinning at her; she was glad his satyr’s grin was safe on the face of the devil in the painting, never to embarrass her any more... “You’re drunk.” “I expect I will be, presently.” “You are quite your old self.” “No. Let’s not exaggerate.” And he was straining to be happy. It was not spontaneous, he was trying too hard. Melanie was sorry for him and moved closer to him. They sat together on the table. Francie’s whisky was almost done.

As they run out of booze, Finn gets sent out for more supplies:

When the pubs opened, Finn went out and returned clinking many bottles of Guinness, though Melanie did not know where he had got the money. “I got Guinness to prove we’re Irish,” he said. Francie and Finn pressed Melanie to drink a few mouthfuls of the treacly stuff... Finn unwisely gave Guinness to Victoria and suddenly she sank down and out on the rug, with her head between the dog’s paws. The room took on a debauched and abandoned look.

Philip will have to return at some point though, and when he does, the result will be apocalyptic...

Not After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier

I’m plundering Daphne du Maurier’s short stories again, this time an account of an ill-fated trip to Crete.

The narrator, Timothy Grey, a teacher at a minor public school and amateur painter, beings his story with the confession that he has been brought down by an affliction that he picked up on his hols. What could it be? A dose of the clap, a skin condition?

I am a schoolmaster by profession. Or was. I handed in my resignation to the Head before the end of the summer term in order to forestall the inevitable dismissal. The reason I gave was true enough – ill-health, caused by a wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete, which might necessitate a stay in hospital of several weeks, various injections, etc. I did not specify the nature of the bug. He knew, though, and so did the rest of the staff. And the boys. My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passer-by averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.

Not giving too much away, he goes on to relate how he had gone to Crete to paint for a week. The hotel was quiet and not badly appointed, although to the unease of the staff, he insists on moving to a chalet that later transpires to have been previously occupied by a man who had drowned in the sea nearby only two weeks before. Grey is unperturbed by this and carries on with his painting. In fact, the only disruption to his peace and quiet is the presence of a loud and abusive American called Stoll and his silent wife. The man drinks like a fish, and, according to the hotel bar-man, he’s even making his own hooch in their chalet:

“The girls say he brews his own beer. He lights the fire in the chimney, and has a pot standing, filled with rotting grain, like some sort of pig swill! Oh, yes, he drinks it right enough. Imagine the state of his liver, after what he consumes at dinner and afterwards here in the bar!”

Following them into the nearby town one night, Grey is confronted by the Stoll, who is keen to extol the virtues of his home-made supply: 

“...The beer they sell you here is all piss anyway, and the wine is poison.” He looked over his shoulder to the group at the café and with a conspiratorial wink dragged me down to the wall beside the pool. “I told you all those bastards are Turks, and so they are,” he said, “Wine-drinking, coffee-drinking Turks. They haven’t brewed the right stuff here for over five thousand years. They knew how to do it then.” I remembered what the bar-tender had told me about the pig-swill in his chalet. “Is that so?” I enquired. He winked again, and then his slit eyes widened, and I noticed that they were naturally bulbous and protuberant, discoloured muddy brown with the whites red-flecked. “Know something?” he whispered hoarsely. “The scholars have got it all wrong. It was beer the Cretans drank here in the mountains, brewed from spruce and ivy, long before wine. Wine was discovered centuries later by the God-damn Greeks.” He steadied himself, one hand on the wall, the other on my arm. Then he leant forward and was sick into the pool.

Grey’s curiosity gets the better of him and he follows them again, this time to a deserted beach. It soon becomes apparent that the Stolls, keen divers and swimmers, have discovered an ancient shipwreck that has not yet been found by anyone else. In the past three years worth of holidays to the island they have stripped it bare. Thinking that Grey might be onto their game, Stoll’s wife leaves Grey an ancient rhyton (an ornate classical drinking vessel) decorated with Silenos, drunken tutor to the God Dionysus.

