A good old fashioned one hundred and twenty unit week...

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

2012-02-23T01:08:00.002-08:00

Now accepted to be one of the greatest poets of the 19th Century, John Clare led an unstable and fairly chaotic life. He died in a Northampton lunatic asylum, his second incarceration, and he suffered from delusions and bouts of alcoholism. His work was published in his time, but seems to have fallen out of fashion, hastening his descent into madness.

Foulds beautifully written novel imagines Clare’s life in Mathew Allen’s private asylum at High Beach, Epping Forest. Allowed a certain amount of freedom, including that of leaving the hospital to go out into the forest, Clare still yearns for the old days of drinking with his literary chums in London:

John whistled enviously after him ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’. An evening in London with the old, wild lads – that was what he needed. He felt his flesh strain towards the thought of beer, wanting drunkenness, wanting the world softened and flowing around him. To back in his green jacket, the country clown for his friends from The London Magazine with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehearsed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk.

It quickly becomes apparent that Clare is not himself as he becomes increasingly confused as to his own identity. He meets a band of gypsies in the forest and falls in with them for the night, returning a few weeks later to share a meal with them. His old nemesis, booze, makes its appearance:

A bottle of whisky was passed around to accompany the food. John took a swig, letting its fire wash loosely down into his chest. “Old John Barleycorn,” he said, saluting with the bottle. “Now there’s a fighting man. Seen him dust out many a strong fellow.” The other’s laughed. “Let’s be having you then,” he said, standing, raising his fists.

Convinced he’s now Jack Randall, bare-knuckle prize fighter, the five foot high Clare challenges the gypsies to a bout and is quickly knocked flat on his back. His return to the asylum the next morning, distinctly worse for wear, causes him to be incarcerated in a darkened room for the next two days. Sadly, by the time he’s let out, he’s under the firm impression that he is Lord Byron.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

2012-02-16T00:05:00.003-08:00

A friend about to travel to India enthused about Roberts’s bestselling story of life on the run in Bombay, and I felt compelled to find out more. There is something of a challenge to reading an autobiographical novel about a man who escaped a high security prison in Australia, entered India illegally, learned Hindi and Marathi, lived in a slum, established a health clinic, got involved with both the Bollywood film industry and the Bombay mafia and ended up fighting alongside the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan... Somehow, Roberts manages to fit all this along with a tale of personal redemption into only 900 pages.

Straight off the plane and pretending to be a New Zealander called Lindsay, he sets off to find somewhere to stay in Bombay. He’s accosted at the airport by a young tout called Prabaker, who procures him a good room and some marijuana. Roberts opens up the duty free and offers his guide a drink in return:

I pulled a bottle of whisky from my pack and cracked the seal. It was another ritual, another promise to a friend in New Zealand, a girl who’d asked me to have a drink and think of her if I managed to smuggle myself safely into India with my false passport. The little rituals – the smoke and the drink of whisky – were important to me... I was about to take a sip from the bottle, but an impulse made me offer it to Prabaker first. “Thank you very much, Mr. Lindsay,” he gushed, his eyes wide with delight. He tipped his head backward and poured a measure of whisky into his mouth without touching the bottle to his lips. “Is very best, first number, Johnnie Walker. Oh, yes.” “Have some more if you like.” “Just teeny pieces, thank you so.” He drank again, gluggling the liquor down in throat-bulging gulps. He paused, licking his lips, then tipped the bottle back a third time. “Sorry, aaah, very sorry. Is so good this whisky, it is making a bad manners on me.” “Listen, if you like it that much, you can keep the bottle. I’ve got another one. I bought them duty free on the plane.” “Oh, thank you...” he answered, but his smile crumpled into a stricken expression. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want it?” “Yes, yes, Mr. Lindsay, very yes. But if I knew this was my whisky and not yours, I would not have been so generous with my good self in the drinking it up.”

Over the next few weeks Prabaker and Linbaba become close as the guide shows him around Bombay. Eventually, Prabaker honours Roberts with the offer of a visit to his family in upstate Maharashtra. They stay there six months and Roberts picks up the Marathi language and is introduced to rural Indian life. He is also given the name Shantaram, meaning man of peace, by Prabaker’s mother.

On their way home, they decide to go out for a drink in a small town on the road back to Bombay.

As good as his word, Prabaker directed us to a hovel, about an hour’s walk past the last bus stop on the outskirts of the town. With a round of drinks for the house, we insinuated ourselves into the crush of the dusty, determined drinkers who occupied the bar’s one narrow stone bench. The place was what Australians call a sly grog shop: an unlicensed bar, where men buy over-proof alcohol at under-the-counter prices. The men we joined in the bar were workers, farmers and a routine assortment of lawbreakers. They all wore sullen, persecuted expressions. They said little, or nothing at all. Fierce grimaces disfigured them as they drank the foul-tasting, homemade alcohol, and they followed each glass with a miscellany of grunts, groans, and gagging sounds. When we joined them, Prabaker and I consumed the drinks at a gulp, pinching our noses with one hand and hurling the noxious, chemurgic liquid down our open throats. By means of fierce determination, we summoned the will to keep the poison in our bellies. And when sufficiently recovered we launched ourselves, with no little reluctance, into the next venomous round. It was a grim and pleasureless business. The strain showed on every face. Some found the going too hard and slunk away, defeated. Some faltered, but were pressed on by the anguished encouragements of fellow sufferers. Prabaker lingered long over his fifth glass of the volatile fluid. I thought he was about to admit defeat, but at last he gasped and spluttered his way through to empty the glass. Then one man threw his glass aside, stood up, and moved to the centre of the shabby little room. He began to sing in a roaring, off-key voice, and because every man of use cheered our passionate and peremptory approval, we all knew that we were drunk.

Drunk and vulnerable, unfortunately. Walking back to the hotel, they are mugged and the remains of Roberts money is taken. His visa has also expired and realising that he risks deportation back to Australia and imprisonment if the authorities discover who he is, Roberts now has the problem that he has nowhere to stay. His only option is to move to slum where Prabaker lives, and his long journey from violent criminal on the run to a man of peace begins.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

2012-02-09T00:31:00.000-08:00

The last word in coming of age novels appears to be Catcher in the Rye, which was referenced in most of the reviews on the back of my copy of Submarine. I’m not entirely sure if Dunthorne has created a Welsh Holden Caulfield in Oliver Tate, but he’s a memorable mix of misunderstood teenager and youthful antihero.

Narrator Oliver lives in Swansea with his depressed dad and his mother who has recently embarked on an affair with her capoeira teacher, an ageing hippy called Graham. Determined to keep the family unit together at all costs, Oliver tries to keep his mother out of Graham’s clutches, with a spectacular lack of success. Finally convinced that she is pregnant with the man’s child, Oliver sets out on a mission to get Graham out of their lives for good:

I will make Graham realize what he has done to my family by giving him the impression that I’ve lost it and am capable of anything. I don’t feel threatened by him: capoeira is the art of not hitting each other. I take an empty bottle of Robinsons into the cellar, fill it with one-third vodka, one-third apple, one-third cranberry. It is important to seem genuine.

Setting off for Graham’s house on the bus, Oliver starts knocking back the vodka mix. By the time he gets to his destination he’s a little squiffy, but still functioning clearly enough to break in. He investigates the house, fixes himself another drink:

Next to a clay-coloured bread bin in one corner sits a wine rack containing Gordon’s gin, whisky still in its cardboard tube and a Gran Reservas brandy. I pull out the brandy. In a cupboard next to the cooker I find a bell-bottomed glass. I pour myself way too much expensive brandy. I don’t even like brandy.

Finally after defenestrating a couple of ornaments and committing a few other minor acts of vandalism, he waits for Graham upstairs, hoping to ambush him when he gets back. Unfortunately, he passes out drunk on the man’s arrival and the old philanderer takes him home, stopping once or twice for Oliver to throw up. He’s sobered up a little by the time he gets to the front door, but not quite enough to make a dignified entrance:

I turn the key in the lock and lean on the door. It swings open with me attached. My parents are still up, sitting on the stairs in the half-dark, each clutching a glass of red wine.

His parents are having a romantic tête à tête – the marriage is saved. Well, it is until Oliver starts blurting out what he’s been up to and how he’s been protecting his mum... Dad decides to get some coffee. Oliver staggers around for a few moments until antiperistalsis sets in:

I feel another surge. I bow, twirling my hand, as a first of vomit moves up my throat, out of my mouth – it is bright red – and on to the linoleum.

Poetic, moving and genuinely funny, Submarine is a remarkable debut.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

2012-02-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

Hašek’s book of boozy stories is a nice stop-gap when the book I’m supposed to be reading sends me into fits of narcolepsy on the train. (The current offender is Iris Murdoch, a brilliant writer, but one seemingly unsuited to public transport.) He is a great chronicler of drunken misfortune: one who sees the pleasures, perils and pains of drinking all in the same glass.

In his story Captured by Carthagians, Hašek has just come out of a rowdy political meeting where he and his party have won a decisive moral victory by being duffed up by the opposition. Nursing a shiner, he is accosted by someone in the street:

It was my friend Ladislav Hájek-Domažlický, whom I haven’t seen for two years, and who is a good friend of mine since that memorable day when he didn’t betray me in Hradčany, at the pub under the arcades where they serve beer from the Volseký imperial brewery.

While Hašek doesn’t go on to explain exactly what happened in the pub under the arcades in Hradčany, he does go on to relate another tale from back in 1902, when finding themselves on their uppers, they decide to tap a wealthy relative of Hájek’s for some cash. Uncle Hájek is now in a monastery, but they reckon he should be good for fifty crowns, so they write a long letter explaining how Hájek has fallen ill and has had to borrow money from Hašek to buy medicines:

We had styled the letter in the pub, where we had come moneyless, since the rich Strahov monastery was like a promised land. We had a great time, we drank, smoked, and at half past three I went to see the philanthropic priest, the uncle of my friend Hájek, in Strahov. When I had arrived, they informed me that the reverend vicar Hájek is at the evensong and will come back within the hour. I went back to the pub and again we ate, drank, smoked and played billiards. “On such a happy day we have to have wine,” said Hájek, “my uncle is an angel.”

Hašek finally gets an audience with the uncle, who listens patiently to his story before giving him an envelope that clearly contains a note. Hašek hurries back to the boozer and they rip it open, expecting to find cash. Unfortunately, Uncle Hájek appears to have got wise to their scheme:

You crooks! I saw you going into the pub! When I went to the evensong you were still there. Be ashamed! Vicar Hájek

This doesn’t auger well, considering that they’ve run up quite a tab in the pub:

And so we sat there imprisoned by the innkeeper, in a foreign atmosphere, far from friends, desperate, and outdoing each other in generosity, since each of us maintained that he’ll be the one to go down to the city and come back with money to pay the bill.

They draw straws as to who is to go back into Prague to get the money. Hašek gets left behind as the deposit:

At ten o’clock, when in desperation I doubled the bill, Hájek appeared and said, “Kill me! I borrowed six crowns off your uncle, and stopped in one pub. They were playing cards there, I wanted to double our fortune, I lost, and I am skint.”

As the author drily points out:

The old Roman hero, Regulus, came voluntarily back from Rome to Carthage in captivity, only to be tortured to death.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

2012-01-26T06:18:00.001-08:00

The unreliable narrator is a useful device in fiction. The haziness that descends over the novel’s events gives plenty of scope for interpretation, and the principal character themselves is often gloriously deluded in the bargain, which is certainly the case with Barbara Covett, a former history teacher in her sixties who is now writing her account of a colleague’s affair with an underage boy.

She begins her notes explaining that she and another former teacher, Sheba Hart, are temporarily living in the house of Sheba’s brother while he is away, and in circumstances somewhat more straightened than Sheba is used to:

I don’t cook anything fancy. Sheba’s appetite isn’t up to much and I’ve never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she’s eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. Something in a bottle, at least, she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. We are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn’t seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff.

Barbara then goes on to relate what happened at a comprehensive school where they both taught, how Sheba, a newly started pottery teacher, started an affair with a fifteen-year-old student, destroying her marriage, her career and leading to an impending court case.

Barbara has taken a shine to Sheba from the start, and singles her out as a friend. Sheba confides in Barbara that a boy, Steven Connolly, has made a pass at her, and Barbara tells her in no uncertain terms to put the kibosh on any designs he has. Unfortunately, Sheba finds herself smitten, and an affair begins. There are liaisons al fresco on Hampstead Heath, furtive couplings behind the kiln in her pottery studio, and even, on a couple of occasions, something that might even be called a ‘date’:

At the restaurant in Hammersmith, Connolly apparently requested a sickly cocktail to go with his curry. Sheba suggested he have a soft drink instead, or a lager, but he was insistent: he wanted his rum and Coke. She did not press the matter. She could hardly hector the boy about the dangers of strong drink, she felt, when she was about to take him off the park for sex.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, but the fickleness of teenage boys is particularly notable. Connolly eventually gets bored with Sheba. Sadly, Sheba feels different about the matter and gets distinctly clingy. While her home life is collapsing around her, Connolly is going to parties, doing the usual adolescent stuff:

Sheba had tried to remain cool, but she had kept picturing him at the party, drinking his rum and Coke from a plastic cup, dancing with peachy-skinned girls in slutty dresses.

Meanwhile, Barbara is slowly inveigling herself more and more into Sheba’s life. She decides that Sheba is her best friend now, and when she’s rejected in favour of Connolly, she reacts by hinting to another teacher that Sheba has an unhealthy interest in year 11 boys...

While Sheba spends one last oblivious Christmas and New Year with her family and Sheba sits at home with a full glass and a book (I bought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while re-reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion) the word finally gets out, and Sheba’s life is about to spiral into scandal and catastrophe.

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

2012-01-19T00:05:00.000-08:00

When I was thirteen, I found myself being given a book with a rather serious title along the lines of Your Preparation for Adolescence which dwelt long on the temptation to sin and the perils of marijuana. Seeing as all I learned from it were a few rather outdated slang words for puff, I can’t help but fantasise how things would have turned out had I managed to send this little gem back in time to my thirteenth birthday.

Part memoir, part rant and an attempt to rewrite The Female Eunuch from a bar stool, How to be a Woman is a hilarious amble through subjects both serious and not, that affect women in Britain today, the sort of stuff that people need a few drinks inside them to discuss:

So whilst How to be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

She marches through most of the above before getting to marriage; the obscene cost, and the ultimate disappointment of the ceremony itself. She illustrates this with her own nuptials:

I don’t want to exaggerate but, by God, it was a bad wedding... My father is in a suit he shoplifted from Ciro Citterio, and some shoes he shoplifted from Burtons – but he looks calm, wise and not a little emotional about giving away his first child in marriage. “Oh my lovely daughter,” he says, smelling a little of whisky.

Realising she is walking too quickly up the aisle, she slows down to a pace so slow, her sisters suspect that she has cystitis:

Still, I look fine compared to husband to be. He’s so nervous he’s a very pale green, and is shaking like a sock on a washing line. “I’ve never seen a more anxious groom,” the registrar confides, later. “I had to give him two shots of whisky.”

The ceremony over, the guests decamp to the watering hole:

An hour later and everyone’s in the bar. Many of our invited guests haven’t been able to make it, because it’s two days after Christmas and they’re with their families in Scotland, Devon and Ireland. My family are taking advantage of the free bar – many of them can’t walk anymore, and, of the ones that can, two of the have found a memorial to a dead knight, and are giving his statue a ‘saucy’ pole dance.

The reader may now have drawn the conclusion that Caitlin Moran doesn’t do weddings:

I was similarly lacklustre at Cathy and John’s wedding, when Cathy’s dad gave me a tour of their beautiful, all-white house, as I trailed along behind, swigging red wine. “And this is my favourite view,” Cathy’s dad said, as we reached the master bedroom, and he strode over to the window. “On a clear day, you can see right down the valley.” Then a bat flew in through the window, and right into my face. I don’t know if you’ve every had a bat fly into your face, but you don’t have an enormous amount of time to work out your coping technique. You kind of... ride on instinct. My instinct, it turned out, was to scream “WHAT THE FUCKING?”, and hurl my red wine right across the world’s whitest room.

Still, she knows exactly how to rectify the situation:

Bombing into the kitchen, I returned with a bottle of white wine, and started sloshing it around, in a dedicated manner. “White wine gets red wine stains out!” I shouted. “I saw it on telly!” I maniacally started pouring the white wine into the now scarlet rug, and scrubbing it with a tea towel. Cathy’s dad came across the room – slightly faster than I thought a man of his age would be capable of – and gently prised the bottle from my hand. He stared at it – now empty – for a moment. “Ah,” he said, regretfully, “The ’93 Alsace Grand Cru.” There was a long pause. “Still,” he said, with enormous grace, touching the bottle with his fingertips. “It was a little too warm to drink.”

Her feminism is just as important as her humour and Moran tackles her subjects of sexism, motherhood, abortion, role models, weight and adolescence with equal gravity and laughter.

I feel I probably owe the author a bit of an apology, as I’ve never given her much time for her prodigious column writing. I grumbled that most of it wasn’t my thing, (to be objective, that goes for almost all columnists), missing the point that Moran writes well, and is very funny as well as being an excellent polemicist and debater.

I felt almost wistful for my thirteen year old self as I read How to be a Woman, and it is testament to the book’s clarity of thinking that I wish I’d had the chance to read it then. I’m sure it would have helped me muddle through just a little bit better than just knowing that a large weight of cannabis used to be called a brick...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2012-01-13T00:59:00.000-08:00

I picked this up by accident while looking for something completely different, but as with most of my serendipitous finds, I’m ever grateful for whatever thought process dragged me to the particular shelf in the library that is the home of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The goon in question is time, forever beating on the interlinked characters in Egan’s novel which flits from late 70s California, to a dystopian New York in the 2020s. Chronological order is eschewed in favour of themes, her playful prose playing tag with ideas through the book. It begins with Sasha, PA to music mogul Bennie Salazar, who is seeking psychiatric treatment for her kleptomania. Each chapter is a separate vignette, seen through the eyes of another player: Bennie and his friends in a band called The Flaming Dildoes, listening to the Dead Kennedys and playing the punk clubs in San Francisco; Sasha’s friend Rob losing his mind at college in New York; her uncle Ted looking for her a few years earlier when she has run away to Naples...

Ted, a frustrated art history professor who dreams of writing something serious, but never seems to be able to, has been sent by his sister’s new husband to retrieve Sasha from whatever she’s got herself mixed up in and bring her back to the US. He spends each day in Naples wandering around museums, pointedly not looking for her, then going back and ringing his sister to report on his progress. The guilt, along with the realisation that his deliberate freezing of his desire for his wife has destroyed both her sanity and their marriage, is crushing:

After hanging up, Ted went to the minibar and dumped a vodka over ice. He brought drink and phone to the balcony and sat in a white plastic chair, looking down at the Via Partenope and the Bay of Naples.

Ted, in reality, is not much of a drinker:

He seldom drank; booze flung a curtain of exhaustion over his head, robbing him of the two precious hours he had each night – two, maybe three, after dinner with Susan and the boys – in which to think and write about art.

It’s best to put it all to one side, and get back to the serious matter of looking at great art. He sets off the next day to Museo Nazionale to see marbles of Orpheus & Eurydice. On his way back to the hotel, he wanders into the slums of Naples, and runs into Sasha.

It’s all a bit awkward, but he manages to persuade her to come out for supper that evening. She opens up a bit after a second glass of red wine, and they go on to a nightclub:

After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. “Friends of mine own this place,” Sasha said, leading the way into the tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. “Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you?” she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. “Like that, with a little umbrella.”

I remember reading this with a palpable terror that something terrible was going to happen; would one of them make a pass at the other, would there be a fight with some of the criminals that she had befriended (we learn from an earlier part of the book that she has dabbled in thieving and prostitution while in Italy, although is this true?) What happens is more understated, but no less devastating:

Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached into his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’d robbed him.

The fact that Sasha eventually makes good of her life makes little difference. The deed is done, it’s part of her forever now. And even if it could be wiped away and forgotten, there’s still no escaping time’s Goon...

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

2012-01-05T06:27:00.000-08:00

I recalled a passage in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet which involved champagne and disaster, that I thought seemed appropriate for the New Year and for the blog, in that order. I last read the book it nearly a decade back, having just read and loved her second book, Affinity. Tipping the Velvet seemed at first to be the lighter book, and it’s obvious that Waters had bloody good fun writing it, but looking back, she’s managed to do more than just create an entertaining Victorian romp. A whole imagined world of lesbian history is intertwined with her sumptuously detailed descriptions of London in the 1890s and her impressive research into gay and lesbian writing of the late nineteenth century; it’s a rather marvellous achievement and also a cracking read.

Nancy, know as Nan, lives with her family in Whitstable, where she works shelling oysters for their restaurant. Captivated by Kitty Butler, a male impersonator who she sees at the local theatre, she becomes close friends with her, taking up an offer to work as her dresser in London. Soon performing as a double act on stage, they become quite famous, with a burgeoning physical relationship growing in secret. Unfortunately, Nan comes back one day to find Kitty in bed with their agent, Walter, and she leaves in a hurry.

Taking to the streets and the grim world of prostitution, going out ‘renting’ dressed as a young man for male clients. It’s here that she runs into Diana, a wealthy widow with a rather outré taste in sex toys. She lives with her for a year, but Diana and her rich, boorish lady friends treat her as little more than an object of titillation and erotic indulgence, and Nan misses Kitty terribly.

After a rather debauched party thrown by Diana for Sapphists Only, Nan has a fight with her after she tries to strip Zena, her maid, in front of her friends. Sent upstairs while the rest of the party continues its drunken whirl, Nan finds herself consoling Zena:

“Just listen to them!” I said, growing bitter again. “Partying like anything! They have forgotten about us, sitting miserably up here...” “Oh, I hope they have!” “Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’t matter to them. Why, we might be having a party of our own!” She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: “Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?”

Her new friend scuttles downstairs and returns with a dewy bottle and a glass straight from the cold store:

I went to her and took the bottle, then peeled away the lead wrapper from its neck. “You’ve shaken it up,” I said. “It’ll go off with a real bang!” She put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. I felt the cork squirm in the glass for a second; then it leapt from my fingers, and I gave a yell: “Quick! Quick! Bring a glass!” A creamy fountain of foam had risen from the neck of the bottle, and now drenched my fingers and soaked my legs – I was still, of course, clad in the little white toga. Zena seized the glass from the tray and held it, giggling again, beneath the spurting wine. We went and sat upon the bed, Zena with the glass in her hands, me sipping from the frothing bottle. When she drank, she coughed; but I filled her glass again and said: “Drink up! Just like those cows downstairs.” And she drank, and drank again, until her cheeks were red.

With all those bubbles and emotions, there’s bound to be horseplay. Which there is, but unfortunately Diana and friends come upstairs to check on their charges at a rather inopportune moment...

The Olive And The Caper by Susanna Hoffman

2011-12-22T00:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve mentioned before that there are many joys to be found in reading cookery books, not just for the references to booze; a lot of them are also well written and contain much more than just recipes.

Hoffman’s homage to Greek cuisine is a rambling compendium of culinary history which often strays into culture and language. Wine has been an essential part of Greek life for millennia, and she devotes several pages to it, starting with amphora of the ancients, and running up to the modern day. A glass of local wine is now part of the main meal, however:

...in ancient times wine was reserved for the second part of the dinner, called the symposion, the time when conversation, games, and entertainment took over. There, after a first sip of undiluted wine taken as a libation to the gods, the wine was always diluted with water. Drinking undiluted wine was considered dangerous, with possible dire consequences.

The ritual of the symposion is described thus:

At the symposion, the wine part of the banquet, three kratirs, or mixing bowls, were thought the proper, moderate amount of wine to imbibe. The host was in charge of the pace of the drinking, and since rituals accompanied the first three bowls, he could even force guests to finish the number of bowls served. At some gatherings a wine watcher was in charge to see that all received an equal amount of wine. In a play by a writer named Euboulos, the god Dionysos describes the bowls: The first bowl, he says, is for health, the second for love and pleasure, the third for sleep. At this point wise drinkers go home. Should guests drink onward, the fourth bowl belongs to hubris, which in Greek means “boastful talk among males.” The fifth leads to shouting, the sixth to revelry, the seventh to black eyes, the eight to court summonses, the ninth to bile, and the tenth to madness and people throwing the furniture about.

They knew a thing or two did the Ancient Greeks. Along with wine, they were also known to imbibe beer, indeed, Aristotle notes its effects:

Aristotle compared the intoxication caused by beer to that of wine: Wine, he said, caused a drunk to pass out and fall face down, whereas beer caused one to fall belly up.

I think proof of this might require further research...

Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser

2011-12-08T00:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve had this on the bookshelf for a few years now, and having some time ago given up on a rather foolish attempt to read all twelve in order, I picked this up, reasoning that Flashman withdrawal was a good enough reason to break sequence.

MacDonald Frasers’s eponymous anti-hero is a liar, a bully and a toady, who ducks and skives his way through some of the more colourful parts of nineteenth century history. In this episode he finds himself caught up in the Sikh War of 1845, and once again, Flashman has unwitting found himself in a tight spot.

He volunteers for a political role in an effort to avoid the inevitable fight between the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab and the East India Company, but is instead sent off to the court at Lahore. He is supposed to report back on court intrigue from the lions’ den itself, but after being dramatically rescued from falling off a high balcony by his servant, Jassa, his mind is strangely elsewhere.

I’m not certain what line our conversation took, once I’d heaved up my supper, because I was in that state of blind funk and shock where talk don’t’ matter, and I made it worse – once I’d recovered the strength to crawl indoors – by emptying my pint flask of brandy in about three great gulps, while Jassa asked damnfool questions. That brandy was a mistake. Sober, I’d have begun to reason straight, and let him talk some sense into me, but I sank the lot, and the short result was, in the immortal words of Thomas Hughes, Flashy became beastly drunk. And when I’m foxed, and shuddering scared into the bargain ... well, I ain’t responsible.

Flashman has overheard that the safest place for him to be is the durbar room (court) and he makes a sharp exit in that direction. Surprised when he gets there by scenes of utter debauchery, he’s quickly accosted by Mangala, slave and chief adviser of the Maharani:

She said I needed something to warm me, and a lackey serving the folk in the gallery put a beaker in my hand. What with brandy and funk I was parched as a camel’s oxter, so I drank it straight off, and another – dry red wine, with a curious effervescent tang to it. D’you know, it settled me wonderfully... I took another swig, and Mangala laid a hand on my arm, smiling roguishly. “That is your third cup, bahadur. Have care. It is ... strangely potent, and the night has only begun. Rest a moment.”