The next day they are gone. Grey is about to depart himself, but the Stolls have left him one last present in the care of the bar-keep:

He bent down and brought out a small screw-topped bottle filled with what appeared to be bitter lemon. “Left here last evening with Mr Stoll’s compliments,” he said. “He waited for you in the bar until nearly midnight, but you never came. So I promised to hand it over when you did.” I looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” I asked. The bar-tender smiled. “Some of his chalet home-brew,” he said. “It’s quite harmless, he gave me a bottle for myself and my wife. She says it’s nothing but lemonade. The real smelling stuff must have been thrown away. Try it.” He had poured some into my mineral water before I could stop him. Hesitant, wary, I dipped my finger into the glass and tasted it. It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with ears of ripening corn.

With a few hours to kill before he has to drive back to the port, he decides to check on the deserted cove once again. Realising he’s dying of thirst, he takes another swallow of the home-brew, this time drinking from the rhyton. Taking the boat back, he looks into the water and spots the wreck that the Stolls have looted. Pinned under the anchor is the husband who has definitely had his last drink. Terrified, Grey throws the rhtyon into the waves:

It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim before long. The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well, as I should see them soon reflected in a mirror. They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair.

So Grey’s curse is Dipsomania, brought upon him by the poisoned beer... Or has the shock of seeing Stoll’s murdered body under the water tipped him into madness and alcohol dependency? As in the previous story, Don’t Look Now, du Marier leaves the supernatural elements of the tale delightfully ambiguous...

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

I picked this up after reading a rather interesting article on Huffington Post about Doris Lessing and the 50th anniversary of the Golden Notebook. It’s a book that still divides opinion; personally, I didn’t like it, but I enjoyed The Grass is Singing and wasn’t prepared to write Lessing off as an author simply on the fact that I just couldn’t get on with her most famous novel. However, the writer in the HuffPo handily suggests five other books to get on with, and this is one of them.

Set in the 1980s, the story follows Alice, a leading figure of the Communist Centre Union, a fringe Marxist revolutionary group. She has just moved into a squat in London with Jasper, a gay man with whom she is obsessed, and who ruthlessly exploits her affection, stealing her benefit money and scrounging off her family before frequently rejecting her for a week’s drinking binge, or pushing her aside when he becomes infatuated with the charismatic leaders of the group. Alice has, over the years, been reduced to the status of a domestic slave, her life dedicated to looking after Jasper and other members of the communes and squats they live in. She cooks, cleans, sorts out the electricity and gas, and when she needs money, she steals off her parents as well.

I have to admit that I found Jasper the most repellent character I have ever encountered in a novel. A nasty, self-serving ponce who has ruined not only Alice’s life, but that of her mother Dorothy – their years of staying rent free at her home bankrupted Dorothy and drove her out of her house – I longed for him to receive his comeuppance. Alice at least has the benefit of being utterly deluded. Her naivety in both her commitment to Jasper and in her devotion to the revolutionary cause is breathtaking and she seems completely unable to see that their group is being manipulated by the KGB, as well as getting itself into dangerous territory by trying to link up with the IRA. Although they are rebuffed by the Irish, they decide to start up a bombing campaign anyway, and despite their complete amateurism, they manage to cause bloody and violent carnage.

Just before the bomb is set to go off, Alice decides to visit her mother, now living in a tiny flat that she can’t afford to heat. Sitting wrapped in blankets next to a switched off gas-fire, Dorothy is drowning her sorrows:

The armchair her mother had been in had books stacked up beside it to the level of the arm. On the shelf above the gas-fire was a bottle of whisky and a glass, a third full... She half got up – she did not need to do more – reached over for her glass of whisky, and took a firm ration of it, her mouth a bit twisted. Grant’s whisky. Oh yes, Dorothy might be poor, though Alice bitterly, but she wasn’t going to drink anything but her brand of Scotch.

Alice, away with the fairies as ever, laments the fact that Dorothy has had to leave the family home. Mother tries to spell it out, once again, in words that her daughter might understand. She’s wasting her time:

“It’s funny,” she said, “How you simply don’t seem to be able to take it in.” If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. “Why can’t you?” she inquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. “I simply cannot make you see ... the point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren’t for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself.” Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would leave! She hated her mother tight; it was when she began saying all those negative things.