That might be hard work. The durbar is in the throes of an orgy, and Flashman feels ill disposed to restraint. He’s quickly brought to a booth at the end of the room and realises that he was in the presence of the notorious Maharani Jeendan, Indian Venus, modern Messalina, and uncrowned queen of the Punjab.

She’s quite a character:

...she was simply the lewdest-looking strumpet I ever saw in my life. Mind you, when a young woman with the proportions of an erotic Indian statue is found reclining half-naked and three parts drunk, while a stalwart wrestler rubs her down with oil, it’s easy to jump to conclusions.

Indeed it is. And it’s all too easy to get carried away. Flashman has another close shave before the night is out and has to get rescued by an American... and the war with the Sikhs hasn’t even begun yet.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

2011-12-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

Last week’s post on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trek through Mitteleuropa prompted me to mention Joseph Roth and Jaroslav Hašek, so I thought I’d carry on the theme and return, once again, to Drunkard’s Tales, Hašek’s boozy stories from old Prague...

Mr. Motejzlík’s Fatherly Delights concerns the eponymous new father and reprobate, who in the run up to the arrival of his son and heir, has been putting it about in the bars and shops around town that he’s already got a little boy at home. Realising that his wife might give birth to a girl, he back pedals and tells everyone it’s a daughter, then twins, then...

Finally, when the moment came that he was to become a father, he disappeared in the neighbourhood even though his in-laws were present, and at the pork butcher’s, the baker’s the chemist’s, in two pubs and one wine house claimed that it is a done thing, and again in his lying ways – a girl, boy – boy, girl – twins, triplets – boy, girl – girl, boy – to cut along story short he left himself a back door open. And when in the wine house he had his fifth glass of vermouth tucked inside, he exclaimed, “You don’t know how happy I am!” and went home.

Back at home, the drunken father is presented with the newborn:

When the midwife brought in the red infant, Mr. Motejzlík took hold of him and was in the hallway in a jiffy. He wanted to show it to the neighbours next door. They wrestled it away from him, and Mr. Motejzlík, shouting at the whole house in the quiet of the evening, “I have a son!” ran down and out to the restaurant opposite. There he ordered ten beers and told everyone he has a son. Since he told them half an hour ago that he had a daughter, an argument arose while Mr. Motejzlík was shouting, “I know better, it’s mine!”

The in-laws aren’t happy and show him the door, so Motejzlík spends the night on the toot, before trying to kip at a friend’s house. When this goes wrong (he sneaks in through a window and startles the man’s wife...) he creeps back home and sleeps on the sofa.

Still, Motejzlík is a doting father, if a little prone to festivities:

When somebody becomes a father, there are many little delights... What a great joy to note into your diary every gram that your offspring gains, slowly but surely, according to the implacable rules of nature. Then a new pleasure – your boy wants to drink. You take him to his mother and get back to your guests, take another bottle of cognac out of the cupboard, and while your little dear drinks, so do you and your guests to his health.

Once again, the in-laws show him the door and he ends up out on the pop. He comes back with a hare-brained idea that he wants his lad christened Hector, after the Trojan hero, but the family put the kibosh on that pretty quickly and tell him there’s no way the boy is having the same name as a butcher’s dog. Motejzlík storms off in a huff, but comes back a couple of days later, seemingly repentant:

Then he got ignored, shut in a room and when he spoke up at the door all contrite, “Could I please see my dear little son,” he received a curt answer, “When you sober up!” – “Sorry, I am really not drunk today, I would really like to see my own blood, dearest madam." The dearest mother-in-law did not answer and started to whistle an aria from the Huguenots, the part when they are starting to slaughter the Huguenots.

Father-in-law decides that Motejzlík is sober enough to make himself useful and sends him out to buy a pram, furnishing him with 150 crowns to fund the purchase. Motejzlík dutifully shops around, comparing prices and finally sits in a coffee shop working out which one is best value. Unable to decide, he goes back out to the street, only to find that it’s eight in the evening and all the shops are shut. The shadow of opprobrium has been cast on the night and he doesn’t dare go home:

All of a sudden Mr. Motejzlík began to feel the need to distract the thoughts of a hunted man with a jovial talk with his true friends, whom he saw daily at the restaurant U Zvěřinů in Košíře, whenever he managed to escape from home. So there he tried to banish his dismal thoughts with good beer, but still it was not the real thing, some excitement was needed to forget his sad lot.

Some wiseguy suggests a nightclub where they play cards, and before he knows what he’s doing, Motejzlík is changing a 100 crown note. Before long he’s down to his last 20 so he goes all in – “Everything for my little son!” – and scoops a monkey:

It was the next day around ten o’clock, when Mr. Motejzlík came back to his family and home. But in what condition!

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

2011-11-24T00:38:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I saw a remarkable documentary about a remarkable man, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who during the Second World War, led and daring raid on the German forces in occupied Crete, capturing the General stationed on the island and taking him into Allied custody. Then over ninety, he could still tell a good story about his travels, and I made a note to read his books.

To my shame it has taken a while to get around to this, but I am now enjoying his account of a walk from London to Constantinople, a tale so rich in detail that it sprawls over two volumes. A Time of Gifts is the first, chronicling how in the winter of 1933, at the age of eighteen, he set off from Britain with little more than a rucksack, a walking stick and a sturdy pair of boots.

The trek gets off to a good start: in Hook of Holland he stops for a coffee after getting off the boat. As he’s leaving, the landlord wants to know where he’s headed:

I put on my greatcoat, slung the rucksack, grasped my stick and headed for the door. The landlord asked where I was going: I said: “Constantinople”. His brows went up and he signalled for me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them; he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an internal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey.

After following the Rhine upstream through the Netherlands and Germany, stopping in beer cellars and wine houses – “It is impossible, drinking by the glass in those charmingly named inns and wine-cellars, not to drink too much.” – he reaches Austria. In less than five years time the country would be annexed in the 1938 Anchluss, succumbing to the horrors of Nazism that he had already seen in his walk through Germany. In the early months of 1934, the old order of the Habsburgs lives on in the castles that line the Danube, and armed with letters of introduction, Fermor is invited to stay with the lower nobility from an Empire that disintegrated a mere fifteen years before.

They certainly have a lot to talk about, and Fermor soaks up stories about the old kaiserlich und königlich:

As I listened, the white gloved hand of the Lincoln green footman poured out coffee and placed little silver vermeil-lined goblets beside the Count’s cup and mine. Then he filled them with what I thought was schnapps. I’d learnt what to do with that in recent weeks – or so I thought – and I was picking it up to tilt it into the coffee when the Count broke off his narrative with a quavering cry as though an arrow from some hidden archer had transfixed him: “NEIN! NEIN!”, he faltered. A pleading, ringed and almost transparent hand was stretched out and the stress of the moment drove him into English: “No! No! Nononono – !” I didn’t know what had happened. Nor did the others. There was a moment of perplexity. Then, following the Count’s troubled glance, all our eyes alighted simultaneously on the little poised silver goblet in my hand. Then both the Countesses, looking from the torment on the Count’s face to the astonishment on mine, dissolved in saving laughter, which, as I put the goblet back on the table, spread to me and finally cleared the distress from the Count’s features too, and replaced it with a worried smile. His anxiety had been for my sake, he said apologetically. The liquid wasn’t schnapps at all, but incomparable nectar – the last of a bottle of liqueur distilled from Tokay grapes and an elixir of fabulous rarity and age.

As much as it is a cliché to say that Fermor writes exquisitely about a world that’s now gone forever, it happens to be true in this case. He also links us to the world of Jaroslav Hašek and Joseph Roth, and for that I will always be grateful.

The Book of Genesis

2011-11-17T06:43:00.001-08:00

I’m not sure how this particular bibulous biblical reference came into conversation last week, but Noah’s infamous ventures with wine growing ended up scrutinised with a glass of wine over supper, so here it is in full.

Noah, having recently battened down the hatches on his ark and saved his family and the world’s animals from drowning in the flood, has now been told by God to multiply, and replenish the earth. He sets about this by becoming a farmer, along with which he plants a few rows of grapes. In the Old Testament’s first reference to viticulture, Noah gets disgustingly drunk and passes out in his gaff:

9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

9:21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

9:22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

9:23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

9:24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

9:27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

What happens when Noah passes out is clothed in biblical obfuscation. It’s pretty much open to conjecture but there those who suggest a serious misdemeanour, either after the booze gets the better of him, or before. At any rate, the other two brothers cover the old boy up and sit out the wrath of the grape the next day when Noah wakes up with the bible’s first hangover. Ham’s son Canaan gets it in the neck for what has happened between his father and grandfather, so it was obviously something worse than not putting him into the recovery position...

Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

2011-11-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

Another foray into South American literature, this time to Chile, and writer in exile Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño’s magnum opus is 2666, which has been eyeballing me from the bookshelf of the local library for a while now. At over 900 pages in translation, however, I have shied away from it in favour of one of his shorter pieces, Distant Star, the story of a poet-aviator Carlos Wieder, and his part in the murderous regime that took over in the 1973 coup.

Known to the book’s unnamed author as Alberto Ruiz-Tagle in the period running up to Pinochet’s takeover, Wieder is first encountered in various university poetry groups. A little older than his fellow students, he is an accomplished poet who claims to be an autodidact. More infuriatingly, to the author and his friend Bibiano O’Ryan, he is adored by the two stunningly beautiful Garmendia sisters, who fail to notice Bibiano or the writer at all.

After the fall of Allende, the writer is in a prison camp, when one afternoon he looks up to see a Messerchmitt sky-writing poetry. The pilot is Ruiz-Tagle, now know by the name Carlos Wieder. Following his release, finding himself expelled from university and unable to get a job in the country, the author leaves Chile, but on his travels he continues to hear about the poet-aviator Wieder and his exploits.

After a reckless display in which Wieder flies into a thunderstorm while writing a poem about death, the pilot invites a party of friends, fellow officers and socialites back a rented apartment where he has set up a photography exhibition. No one has seen the content, which is in a locked spare room that Wieder promises to open at midnight. The party goes pretty well, at first:

The first guests arrived at 9.00 in the evening. Most of them were old school friends who hadn’t seen each other for some time. At 11.00, twenty people were present, all of the moderately drunk. No-one had yet entered the spare bedroom, occupied by Wieder, on the walls of which were displayed the photos he was planning to submit to the judgment of his friends. Lieutenant Julio César Muñoz Cano, who years later was to publish a self-denunciatory memoir entitled Neck in a Noose relating his activities during the early years of the military regime, informs us that Carlos Wieder behaved normally (or perhaps abnormally: he was much quieter than usual, to the point of meekness, and throughout the night his face had a freshly washed look). He attended to the guests as if he were in his own home (everyone was getting along splendidly, too well, in fact, writes Muñoz Cano).

Come pumpkin time, Wieder assembles the guests and opens the door, ordering them in one at a time:

The room was lit in the usual way. There were no extra lamps or spotlights to heighten the visual effect of the photos. It was not meant to be like an art gallery, but simply a room, a spare bedroom temporarily occupied by a young visitor. There is, of course, no truth to the story that there were coloured lights or drum beats coming from a cassette player hidden under the bed. The ambience was meant to be everyday, normal, low-key. Outside the party continued. The young men drank as young men do, like the victors they were, and they held their drink like Chileans. The laughter, recalls Muñoz Cano, was contagious, without the slightest hint of menace or anything sinister.

The reaction of the first visitor to the exhibition, the beautiful and confident Tatiana von Beck, is memorable, to say the least:

Less than a minute after going in, Tatiana von Beck emerged from the room. She was pale and shaken – everyone noticed. She stared at Wieder as if she were going to say something to him but couldn’t find the words. Then she tried to get to the bathroom, unsuccessfully. After vomiting in the passage, Miss von Beck staggered to the front door with the help of an officer who gallantly offered to take her home, although she kept saying she would prefer to go alone.

A room full of half-cut officers looks on, unsure what to do next:

Wieder’s father broke the spell. He made his way forward politely, addressing each officer by name as he excused himself, then went into the room. The owner of the flat followed him in. Almost immediately he came out again, went up to Wieder, seized him by the lapels, and for a moment it looked as if he would hit him, but then he turned away and stormed off to the living room in search of a drink.

He’ll need it. Wieder has printed out photographs of dozens of atrocities committed by himself on behalf of the military regime, including the murders of the Garmendia sisters. They cover every inch of wall in the room.

Now disgraced, Wieder sinks into obscurity. His writings appear occasionally under pseudonyms in small journals in Europe and South America. The author thinks he has disappeared, until a private detective arrives on his doorstop in Barcelona and demands that they confront Wieder...

The Hireling by LP Hartley

2011-10-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

These days Hartley seems best known for The Go-Between and its opening line, “The past is a different country: they do things differently there.” In his time, however, he was a renowned author, recipient of literary prizes and the CBE.

The Hireling, one of the more popular of a fairly prolific output and still in print, tells the story of Leadbitter, who has recently left the army after the war, and started out as a driver for wealthy customers. Misogynistic, uptight and doomed to a life driving the idle rich while paying the crippling hire-purchase on his car, Leadbitter becomes chauffeur for a bereaved young Widow, Lady Franklin.

Asked to take her to Canterbury, he drives her there from London, but declines to see the cathedral with her, which she is visiting in an act of remembrance for her dead husband. Instead, he sits in the car and mopes, before going for a quick sharpener:

Left to himself, Leadbitter turned on the wireless. A woman’s voice! The civilian world was a dull place, a tried three-piece orchestra, waiting for the word ‘fun’. Moodily he got out, locked the car and went to buy himself a coffee. On the way he passed a pub, and after a few moments hesitation pushed the door open. Few working men drink spirits in the middle of the day and Leadbitter was no exception, he couldn’t afford to and besides he didn’t want to smell of alcohol: he had his customers, and the police, to think of. But he felt very tired and the job with Lady Franklin would bring in several pounds, so he decided to take the risk. He chose whisky, a drink he didn’t often indulge in, for it made him feel ‘antagonistic’, as he put it. One double Scotch sufficed to set the hostility working in him, and looking round he spied a small fat man whose inoffensive expression irritated him. He stared at him until the man showed signs first of uneasiness, then of confusion, and at last, looking every way except at his tormentor, ignominiously scuttled out. But Leadbitter’s demon remained unappeased. Arguing the toss with himself whether he should have another whisky, he approached the bar and said the barman, who was a big, heavily-built, pasty-faced fellow, with a slight foreign accent: “Are you an American?” “No,” said the barman. “Well, what are you then?” “If you want to know, I’m Dutch.” “I thought you were an American,” said Leadbitter evenly. His voice made it sound like an insult, almost a threat: and a faint stir of interest went through the drinkers, the pleasurable anticipation of a quarrel, and they turned their heads, awaiting the barman’s answer. “It’s written Dutch on my passport,” he said expressionlessly. “Well, they should know,” said Leadbitter, inferring that such knowledge didn’t matter much, either way. The barman raised his eyes but didn’t answer and Leadbitter, dropping the subject as if any interest it might have had was now exhausted, decided not to have another drink. For a moment, while his will clashed with the barman’s, he had felt that life was worth living: it had been brought to the fine point of conflict that his nature craved.

It’s not set up to end rosily and when Lady Franklin later asks him if he has a family, he lies and invents a wife and children in an effort to give her satisfaction. As his stories get more and more involved, he unwittingly falls in love with his aristocratic employer, with tragic results...

Black Ajax by George MacDonald Fraser

2011-10-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

George MacDonald Fraser is best known for the Flashman novels, and rightly so, but he also wrote other historical novels, as well as screenplays and biographies.

Black Ajax is the story of Tom Molineaux, a former slave who came to London from America with the aim of taking on the greatest bare-knuckle champion of all time, Tom Cribb. The book is written through the voices of various promoters, chancers, gamblers and aficionados of The Fancy who are remembering him posthumously to his biographer. The result is a glorious piece of historical ventriloquism.

One of the raconteurs is none other than Flashman Snr, who has been sent to a sanatorium by his son because of his drinking problem:

I am one of a select band of gentlemen resident in this charming rural establishment because we have lost the battle with delirium tremens – temporarily, I hasten to add – and are in need of a breather between rounds, so to speak. We are here of our own free will, at exorbitant rates, have the freedom of the grounds, and do not consort with the loonies, and ... I say, you don’t happen to have a drop of anything with you, I suppose? Flask, bottle, demijohn, something of the sort?

He’s determined to keep mum on the subject of Molineux, however. Only when he’s promised a drink will he sing:

What’s that? You could call again after luncheon ... with a spot o’ lush, no doubt. My dear fellow, what a capital notion. Put ‘em in separate pockets so that they don’t clink ... the attendants here have ears like dago guerrillas, ‘tis like being in the blasted Steel.

After inquiring as to how the biographer has found him – the man appears to have unwisely left his sister in the company of Harry Flashman – Flashman Snr gets to work:

Now, have you brought ... oh, famous! Sir, you are a pippen of the first flight! Brandy, bigod, that’ll answer. Fix bayonets and form a square, belly, the Philistines are upon thee ... Ah-h-h! Aye, that’s the neat article. Sir, your good health ...

And so to his account; another chapter in an exploitive and bloody story from the golden age of boxing...

All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

2011-10-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

I first read this around ten years ago, finishing it in a single sitting. I was captivated by the sense of Kafkaesque menace that pervades the story, despite the fact that very little happens for most of the book.

Ostensibly the tale of a holidaymaker who gets trapped in a small village in the Lake District after procrastinating whether to go on his travels to India by motorbike, Mills imbues the book with an increasing feeling of menace. By the time winter has arrived and the unnamed narrator has found himself taking on numerous odd jobs including the local milk round, an ice cream franchise and painting a set of rowing boats in a hideous shade of green, the claustrophobia is unbearable.

It all starts off innocently enough; the narrator decides to stay on a week at the end of the holiday season. As the rest of the campers disappear home, Mr Parker, the farmer who runs the site, asks him to paint a gate in return for the next week’s rent for his pitch. It seems a reasonable deal, and it saves him a few bob which he can spend on beer:

After that there was nothing to do except go down the pub. I had a choice between walking and going on the bike. If I took the bike it meant I would have to drink less, maximum three pints. Or I could walk and have five. I thought of the money I’d saved by painting Mr Parker’s gate, and decided to walk.

Pretty soon, he is invited to join the darts team at the Packhorse, the livelier of the two pubs in the village. There’s a new barrel of bitter on tap, just for him, and he’s allowed to run up a sizeable slate:

My opponent from the Golden Lion was a portly bloke called Phil who didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered when I beat him, and instantly rushed off to buy me a pint of lager. When I asked if it would be alright if I had Topham’s Excelsior instead he looked slightly sorry for me, as though I hadn’t been properly weaned or something.

Well, it’s not as if he’s staying for long, just until he finishes the painting for Mr Parker:

When I walked to the pub at night I could hear seabirds out in the middle of the lake, squawking and arguing. It sounded as though there were thousands of them. I had no idea where they’d come from, but they seemed to have settled in for the winter. I thought about the seven boats waiting to be painted, the darts fixtures and the endless points of Topham’s Excelsior Bitter, and realized that I’d settled in for the winter as well.

But disaster strikes. He doesn’t realise that away matches take place on Tuesdays... When he gets to the Packhorse too late to make the game in the nearby village, he gets a distinctly frosty reception. It’s hinted that he ought to keep his head down at the other pub for a couple of weeks until it all blows over. Sadly, the Ring of Bells is a purgatorial dump of a public house:

That night I began my two-week sentence at the Ring of Bells. Two weeks of sitting in a pub with no women, no darts and no Topham’s Excelsior Bitter wasn’t very appealing, so I put it off until about quarter to ten... The same people sat in the same places and stared at their drinks, while the landlord (whose name, apparently, was Cyril) stood behind the counter and polished glasses. The conversation was at best desultory.

After a while of this, he begins to question if it’s worth going to the pub at all. He’s saved from this terrible fate when speaking to the captain of the Packhorse darts team while on the new milk round he has somehow acquired:

Tomorrow being Thursday evening I assumed he was referring to the next darts fixture in the Packhorse. I took his remark as meaning that my period of exile was over and I could begin drinking there again. My resolution of the previous evening about ‘not drinking anywhere for the time being’ had seemed very bleak in the cold light of day. After all, what was the point of working if I couldn’t go to the pub at night?

What point indeed? But by the time he finds that there is only one way to leave the village, it’s a bit late to be thinking about beer...

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

2011-10-06T00:05:00.000-07:00

Somewhat of a literary sensation when published in its native Germany, Wetlands managed to cause quite a stir when it appeared in translation over here. Its protagonist, Helen Memel, is an emotionally damaged eighteen-year-old recovering in a hospital proctology unit from an infected shaving cut that occurred when depilating an area not traditionally kept hair free.

The book never leaves the hospital or Helen’s head, and the next two hundred pages consist of a rant against the over hygienic de-odorised concepts of modern femininity, a catalogue of Helen’s erotic experiences and predilection for anal sex, and a desperate attempt to bring her estranged parents back together which culminates in an incredibly painful complication of the original wound. It’s fair to say that Wetlands is not for those of a queasy disposition.

At the heart of the book are Helen’s feelings of rejection from her parents. Her father his absent, she has no idea what he does, and her mother, with whom she lives, once tried to kill herself and Helen’s younger brother, leaving Helen behind. That said, her memory of this is distinctly hazy, something that can be attributed to both shock and the fact that she’s done her best to blot out the experience with drink and drugs.

One of her ex-boyfriends, Michael, was a small time drug dealer who kept his stash in a fake Coca-Cola can. He mistakenly leaves this round Helen’s friend’s house – not a good idea, really:

We blew off school, bought some red wine at a kiosk, and left a message for Michael on his answering machine: “If you’re looking for cola, we found a whole case in Corinna’s room. You won’t get pissed if we start drinking without you, will you?” ... Then began our race against time. The idea was to take as many drugs as possible before the first one took effect and before Michael showed up. Anything we didn’t slurp down we’d have to give back. At nine in the morning we starting taking two pills at a time, washing them down with wine. It didn’t seem right to snort speed and coke so early in the morning, so we made minigrenades out of toilet paper. Half a packet each for us – which is half a gram – poured onto a little piece of toilet paper, skilfully wrapped up, and gulped down with lots of wine.

Michael is not a happy bunny when he finally turns up, not that Helen and Corinna are in any state to care:

I guess everything started to kick in. I can only remember the highlights. Corinna and I laughed the whole time and made up stories set in a fantasy land. At some point Michael came by to pick up his can and cursed us out. We giggled. He said if all the stuff we’d ingested didn’t kill us, we would have to pay him back. We just laughed. Later we puked. First Corinna, then me from the sound and smell of hers. In a big, white bucket. The puke looked like blood because of the red wine. But it took as a long time to figure out why it looked like that. And then we realized there were undigested pills floating around. This seemed like a terrible waste to us. I said: “Half and half?” Corinna said: “Okay, you first.” And so for the first time in my life I drank someone else’s puke. Mixed with my own. In big gulps. Taking turns. Until the bucket was empty. A lot of brain cells die on days like that.

Helen is certainly one of the more interesting literary creations that I’ve encountered, and although Roche’s prose deliberately sets out to shock, she does have some valid points to make but ultimately, they are lost under a welter of bodily functions and a rather clunky translation by someone whose day job is writing for Playboy. It’s certainly not a book I'll forget in a hurry, though, and I'm not sure I'll ever look at an avocado in the same way again...

The Book of Judith

2011-09-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

I was put onto the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes by my friend Pete who described her as an example of ancient girl power. Judith plays nemesis to Holofernes’s hubris, with the Assyrian losing his head both metaphorically and literally in the process...

The book of Judith is listed as one of the Apocrypha and has disappeared from modern printings of the King James Version, but it is still regarded as canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, as far as I can work out. I’ve resorted to Gutenberg and their text from the Challoner revision of the Douay Rheims translation here.

The story begins with the onslaught on Israel by the Assyrian army, led by Holofernes. He puts the land to the sword and demands that the people follow his king, Nebuchadnezzar. Naturally, the Israelites are having none of it, a brave and noble stand to take, and one that seems increasingly perilous as Holofernes advances on Jerusalem.

In the city abides Judith, a widow of just three months, who has spent the time since her husband died locked in her house wearing a hair shirt and refusing to eat. Hearing of the threat, she puts on sackcloth and ashes and prays to God for the city’s deliverance:

9:12. Bring to pass, O Lord, that his pride may be cut off with his own

sword.

The plot is then hatched... Judith, an exceptionally beautiful woman, is sent to the Assyrian camp where she will wile her way into Holofernes company and do away with him:

10:4. And the Lord also gave her more beauty: because all this dressing

up did not proceed from sensuality, but from virtue: and therefore the

Lord increased this her beauty, so that she appeared to all men's eyes

incomparably lovely.

10:5. And she gave to her maid a bottle of wine to carry, and a vessel

of oil, and parched corn, and dry figs, and bread and cheese, and went

out.

Holofernes is duly stunned, and responds by asking her to stay in his camp, the old goat. After four days of her refusing to eat his food, he decides that enough is enough and he must seduce her; it’s now a matter of Assyrian national pride that he gets his leg over:

12:10. And it came to pass on the fourth day, that Holofernes made a

supper for his servants, and said to Vagao his eunuch: Go, and persuade

that Hebrew woman, to consent of her own accord to dwell with me.

12:11. For it is looked upon as shameful among the Assyrians, if a woman

mock a man, by doing so as to pass free from him.

12:12. Then Vagao went in to Judith, and said: Let not my good maid be

afraid to go in to my lord, that she may be honoured before his face,

that she may eat with him and drink wine and be merry.

And eat drink and be merry they do:

12:16. And the heart of Holofernes was smitten, for he was burning with

the desire of her.

12:17. And Holofernes said to her: Drink now, and sit down and be merry;

for thou hast found favour before me.

12:18. And Judith said: I will drink my lord, because my life is

magnified this day above all my days.

12:19. And she took and ate and drank before him what her maid had

prepared for her.

12:20. And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank

exceeding much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.