Quite unable to understand what her spoiled, selfish behaviour has done, and that she in turn is wasting her life (Dorothy’s simple suggestion that degree educated Alice get a job and do something with her time meets a prim retort from the crusading leftist that there are three million people unemployed) she leaves in a state of muddled outrage. Dorothy is now alone with the bottle and the unlit fire and the next day five people will lose their lives.

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

Death in Venice again. Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novella was famously turned into a film with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christy but the source material is well worth checking out as well.

British couple Laura and John are on holiday in Venice, a hastily arranged break that takes place after the death of their daughter. Laura is withdrawn and consumed by grief, John unable to reach her. At lunch at the end of their stay, they notice two old ladies watching them, one of whom claims she is psychic and that she can see their little girl’s spirit sitting between them...

John reckons it’s all bunkum, but the change in his wife is instantaneous and her misery lifts. Unwilling to break the spell, John goes along with her, up to a point. He also decides that they ought to go out and enjoy themselves. He suggests a restaurant and pooh-poohs the idea of eating in the hotel:

“God, no!” he exclaimed. “With all those rather dreary couples at the other tables? I’m ravenous. I’m also gay. I want to get rather sloshed.”

They find a restaurant in a part of Venice they don’t know, reached by a tortuous route. When they get to their table, the first thing he does is order a drink:

“Two very large camparis, with soda,” John said. “Then we’ll study the menu.”

Over Laura’s shoulder he sees the two old ladies again. Convinced that they’re being followed, he tries to distract her, but she sees them and goes for another long confab about the astral plane. For John, the evening is ruined:

“All right,” thought John savagely, “Then I will get sloshed,” and he proceeded to down his campari and soda and order another, while he pointed out something quite unintelligible on the menu as his own choice, but remembered scampi for Laura. “And a bottle of Soave,” he added, “With ice.” The evening was ruined anyway, what was to have been an intimate, happy celebration would now be heavy-laden with spiritualistic visions, poor little dead Christine sharing the table with them, which was so damned stupid when in earthly life she would have been tucked up hours ago in bed. The bitter taste of the campari suited his mood of sullen self-pity, and all the while he watched the group at the table in the opposite corner, Laura apparently listening while the more active sister held forth and the blind one sat silent, her formidable sightless eyes turned in his direction... He began on his second campari and soda. The two drinks, taken on an empty stomach, had an instant effect. Vision became blurred. And still Laura went on sitting at the other table, putting in a question now and again, while the active sister talked. The waiter appeared with the scampi, and a companion beside him to server John’s own order, which was totally unrecognisable, heaped with a livid sauce. “The signora does not come?” enquired the first waiter, and John shook his head grimly, pointing an unsteady finger across the room. “Tell the signora,” he said carefully, “Her scampi will get cold.”

Cold scampi is the least of their problems. The psychic sisters warn John that they must leave Venice as his life is in danger. Advice that he fatally chooses to ignore...

Henry IV Part II by William Shakespeare

As promised, I have returned to The Bard.


Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters. A mucker of young prince Hal in the two Henry IV plays, he is a lecherous, booze-soaked criminal and braggart. He appears in three works in all and was so loved by the audience at the time that Henry IV Part II finishes with a promise that the old beast would be back in Henry V. There, he makes a single off stage appearance when Hal, now king, hears of his demise.

It’s not hard to see how that came about. Falstaff is a man for whom restraint is more than a bad word, it is the fatal weakness in those around him:

I would you had but the wit: ‘twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine. There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness; and then, when they marry, they get wenches: they are generally fools and cowards; which some of us should be too, but for inflammation. A good sherris-sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes; which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

Sir John carries on drinking until the end, although his hopes on becoming a favourite of the new king are dashed when the Henry publically disowns him. Still, who needs fancy friends when you’ve got Sherry?