Silly boy has got a bit carried away, and has passed out on the couch, overcharged with wine:

13:1. And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their

lodgings, and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

13:2. And they were all overcharged with wine.

13:3. And Judith was alone in the chamber.

13:4. But Holofernes lay on his bed, fast asleep, being exceedingly

drunk.

13:5. And Judith spoke to her maid to stand without before the chamber,

and to watch:

13:6. And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion

of her lips in silence,

13:7. Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look

on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise

up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have

purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

13:8. And when she had said this, she went to the pillar that was at his

bed's head, and loosed his sword that hung tied upon it.

13:9. And when she had drawn it out, she took him by the hair of his

head, and said: Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.

13:10. And she struck twice upon his neck, and cut off his head, and

took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body.

He probably never felt a thing... Judith then stuffs his noggin in a bag and decamps back to Jerusalem, and the city is saved.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

2011-09-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a thing for Gothic Revival for many years and still believe that one of the finest examples of the style can be seen in London: the Midland Grand Hotel, George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece on the Euston Road.

Bradley’s book gives the history of the building that along with William Henry Barlow’s trainshed make up St Pancras Station. Now recently reopened as a hotel once again it has had a chequered past; it failed its fire safety inspection in the 1980s and for a long time British Rail were itching to get rid of it. They weren’t alone in their passion for cultural vandalism, the architectural trends of that century were seen as grossly outdated and impractical, even by the 1920s and 30s:

Even P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster got the drift, remarking somewhere that if he knew one thing about the Victorians, it was that they weren’t to be trusted around a pile of bricks and a trowel.

The trainshed is another marvel of its age, a cavernous space created by a single arch roof over the platforms. A stunning feat of engineering, its design is part of the changing drinking history in the capital:

Barlow’s first intention was that the spoil dug out for the tunnel should be used to infill the basement under his elevated platforms. Wiser counsels then suggested that this space would be better turned over to commerce, especially if this could be tied in with the railway’s own goods traffic. As it happened, there was growing demand in London for the fine ales of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, near the heart of the Midland system. The soft water and improved brewing techniques there allowed the production of a clear and stable brew very different from the capital’s darker and cloudier stouts and porters, a change in taste that also contributed to the slow disappearance of pewter tankards from pubs in favour of drinking glasses. The railway had already erected a beer trans-shipment warehouse for Messrs Bass alongside the nearby canal, a structure big enough to provide six acres of storage space: in brewer’s terms, enough for 100,000 thirty-six-gallon barrels; in drinker’s terms, enough for 28,800,000 pints. The huge void beneath the new station platforms, with its deep plan and stable temperature, was ideal for the same purpose and could easily be reached from the track level by means of hydraulic lifts.

Keeping this vast space stocked up with booze was hard work:

Such was the capacity of the new beer cellar that three dedicated trains loaded with casks arrived every day to replenish it, with even more coming in October, the peak month for brewing.

Best of all, the whole structure was purpose built:

The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow’s words, ‘the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measurement upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based.

Who said that the Empire was built on tea?

The Great Game: On Secret Service In High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

2011-09-15T00:35:00.000-07:00

The advantage of an incomplete history degree is that the sense of unfinished business often prompts me to pick up a good history book. Aside from appealing to a sense of autodidactic self improvement, I feel that I’m making up for previous failure, in a small way.

The Great Game is certainly a good place to start for anyone with an interest in the history of Central Asia. The book is a cracking read, full of derring do and high intrigue, but as well as a fascinating story to relate, Hopkirk has the skill to tell it well.

One of the major players in what the Russians described as the tournament of shadows, was Alexander Bokhara Burnes, whose explorations of that desert kingdom made his name. In 1831, he was sent to Lahore to present a gift of horses to Maharajah Ranjit Singh from William IV, a ruse to survey the Indus river while transporting the animals.

Ranjit Singh ruled the kingdom of the Punjab and the British were keen to keep him onside, especially if, as they feared, the Russians were going to start pouring through the Khyber Pass and push them into the Indian Ocean. Burnes charmed the elderly ruler, who appeared to have been quite the bon viveur:

In all, Burnes and his companions were to spend nearly two months as Ranit’s guests. There were endless military parades, banquets, and other entertainments, including long sessions spent imbibing with Ranjit a locally distilled ‘hell-brew’ of which the latter was extremely fond. There was also a troupe of Kashmiri dancing girls, forty in number and all dressed as boys, to whom the one eyed ruler (he had lost the other from smallpox) appeared similarly addicted.

Burnes seemed sorry to leave, although he was sceptical as to how long the old chap would remain on his perch, especially given his penchant for booze:

‘Cunning and conciliation’, Burnes wrote, ‘have been the two great weapons of his diplomacy.’ But how much longer would he remain in power? ‘It is probable’, reported Burnes, ‘that the career of this chief is nearly at an end. His chest is contracted, his back is bent, his limbs withered.’ His nightly drinking bouts, Burnes feared, were more than anyone could take. However, his favourite tipple – ‘more ardent than the strongest brandy’ – appeared to do him no harm. Ranjit Singh was to survive another eight years – greatly to the relief of the Company’s generals, who saw him as a vital link in India’s outer defences, and a formidable ally against a Russian invader.

Ranjit Singh at least made it into old age. Burnes met a sticky end in Kabul in 1841...

Metroland by Julian Barnes

2011-09-08T05:43:00.000-07:00

Growing up during the early 60s in the Middlesex suburbs, Chris and his friend Toni snigger at the Bourgeois world surrounding them and vow never to be that complacent themselves. Their time at City of London School is spent performing épats on unsuspecting shop salesmen and commuters, while wondering about the unsignposted life ahead of them and sex.

Chris later finds himself in Paris in 1968, researching in the Bibleotheque National for a post-grad paper on theatre and avoiding his fellow ex-pats, although his tone is mellowing a little:

I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés around the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.

Lodging in the XIXe arrondissement, he’s at least in possession of a good drinks cupboard:

I was lent a flat up in the Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).

The daily trudge through documents at the library is tiring stuff, and young Chris finds the lure of the nearby hostelries too much to resist:

...exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick vin blanc cassis at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.

And sitting at a chair nearby is a delightful Breton girl reading Lawrence Durrell. He fumbles an introduction, buys her a coffee and gets himself a date. Things with Annick move slowly, as Toni points out in a letter, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair. All in good time, Toni:

When we came out I mentioned, in a formally casual way, the stock of calvados at my place. It’s proximity was known. The flat was as I’d left it, which means as I’d half-arranged it. Reasonably tidy, but not obsessive either way. Books lying open as if in use (some of them were – all the best lies have an alloy of truth). Lighting low and from the corners – for obvious reasons, but also in case some eager, treacherous spot had come into bud during the course of the film. Glasses put away, but rewashed first, and rinsed not dried, so that the calvados wouldn’t have to be drained through its usual bobbing scum of tea-towel.

Chris spends the next few weeks in a haze of sex and French cinema. The relationship ends in tears, of course, and he throws himself into his studies, spending his remaining time in Paris in the booking gloom of the Bib Nat. And what of the riots and protests, les événements de Mai 68? Rien. Chris has missed the lot.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

2011-09-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

Mitchell’s 1999 debut is an episodic musing on the nature of ghosts, a complicated inter-linked set of nine short stories, (starting in Japan just after the nerve-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway and wending their way through revolutionary China, post communist Mongolia, to a future war and artificial intelligence), and an exploration of the concept of free will and choice. The germ of Mitchell’s hugely successful Cloud Atlas appears in Ghostwritten with many of that later novel’s themes and motifs (including a reference to a birthmark shaped like a comet) appearing here first.

By chapter seven, the book finds itself in London, where musician and ghostwriter Marco wakes up in a bed that doesn’t belong to his on-off girlfriend and mother of his child:

My smirking hangover gave me a few moments to make my last requests, and to take in the fact that whoever’s bed this was it wasn’t Poppy’s. Whash! Then it laid into me, armed with a road-surface shatterer. I must have groaned pretty loudly, because the woman next to me rolled over and opened her eyes.

Connections, connections: the lady he has woken up with is the widow of a corrupt Hong Kong trader who died in chapter three, and Marco is about to save the life of a brilliant physicist who is fleeing to an island off the coast of County Cork in chapter eight... He’s blissfully unaware of this, of course, and is trying to piece together what happened to him the night before:

I’d been at the private view on Curzon Street. Oil paintings by some artist friend of Rohan’s, Mudgeon or Pigeon or Smudgeon or something. This redhead had come up to me then, and we’d done the old quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks. Then – a taxi – a wine bar on Shaftesbury Avenue – then another taxi – that would be most of my money gone – and then another wine bar on Upper Street. Then to here, though how was anyone’s guess. What was her name... A little nest of tissues and condoms down my side of the bed, and a bottle of red wine with almost nothing in it, but 1982 on the label. Why do the best things happen when I’m too pissed to remember them?

Shown the door by his one-night-stand, Marco makes tracks to the subject matter of his book, an old spy who was part of a ring of double agents after the war. Hanging around long enough to hear a ghost story, he’s given the bum’s rush again when his host hears that a friend has died in St Petersburg. (We the reader have been aware of the man’s demise for at least twenty pages now...) Oh well, off to the literary agent, the well-to-do Tim Cavendish:

Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray and a copy of A-Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and The Racing Post.

He entertains Marco long enough to ladle him out a snort of whisky and explain that the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting before the phone rings with news that Cavendish’s brother has found himself financially embarrassed in Hong Kong and the proposed book is almost certainly off...

Dead Simple by Peter James

2011-08-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

I have harboured a lifelong mistrust of stag nights and reading Peter James Brighton based crime novel hasn’t exactly made me change my mind. Detective Superintendant Roy Grace finds himself investigating the aftermath of a particularly messy night out which has left four men dead and one missing.

The stag and his mates have started the evening off with a pub crawl and a fairly bibulous one at that. Still, at least they’ve had the sense to keep a designated driver, Rob:

With three pubs notched up already in the past hour and a half, and four more on the itinerary, he was sticking to shandy. At least, that head been his intention; but he’d managed to slip down a couple of pints of pure Harvey’s bitter – to clear his head for the task of driving, he’d said.

In the back of the van, the stag, Michael, is blissfully unaware that his friends are up to no good and that there might be mischief afoot:

Michael, lolling on a tartan rug on the floor in the back of the van, was feeling very pleasantly woozy. “I sh’ink I need another drink,” he slurred. If he’d had his wits about him, he might have sensed, from the expressions of his friends, that something was not quite right. Never usually much of a heavy drinker, tonight he’d parked his brains in the dregs of more empty pint glasses and vodka chasers than he could remember downing, in more pubs than had been sensible to visit.

The stag night gag is that his mates have procured a coffin, which Michael gets put into and buried alive in a hole in the Ashdown Forest. The scamps! He won’t be there for long as they’ll only be going to another pub for an hour or so before letting him out, and they’ve left him a flashlight, a walkie-talkie, some porn and a bottle of scotch...

Unfortunately, Michael’s charming friends meet with a bit of an accident on their way to the next watering hole and in a scene straight out of a ‘don’t drink and drive’ campaign, plough straight into the front of a cement truck, killing them instantly. Michael is going to be down there a bit longer than anticipated:

He was desperate for water, his mouth arid and furry. Had they left him any water? He lifted his neck up just the few inches that were available before his head struck the lid, saw the glint of the bottle, reached own. Famous Grouse whisky. Disappointed, he broke the seal, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. For a moment just the sensation of liquid felt like balm in his mouth; then it turned to fire, burning his mouth, then his gullet. But almost instantly after that he felt a little better. He took another swig. Felt a little better still, and took a third, long swig before he replaced the cap.

After a couple of days, it’s getting obvious that his friends aren’t coming back, so Michael starts to dig himself out with the only tool he has:

He picked up the whisky bottle. Still a third of its contents left. He struck the top of the bottle hard against the wood above him. Nothing happened. He tried again, heard a dull thud. A tiny sliver of glass sheared off. Tragic to waste it. He put the neck into his mouth, tilted it, swallowed a mouthful of the burning liquid. God, it tasted good, so good. He lay back, up-ended the bottle into his mouth and let it pour in, swallowing, swallowing, swallowing until he choked.

Having to dig yourself out of a coffin with a broken bottle sounds bad enough, but things are about to get a lot more complicated for investigating officer Grace, and a lot worse for Michael, who is definitely not going to make it to the church on time...

Trespass by Rose Tremain

2011-08-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

Dark goings on in the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. Rose Tremains’s novel Trespass examines the dark heart of two sibling relationships: Audrun and Aramon Lunel, living next door to each other in mutual antipathy; and Anthony and Veronica Verey, a writer and a failed antiques dealer who is looking for a new life in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc.

Audrun has put up with her violent and abusive alcoholic brother for her whole life but is secretly hoping that his health is finally going to fail him. Banished from the family home, an imposing mas on the side of a hill, she lives in a tiny bungalow on the edge of his land. Aramon lives in filth in the old house, permanently sloshed and surrounded by a fug of cigarette smoke:

She would see the strip-light blink on in the kitchen of the mas – that old green-tinged rod of light – and picture her brother stumbling to and from the electric stove, trying to fry lardons, gulping from his glass of red wine, dropping ash from his cigarette into the fat of the frying pan, picking up the bottle and drinking from that, his stubbled face wearing that fatuous grin it acquired when the wine excited his senses. Then, with a shaking hand, he’d try to eat the burnt lardons and a burnt fried egg, spooning everything in, with another cigarette smouldering on a saucer and outside in the dark the dogs in their wire pound howling because he’d forgotten to feed them... Upstairs he lived in grime. Wore his clothes until they stank, then hung them at the window to wash themselves in the rain, air themselves in the sun. And he was proud of this. Proud of his ‘ingenuity’. Proud of the strangest things. Proud that the father, Serge, had named him after a variety of grape.

Hoping to inherit the mas that she believes is rightly hers when her drunken brother pops his clogs, Audrun’s plans go distinctly awry when Anthony Verey is shown around by a local estate agent who has promised Aramon a price of several hundred thousand Euros for the family pile. Unfortunately, Audrun’s shack is spoiling the view and Anthony loses interest. Furious, Aramon comes down the hill to remonstrate. He is suitably fortified for any encounter with his sister:

He was drunk on pastis. His gaze looped and swivelled all around him. The sun beat down on his wild head.

He then makes a few wild threats before throwing up on Audrun’s freshly cut lawn. She refuses to budge... Watching his dream of impossible wealth slip away from him, Aramon dwells on the terrible deeds in his past and the unspeaking things he did to his sister:

He drank because of the weight of things. More and more, the alcohol was making him ill, he knew this, but he couldn’t find a substitute, any other way of sliding out from underneath the slab of memories that tried to crush him, crush him with guilt and with love the could never express.

He’s drinking himself into the grave and his body is protesting every inch of the way:

Aramon walked slowly, painfully back to the Mas Lunel. His feet hurt all the time. There was an ache in his hip. His gut churned with some kind of distress that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite sickness, but a mortal unease he couldn’t identify.

Still, if he thinks he’s got problems now, it’s going to get a whole lot worse when Anthony Verey disappears...

Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

2011-08-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

Notionally a work of fiction, but peppered with a hefty amount of travel writing, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi is a contemplation of life, love and enlightenment in the titular cities.

Jeff, a middle aged freelance journalist, has been sent to Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale for the magazine Kultchur. He meets up at the airport with the familiar crowd of hacks and arty types, who already getting stuck into the drink before the horrors of their budget flight:

It was like being on a school trip, organized by the art teacher and part-funded by a range of sympathetic breweries.

He’s ostensibly there to do an interview and cover the event, but things never entirely work out as planned:

That was the thing about the Biennale: it was a definitive experience, absolutely fixed, subject only to insignificant individual variation. You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

As the group lurch from a free party to a bar, Jeff feels the artistic atmosphere beginning to rub off on him:

In the bar, waiting to get served, Jeff decided that, following the example of Tracy Emin’s Everyone she’d ever slept with tent, if he were an artist he would build a one-to-one scale model of all the booze he’d ever poured down his gullet. Beer, wine, champagne, cider, the lot. Christ, he’d need a gallery the size of an aircraft hanger just for the beer: the pints, the tins, the bottles. It would be a portrait not simply of his life but of his era. Some of the brands he’d started out with had since disappeared: Tartan, Double Diamond, Trophy, the inaptly named Long Life. And it would be international too; not just the domestic beers, but the ones you swilled when abroad – Peroni, for example, five of which he order from the busy barman.

Better than that, he meets a beautiful American lady called Laura, and he contrives to make sure their paths cross again. Even so, there are still artworks to view, interviews to conduct (badly) and parties to attend:

Inside, everyone was belting back bellinis as usual. The waiters were struggling to cope with the insatiable demand for bellinis. There was barely room to move and around the drinks table it was mayhem. Jeff had got it into his head that risotto has been promised. He assumed that he’d got this idea from the invite, but there was no mention of it there and, at present, no risotto was in evidence. In view of the numbers, producing risotto was an absurdly ambitious and labour-intensive undertaking, but it seemed that Jeff was not alone in expecting risotto. The risotto and its potential non-appearance was, in fact, the chief topic of conversation in the garden. People were counting on risotto to line their stomachs; a lack of risotto would have a significant impact on their ability to belt back bellinis.

Perhaps because of the lack of blotting paper, everyone seems more pissed than usual. Conversation gets increasingly complicated:

You could say anything at this point in the evening. It didn’t have to make sense and you didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish what they were saying before you said it, but, by the same token, no one had to listen to what you were saying, or wait for you to finish saying what you were saying. “Constable–,” said a woman Jeff didn’t recognise, but that was as far as she got because the Kaiser was saying, “There’s only one artist in the Biennale I care about.” Unusually, there was a pause as everyone waited for the result of this declaration. “Bellini!” he said, raising a glass in acknowledgement of the enthusiastic applause with which this remark was endorsed.

The evening is not entirely wasted as Jeff and Laura end up going back to the same hotel, and the rest of his stay in Venice is spent in a trance of athletic sex, endless bellinis, cocaine and art. The last day comes all to quickly and they say goodbye, promising to meet again but not exchanging numbers. Jeff wanders slightly shell shocked into the bar where they first met and tries to order a drink:

The bar was open, but quite deserted. Even taking into account the fact that it was a Sunday afternoon, it was surprisingly empty. Staff were stacking chairs on tables. It had the look of a place that had been looted. “What’s happened?” Jeff asked. “We run out.” “Ran out of what?” “Drink.” “You mean there’s nothing left to drink?” “Si, nothing.” “Nothing?” “Niente. Is all gone. Beer, wine, whisky. Finito.” He seemed exhausted, proud, amazed and a little appalled by what had occurred. He had, evidently, never experienced anything like this. Or expected it. If an English football team had been playing in Venice, then he might reasonably have assumed there would be a huge demand for booze, but he had seriously underestimated the insatiable thirst of the international art crowd.

After all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that the second section, set in Varanasi, is the more contemplative part of the book...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

2011-08-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

A meditation on fate, a surreal journalistic account of an honour killing and a visceral account of the booze fuelled murder itself, Chronicle of a Death Foretold has been my introduction to the writing of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez.

The plot itself concerns the killing of Santiago Nasar outside his house. Named by a bride rejected by her husband as the man who took her virginity, her twin brothers butcher him outside his house the morning after the ill fated wedding. The narrator, investigating the crime nearly thirty years later, discovers that although everyone in the town knew that the brothers were going to kill Santiago Nasar, the event itself could not be stopped. Even the victim, waking up with a hangover from the wedding, has a faint inkling that things might be awry, although he misinterprets his bad dreams:

Nor did Santiago Nasar recognize the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup on his palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that had gone on until after midnight.

He gets up, leaves the house and walks past his executioners:

That morning they were still wearing their dark wedding suits, too heavy and formal for the Caribbean, and they looked devastated by so many hours of bad living, but they’d done their duty and shaved. Although they hadn’t stopped drinking since the eve of the wedding, they weren’t drunk at the end of three days, but they looked, rather, like insomniac sleepwalkers.

It has, by all accounts been quite a hooley:

He recounted that 205 cases of contraband alcohol had been consumed and almost two thousand bottles of cane liquor, which had been distributed among the crowd. There wasn’t a single person, rich or poor, who hadn’t participated in some way in the wildest party the town had ever seen.

As the narrator recounts the details of the story from what the surviving witnesses can tell him, he realises that small pockets of resistance have occurred here and there. The police chief takes the twins’ knives away from them, believing their threats to be drunken bravado. The twins themselves make sure to tell everyone they meet their intentions, but are unable to make anyone stop them. The lady at the local bar gives them more drink, in attempt to make them incapable of action:

The Vicario brothers came in a four-ten. At that time the only things to eat were sold, but Clotilde Armenta sold them a bottle of cane liquor, not only because of the high regard she had for them but also because she was very grateful for the piece of wedding cake they had sent her. They drank down the whole bottle in two long swigs, but they remained stolid. “They were stunned,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “and they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up even with lamp oil.” Then they took off their cloth jackets, hung them carefully on the chair backs, and asked her for another bottle.

Over-fortified and doomed to avenge their sister, the twins inexorably go about their duty and Santiago Nasar is hacked down at his front door. Like the hangover on the morning after, some things in life are just inescapable...

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

2011-07-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

One of the most beautiful and haunting novellas of the twentieth century, Death in Venice is the tale of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famed German writer, who while holidaying in Venice falls impossibly in love with an entirely beautiful Polish youth called Tazdio, and remains in the city because of him, succumbing to cholera at the end.

Of course, it’s about a lot more than that. Mann’s text is about the conflict between reason and passion, the muse of art and the concept of beauty itself. There’s not much by the way of drinking, I can hardly imagine Aschenbach tipping back the proseco, but in a awkward moment at the beginning of the story, he comes across an old man, fraternising with a bunch of Adriatic youths on a the boat to Venice. The man wears a wig and dyes his beard to look young, which Aschenbach finds distasteful. The lads have all got tanked up on sparkling wine and are full of vim and bon viveur. The old boy can’t take his drink though, and is simply pissed:

The youths of Pola, perhaps also drawn to the military trumpet signals that echoed over the waters, had come on deck, and, enthusiastic from the Asti they had drunken, they cheered the Bersaglieri who were being drilled there. But it was repugnant to witness the state into which his faux communion with youth had brought the overdressed old man. His old and faded brain had not been able to resist the liquor to the same degree as the real youths, he was hopelessly drunk. Looking stupidly around, a cigarette between his trembling fingers, he swayed, barely able to keep his balance, pulled to and fro by his intoxication. Because he would have fallen down at the very first step, he did not dare to move, yet still displayed a sorry cockiness, holding on to everyone who approached him, speaking with a slur, winking, giggling, raising his ringed and wrinkled index finger to tease ridiculously, and licking the corners of his mouth in the most distastefully ambiguous manner. Aschenbach watched him with an expression of anger, and again he got a feeling of unreality, as if the world showed a small but definite tendency to slip into the peculiar and grotesque; a sensation which the resumption of the pounding work of the engine kept him from exploring fully, as the ship returned to its course through the San Marco canal.

Worse still, the old coot wants to speak to him:

He is unable to descend, as his trunk is taken with great effort down the ladder-like stairs. So he cannot get away for several minutes from the intrusiveness of the ghastly old man, who is compelled by his drunkenness to bid the foreigner good-bye. “We are wishing a most enjoyable stay. One hopes to be remembered well! Au revoir, excusez and bonjour, Your Excellency!” His mouth is watering, he winks, licks the corners of his mouth and the dyed moustache on his lips is ruffed up. “Our compliments,” he continues with two fingertips at his mouth, “our compliments to your sweetheart, the most lovely and beautiful sweetheart...” And suddenly the upper row of his false teeth drops onto his tongue. Aschenbach was able to escape. “To your sweetheart, the most pretty sweetheart,” he heard in hollow and somewhat obstructed speech behind his back while he descended the ladder.

Repelled, Aschenbach is glad to be shot of him, little thinking that in a few week’s time, and desperately stalking the beautiful Tazdio, he will also dye his hair and paint his face in a effort to recapture lost youth...

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

2011-07-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker prize The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, son of a rickshaw puller and chauffer to his rich village landlord, who was born in the rural darkness of India, but his dream is to escape into the light of riches and freedom.

Narrating his story in a long rambling missive to Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Balram sketches out the humble background of a half-baked Indian, taken out of school to work in the local tea shop, locked in the great chicken coop of a society that keeps the poor enslaved.

His luck starts to change when he gets a job as a chauffer, a role that also involves washing his master’s bad feet, looking after two small dogs and getting sent out on errands:

At least once a week, around six o’clock, Ram Persad and I left the house and went down the main road, until we got to a store with a sign that said: ‘Jackpot’ English Liquor Shop. Indian-Made Foreign Liquor Sold Here. I should explain to you, Mr Jiabao, that in this country we have two kinds of men: ‘Indian’ liquor men and ‘English’ liquor men. ‘Indian’ liquor was for village boys like me – toddy, arrack, country hooch. ‘English’ liquor, naturally, is for the rich. Rum, whisky, beer, gin – anything the English left behind... Coloured bottles of various sizes were stacked up on the Jackpot’s shelves, and two teenagers behind the counter struggled to take orders from the men shouting at them. On the white wall to the side of the shop, there were hundreds of names of liquor brands, written in dripping red paint and subdivided into five categories, Beer, Rum, Whisky, Gin and Vodka.

Passed on to look after his employer’s son Ashok, who has come back from America with a new wife, Pinky Madam, Balram moves from Dhanbad to Delhi, where he lives in the cockroach infested basement while his new boss lives in a plush apartment in the tower block above. As American born Pinky realises that Ashok isn’t going to take her back to the US, the marriage collapses, and Ashok hits the sauce. It’s the chauffeur’s job to clean up the mess:

“Stop the car,” he said. He opened the door of the car, put his hand on his stomach, bent down, and threw up on the ground. I wiped his mouth with my hand and helped him sit down by the side of the road. The traffic roared past us. I patted his back. “You’re drinking too much, sir.” “Why do men drink, Balram?” “I don’t know, sir.” “Of course, in your caste you don’t... Let me tell you, Balram. Men drink because they are sick of life. I thought caste and religion didn’t matter any longer in today’s world. My father said, ‘No, don’t marry her, she’s of another...’ I...” Mr Ashok turned his head to the side, and I rubbed his back, thinking he might throw up again, but the spasm passed. “Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what’s the point of living. I really wonder...” The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who’s going to pay me three and half thousand rupees a month?

Balram realises that he has to make his move in the ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor and turns on the hopeless Ashok. An empty bottle of Scotch provides the perfect murder weapon:

I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It’s a good, strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black – well worth its resale value.

Balram finishes his visceral account of 21st century India as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, running a taxi firm funded by stolen money. He has finally made the transition from darkness to light...

Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall by Luke Haines

2011-07-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

I picked up this autobiographic tome on a recommendation, without any particular interest in the music scene in the title, or having knowingly listened to a single note by Haines’s group The Auteurs. I finished it sharing his disdain for his contemporary musicians and quoting sections of the book to anyone unlucky enough to get in my way. I even listened to a couple of his songs as well...

Haines starts his story in a band called The Servants whose career fizzled out in the beginning of the 90s. He’s been in the group a few years and likes a drink, although he’s nearly put off the sauce for good after a particularly bad experience on red wine one day:

On a dreary Tuesday autumn afternoon I line up three bottles of red wine. Three bullets, each with my name on. Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. I down the bottles in just over two hours. I could probably do more but I’m wearier that usual. I pass out on the couch. I dream about red. Swathes of crimson red. I am Isadora Duncan, in a red car, on a red road, with a red sky, and a red scarf caught in a red wheel tightening around my neck. My long skinny dancer’s neck. I’m thrown out of a feverish sleep by the need to vomit. Blood. Throwing up fucking blood. I am by nature a hypochondriac, but to have an irrational fear of death turn into the actual possibility of dying is quite something. Without too much prompting I see a scornful doctor. A severe eastern European lady of retirement age prods at my sides and back. Tuts and shakes her head. Dispassionately she tells me what I already know. That I most probably have serious liver damage. (Tests conform this.) All self inflicted. Give up drinking and smoking. Or die.

Faced with sobriety, Haines gets some solid songwriting under his belt and starts a new band which eventually becomes The Auteurs. The diagnosis of liver damage proves to be wildly inaccurate, allowing him to go back onto the booze, while The Auteurs start to pick up some interest from the music business, and end up lumped together with various chippy Britpop bands. After a couple of successful(ish) years, Haines recalls their nomination for the 1993 Mercury Music prize. He starts the show as he means to go on:

I am already drunk by the time I arrive at Grosvenor House, which is a good start as it is my intention to get colossally drunk this evening.

Just as well that Suede win instead... The evening, already going badly, gets steadily worse. Haines and his friends are

...led upstairs to a private suite in the Grosvenor. It’s the usual bullshit. Cocaine, champagne. More cocaine, more champagne. I fall into a table of glasses generously filled with Perrier Jouët. I have achieved optimum inebriation and am acting like a peasant. Alice is trying to coax me out of the suite. Even Vinall, in his advanced state, knows I am falling apart. The lance corporal makes one final obsequious remark and l let fly. Haymaker. Unlucky sunshine. I am too drunk to connect. Instead my fist goes through a glass panel about three feet wide of my intended target.

Despite the boozy self destruction, the bouts of rage and megalomania and the drug taking, The Auteurs manage three respectable albums before things go totally pear shaped. Haines, like Mark E. Smith, is an unrepentant tippler, and also much prefers alcohol to other substances:

Alcohol became my drug of choice. I’m a good drunk – one of the best you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet. Uncle Lou [Reed] also knew about the booze when he wrote ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’. Booze is my muse. During the mid-90s the Britpop horde devoured the class As like hungry peasants at the eat-as-much-as-you-can meal deal. Really, some of the most unlikely sorts got Dequinceyed up to the gills. Proof, if ever it were needed, that heroin does not always unleash the dark creative beast.

Still, all good things come to an end, and the Auteurs finally disintegrate into an ugly mess of missed tour dates and recriminations. Still, there’s a fine body of work that’s aged a lot better than most of the tosh that was playing during the mid-90s, and by the end of the book, Haines is making music again, (although nothing that he can persuade anyone to buy...) this time with a man who wants to reintroduce absinthe to the UK:

...the potent wormwood spirit that helped turn the French army myopic during the First World War...

I’m rather looking forward to the threatened second volume of memoirs.

Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris

2011-07-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

Years ago I had Harris’s novel Chocolat foisted on me in a reading group, an experience that didn’t exactly enamour me to her work. I think one of my more charitable comments was that it was ‘bad art’, so when a friend passed me a copy of Gentlemen & Players, I regarded it with a certain amount of suspicion. I was wrong to do so. It’s brilliant.

St Oswalds, a well established boy’s grammar in the North of England, has just started its new term. Roy Straitley, the eccentric Classics master, fond of a medicinal sherry, and last of a dying breed holding out against the inexorable march towards Information Technology, computer science and email, is reaching his sixty fifth birthday and is reluctantly facing retirement. But before Straitley can receive his carriage clock, the school is going to undergo a crisis that may well destroy it.

One of the term’s new intake of teachers is the poisonous ‘Mole’ who has a very nasty grudge against St Oswalds and who will stop at nothing to get revenge. Small acts of theft, suspicion planted in the minds of teachers and students; Mole starts small, but is working up to bigger things:

I celebrated my first week with a bottle of champagne. It’s still very early in the game, of course, but I have already sown a good number of my poison seeds, and this is just the beginning.

Soon enough, Mole has poisoned a pupil, caused the porter to be dismissed for selling cigarettes to the boys, raised merry hell with the local press and has indirectly caused Straitley to have a small heart attack (a scene that is so wickedly funny that I forever forgave Harris Chocolat...). Slipping into the teachers’ local after another act of sabotage, Mole spots several of the staff, including the thuggish sports master, Light, drinking with some of the boys:

And so I went home to my chintz-hung room, opened my second bottle of champagne, (I have a case of six, and I mean to see them all empty by Christmas), caught up with a little essential correspondence, then went down to the payphone outside and made a quick call to the local police, reporting a black Probe (registration LIT 3) driving erratically in the vicinity of the Thirsty Scholar. It’s the sort of behaviour my therapist tends to discourage nowadays. I’m too impulsive, or so she says; too judgemental. I don’t always consider the feelings of others as I should. But there was no risk to me; I did not give my name, and in any case – you know he deserved it. Like Mr Bray, Light is a braggart; a bully; a naturally rule-breaker; a man who genuinely believes that a few pints under his belt makes him a better driver.

By the time Mole’s plan is in full swing a large portion of the masters common room are under police investigation, a boy is missing, parents are withdrawing their children from St Oswalds and the head is refusing to answer calls:

All things considered, a nice little piece of anti-social engineering. I say it myself (because no one else can), but actually I’m very pleased with the way things have worked out. Remains one small, unfinished piece of business, and I plan to deal with that tonight, at the Community bonfire. After that I can afford to celebrate, and I will; there’s a bottle of champagne with Straitley’s name on it, and I mean to open it tonight.

It’s time for the endgame, when Mole’s identity will be revealed to Straitley, that is if he can last to the end of the night without a final, fatal, cardiac arrest...

Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

2011-06-30T01:14:00.000-07:00

Reading Renegade is a bit like being locked in a bar with its subject, a man described on the fly leaf as equal parts Johnny Cash, Brian Clough and the classic British pub contrarian with rather too much on his mind. It starts with a good old fashioned rant about former members of his band, The Fall, pauses for biographical notes about Smith and his life in Manchester and Salford, before carrying on in a stream of cantankerous grumbling about the state of the nation, the North, issues about drinking and a potted history of his music. Rambling yes, but never dull.

Smith, known for liking a drink or too, describes getting into LSD as a teenager in an attempt to avoid the drink of choice of his young contemporaries; bottles of booze purloined from parental sideboards:

If anything, I was doing acid to get away from the cider clubs and the sherry clubs. Kids of about fourteen used to nick their mam’s ‘British Sherry’ and be sick all over the house. You could tell where they lived by the drink and vomit stains on the carpet.

After leaving school and working at the docks in Salford, Smith formed The Fall, one of Britain’s most exciting and unpredictable avante garde rock groups, or a noisy racket, depending on your point of view. Smith’s song writing is a combination of distinctive wordplay and characterisation built from the experience of his native North West. Drink plays its part:

The problems started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque. I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.

The Fall are one of the more prolific bands in the country and have toured and recorded relentlessly since the 70s. Smith’s trip to Iceland where they record Hex Enduction Hour included a gig where about a third of the island’s youth came to see them (he apologises for almost certainly having brought about Björk and the Sugarcubes) and copious amounts of the local hooch:

We recorded parts of it in Iceland, which was a very inaccessible place at the time, totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps. I remember firing into it one day and night. I thought my legs had been stolen afterwards.

Continually messed around by hopeless record labels and enjoying a strained relationship with other band members (Smith has sacked over forty musicians over the years) things take a turn for the worse when he divorces his wife (and fellow band member...) Brix. He moves to Edinburgh, which introduces him to whisky:

I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well.

As the 90s progressed, the already uncompromising Smith started getting a reputation as a drunk who should keep of the sauce before the gig:

What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, “Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.” It’s written into the contract – “Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.” I’d rather have it upfront... To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink. The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing is with me, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

He remarks that a lot of people who complain about his drinking are taking copious amounts of other substances as well. Stick to drink, he says:

At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

The boozy nadir is a fight with the band in New York when he is convicted of a drunken assault:

The bottom end of it was that the New York court said I had to go on this alcohol programme, twice a week for six weeks in Bury. But the staff there seemed to have more problems than I had. I didn’t have any problems, to be quite honest. I don’t think I did.

It’s a self justification, but it works for him. Anyway, there’s a method in the madness:

It’s sort of good for me, though, this idea that I’m a mad drunk. It makes people frightened of me.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

2011-06-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

A truly disturbing novel about the eponymous alcoholic, sexually incontinent beauty product salesman, The Death of Bunny Munro is also gloriously funny, usually in the most inappropriate ways. At the heart of the novel is a demented road trip along England’s south coast, taken with his son, Bunny Junior. He sets out with the vague intention of showing the boy the tricks of the salesman’s trade, but the true goal of their quest is Bunny’s corrupted soul.

The novel starts with Bunny in a shabby hotel room in Brighton, pissed on the contents of the mini-bar and awaiting a prostitute. He is also on the phone to his wife, Libby:

“I am damned,” thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. He feels that somewhere down the line he has made a grave mistake, but this realisation passes in a dreadful heartbeat, and is gone – leaving him in a room at the Grenville Hotel, in his underwear, with nothing but himself and his appetites. He closes his eyes and pictures a random vagina, then sits on the edge of the hotel bed and, in slow motion, leans back against the quilted headboard. He clamps the mobile phone under his chin and with his teeth breaks the seal on a miniature bottle of brandy. He empties the bottle down his throat, lobs it across the room, then shudders and gags and says into the phone, “Don’t worry, love, everything’s going to be all right.”

It’s clear that he’s in a bad way, even more obvious when he wakes in the small hours, the booze wearing off;

Bunny stumbles in the dark, groping along the bathroom wall for the light switch. It is somewhere in those dead hours, the threes and fours, and the prostitute has been paid and packed off. Bunny is alone and awake and a mammoth hangover finds him on a terrifying mission for the sleeping pills. He thinks he may have left the in the bathroom and hopes the hooker didn’t find them. He locates the switch and fluorescent tubes buzz and hum awake. Bunny moves towards the mirror and its merciless light and despite the hot, toxic throb of his hangover – the dry, foul mouth, the boiled skin, blood-brown eyes and his demolished quiff – he is not displeased with what greets him.

Complaining that his head feels like someone actually dropped the mini-bar on it, Bunny heads home the next day to discover that ten years of philandering and sexual misdemeanour on his part have finally driven poor Libby over the edge and she’s committed suicide.

Left alone with Bunny Junior, Bunny hits the bottle:

Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass. He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again.

...and the satellite porn...

Unable to palm his son off on his in-laws he takes him on the road. Bunny’s death is inevitable, but will the boy be able to help his dad find redemption before it’s too late? By the looks of things so far, he’ll have his work cut out.

Abandoned by Anya Peters

2011-06-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

Peters’s disturbing memoir is easy to pigeonhole, and I confess that it isn’t the sort of book that I would normally read. It’s an account of a spectacularly miserable childhood of a little girl adopted by her aunt, a woman she always sees as her Mummy, into the violent household she shares with an unpredictable, drunken bully.

Alcohol, predictably, plays a part in the sorry saga. ‘Daddy’, her uncle, is frequently intoxicated, and drunkenly berates Anya, shouting that she doesn’t belong in the house with the rest of the children:

It’s what Daddy is always saying, screaming it out week after week in drunken arguments. “She’s not wanted here, right! She doesn’t belong here... They dumped her over here with you because they didn’t want her over there and she’s not wanted here either. I want her out,” he says snapping open another beer, “She doesn’t belong here.”

Mummy does her best to stick up for Anya, but succumbs to the bottle as well:

“Don’t worry about me,” she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. “I’m as tough as old boots, me.” But she wasn’t; thought neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim. Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream an pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be.

The constant abuse, often physical, progresses into sexual abuse. Anya’s uncle is eventually arrested for his crimes and sent to prison. Anya and her aunt temporarily move to the home of another daughter, but the effect on both of them has been terrible. Anya’s mother is nearly catatonic and drinking heavily again:

During the day, indoors, she sat in the front room with the curtains drawn watching TV, living on Silk Cut and milky tea and her nerves. When she passed me to go to the bathroom one morning after getting a postcard from the boys asking when she was coming home, I smelt drink on her breath.

Despite all these terrible events, Anya manages to pass her A-Levels and qualifies as a lawyer. Unfortunately, her self esteem is badly damaged by her past, and she finds herself in another abusive relationship. She ends up sleeping in her car in Brighton and London, finally breaking away from the spiral of despair by writing her story in a blog which eventually became this book.

Even after all the horrible things that happened to her, Peters shows a lack of rancour and a forgiveness that is humbling. I’m glad I read it for that, but I don’t think it’s an area I’ll investigate again.

Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts by Claudia Roden

2011-06-09T00:05:00.000-07:00

I believe that food writing, when done well, can be just as emotive and inspiring as any other form of literature. I have already covered Elizabeth David, although I am much better acquinted with Claudia Roden’s recipes (her red lentil soup is a favourite) and this recent acquisition on picnics is a gem.

Picnics are as much an excuse for a few drinks as they are for unwrapping sandwiches out of acres of Bacofoil and peeling hardboiled eggs. The natural choice is wine:

One tries to simplify things outdoors and I am quite happy to wash down pies and cold meats, vegetables and desserts with one wine only. But for the dedicated drinkers who believe like Brillat-Savarin that ‘the palate becomes cloyed and after three or four glasses, it is but a deadened sensation that even the best wine provokes’, it is right to offer two. Have a light refreshing white, commended by Savarin as ‘less affected by movement and heat and more pleasantly exhilarating’, which you can carry chilled in a refrigerated box or keep cool in the river, and a hearty stout red wine which cannot be unduly harmed by the journey, or a rosé, which is said to be particularly delicious by the sea. Serve straight-forward and relatively inexpensive wines. They will taste better on a picnic, while the fine aged ones are too delicate for rough outdoor handling and will be overpowered by all the competing perfumes of nature.

Not everyone drinks wine though:

If you are not having wine, it is well known that Englishmen are happy with good beer and women with good cider and that beer mixed with Stone’s ginger wine makes Shandy Gaff. And, of course, there is nothing as grand as a champagne picnic.

Which leads us to her champagne menu for Glyndebourne:

Indeed there can be few delights to compare with the pleasures of an elegantly chosen meal taken by one of the lakes, while watching the sun go down with the second half of Mozart still to come. People travel in evening dress... They leave their hampers in a favourite spot in the gardens, sometimes with the champagne bottle left to cool in the lake, tethered to a tree, until the interval.

I feel stirred to dig out the dinner jacket and go along myself, if I could actually afford the ticket. Nevermind, the next picnic will be enjoyed with a bottle of something chilled in the River Wey and with a couple of sonatas brought along for playing on the Victrola.

In The Woods by Tana French

2011-06-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

I seem to be reading more crime fiction lately; not necessarily a bad thing. The genre relies heavily on strong plot and characterisation, tools of writing that always bear further study. There’s often a lot of booze as well...

French’s debut is written through the eyes of Dublin DI Rob Ryan, a man who admits at the start of the book that he tells lies, a man who is also falling apart under the weight of his own past. More than partial to drinking solitary vodka, he keeps a private stash in his room:

I poured myself a drink – I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books...

Working on a case involving a murdered child, Ryan is getting too close for comfort to his detective partner, Cassie Maddox, and when it transpires that the body has been found in the same wood where two of his childhood friends disappeared over twenty years before, he finally loses his grip on reality. After nearly punching a suspect during an interview, he decides that the best thing to do is get drunk.

I got drunk that night, banjoed drunk, drunker than I’d been in about fifteen years. I spent half the night sitting on the bathroom floor, staring glassily at the toilet and wishing I could just throw up and get it over with. The edges of my vision pulsed sickeningly with every heartbeat, and the shadows in the corners flicked and throbbed and contorted themselves into spiky, nasty little crawling things that were gone in the next blink. Finally I realised that, while the nausea showed now signs of getting better, it probably wasn’t going to get any worse. I staggered into my room and fell asleep on the covers without taking off my clothes.

It goes downhill from here for Ryan and his subsequent flashback in the woods brings about a near breakdown. He finishes the book in professional and personal torment and the bottle seems to be his only friend:

I....locked myself in my room and drank vodka, slowly and purposefully, until four in the morning.

French’s characters are the strongest part of the book, and in Rob Ryan she gives us a palpable examination of a troubled soul.

I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine by Roger Scruton

2011-05-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

I’m slowing devouring this between other books, taking in a chapter or so at a time. Describing itself as a good-humoured antidote to the pretentious clap-trap that is written about wine today it’s a brilliant meditation on the philosophical pleasures attendant to wine. Provided you’re drinking the right stuff, of course.

Scruton appears to be a stickler for terroir. From very early on in his wine drinking career, he took it upon himself to investigate wine through the hallowed names that adorn the labels. All French, of course:

I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in-other soils and blessed with other place-names, would produce a similar effect. From the moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil.

The problem is that as wine has become more available, the consumer has become a little less demanding:

But the concept of terroir has now become highly controversial, as more and more people follow the path to perdition that I trod those forty-five years ago. Poetry, history, the calendar of saints, the suffering of martyrs – such things are less important to the newly flush generation of winos than they were to us lower-middle class pioneers. Today’s pagan drinkers are in search of the uniform, the reliable and the easily remembered. As for where the wine comes from, what does it matter, so long as it tastes OK? Hence the tendency to classify wines in terms of the brand and the grape varietal, either ignoring the soil entirely, or including it under some geological category like chalk, clay, marl or gravel. In short, the new experience of wine is that of drinking the fermented juice of a grape.

Oh dear, guilty as charged at 120 Units. Scruton is emphatic about the importance of terroir:

There in the glass was the soil of a place, and in that soil was a soul.

He illustrates his point by quoting Napoleon:

“Nothing makes the future so rosy,” Napoleon remarked, “as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin”, and we instantly respond to the sentiment. But suppose he had said, “nothing makes the future so rosy, as to contemplate it through a glass of Pinot Noir”? The word ‘contemplate’ would have lost its resonance, and the remark, no longer associating the greatest risk-taker of his day with a tranquil plot of earth in Burgundy, would have been flushed clean of its pathos and its spiritual truth.

And for all my dalliances and flirtations with Chilean Merlot and Bulgarian Cab Sauv, I have to admit that he’s right.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2011-05-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

David Mitchell’s doorstoppers seem to be the staple of book groups in recent years. I read The Cloud Atlas for one, and have now read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet for a second. Both books are sprawling and overwritten, funny and profound, dazzling in places and just plain confusing in others, but I haven’t regretted picking up either of them.

The Thousand Years of Jacob de Zoet follows the eponymous Zeeland clerk who has come to the Dutch concession port of Dejima in Japan to win his fortune. The port is a manmade island in Nagasaki bay; entry into Japan is strictly forbidden for most foreigners and the country itself is closed. Christianity is outlawed, even for visiting traders from Europe. In one of the books wonderful vignettes, the Dutch pretend that they’re celebrating New Year when in fact they’re having a Christmas meal:

It is understood by the ranked interpreters that ‘Dutch New Year’ on the Twenty-fifth Day of December coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ, but this is never acknowledged in case an ambitious spy one day accuses them of endorsing Christian worship. Christmas, Uzaemon has noticed, affects the Dutch in strange ways. They can become intolerably homesick, even abusive, merry and maudlin, often all at once. By the time Arie Grote brings up the plum pudding, Chief van Cleef, Deputy Fischer, Ouwehand, Baert and the youth Oost are somewhere between quite drunk and very drunk. Only the soberer Marinus, de Zoet and Twomey converse with any of the Japanese banqueters.

De Zoet and Uzaemon have become rivals in love for a beautiful Japanese lady, whereabouts by this point unknown. Still, that’s the last of Uzaemon’s worries. The toasts are about to begin:

Cupido the slave distributes a bottle to each of the two dozen diners... The Malay servant Philander follows, uncorking each bottle. Van Cleef stands and chimes a spoon against a glass until he has the table’s attention. “Those of you who honoured the Dutch New Year Banquet under Chiefs Hemmij and Snitker shall know of the Hydra-headed toast...” Arashiyama whispers to Uzaemon, “What’s a hydra?” Uzaemon knows but shrugs, unwilling to lose more of van Cleef’s sentences. “We make a toast, one by one,” says Goto Shinpachi, “and –” “– and get drunker and drunker, belches Sekita, “Minute by minute.” “...whereby our joint desires,” van Cleef sways, “Forge a – a – brighter future.” As custom dictates, each diner fills his neighbour’s glass.

Interpreter Uzaemon has already witnessed a rather gruesome lithotomy, and is feeling a little queasy before the wine: Mitchell drily points out:

Uzaemon notices how unwell he is feeling.

The toasts continue around the table:

Jacob de Zoet swirls his wine. “To all our loved ones, near or far.” The Dutchman happens to catch Uzaemon’s eye, and they both avert their gaze whilst the toast is chorused. The interpreter is still turning his napkin ring moodily when Goto clears his throat. “Ogawa-san?” Uzaemon looks up to find the entire company looking at him. “Pardon, gentlemen, the wine stole my tongue.” Goblin laughter sloshes around the room. The diners’ faces swell and recede. Lips do not correspond to blurred words. Uzaemon wonders, as consciousness drains away, Am I dying?

Luckily for him, not now...

The Satyricon by Petronius

2011-05-12T00:05:00.000-07:00

I suppose it would be nice to say that this week’s choice was the product of a Classical education, but the prosaic truth is that I picked up The Satyricon after references to Trimalchio in The Great Gatsby (q.v.) and thought it would worth investigating further.

A quick précis of the plot: Encolpius, a former gladiator is travelling with Ascyltos, a former lover, and Giton, Ascyltos’s slave, whom Encolpius has a crush on. Their journey takes them through various ribald adventures, including the famous Cena Trimalchionis (Diner at Trimalchio’s). Trimalchio himself is a freedman now immensely rich. The epitome of crass wealth and moneyed vulgarity, he holds spectacular dinners, serving extravagant food and (allegedly) expensive wines:

At that moment glass winejars, carefully sealed with gypsum, were brought in. On their necks were fastened labels, with the inscription: ‘Farlernian wine of Opimian vintage. One hundred years old.’ As we scrutinized the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands exclaimed: “So wine, sad to say, enjoys longer life than poor humans! So let us drink and be merry. Wine is life-enhancing. This is a genuine Opimian that I’m serving. Yesterday the wine I provided was not so good, though the company at dinner was much more respectable.” So we got started on the wine, taking the greatest pains to express our wonder at all the elegance.

Trimalchio disappears for a comfort break, and while he’s in the toilet, the rabble he’s invited round the supper wax lyrical about the warming effects of wine:

So Dama spoke up first. After demanding larger winecups, he said: “Daylight’s just non-existent. Turn round and it’s nightfall. So there’s no better order of the day than to get out of bed and to make straight for the dining-room. What a sharp spell of frosty weather we’ve had! Even after my bath I’ve hardly warmed up. But a hot drink’s as good as a topcoat. I’ve had a basinful, and I’m absolutely pissed. The wine’s gone to my head.”

The response is this nugget of wisdom from a man by the name of Seleucus:

“Myself, I don’t take a bath every day. Taking a bath is as bad as being sent to the cleaner’s; the water’s got teeth. My blood gets thinner every day. But once I get a jug of mead inside me, I can tell the cold to bugger off.”

Trimalchio returns from the khazi and the feast continues, or as the great man puts it himself:

“Out with the water, down with the wine!”

Quite...

Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières

2011-05-05T05:53:00.000-07:00

This is an absolute treat. I came by it after reading a review in the Graun that made reference to the Surrey Tyrol where the book is set, which was enough to send me off to the library for a copy. It’s set in that hilly part of the county between Godalming and Haslemere; not close enough to where I grew up to be my stamping ground proper, but near enough for me to recognise the terrain. That said, this book’s appeal is universal. Louis de Bernières has put the whole human comedy onto the pages in a series of interwoven short stories about the inhabitants of the village Notwithstanding.

In Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers, the titular Mrs Griffiths is a misanthropic widow who has a disdainful outlook on most things in life, especially young people and the gnarled old countryman Obadiah ‘Jack’ Oak, who hangs around Notwithstanding in a fug of six decades of neglected hygiene.

It’s coming up to Christmas and Mrs Griffiths is preparing to send her cards to the respectable folk in the village. However, a sense of emptiness has come into her life since her husband died, so she’s also decided that this year she will make mince pies and punch for the village carol singers, instead of turning off the lights and pretending she’s not in as she usually does:

Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum.

The carol singers eventually appear, but at her garden gate she hears them discussing whether to bother singing at her door. Coming to the conclusion that she’s an old skinflint who will only hide when they start singing, they miss her out. Angry and frustrated to the point that she cries for the first time since she was a child, Mrs Griffiths starts on her Christmas cards instead. The job requires fortification:

She gets up from her chair and, without really thinking about it, eats a mince pie and takes a glass of punch. She had forgotten how good they can be, and she feels the punch igniting her insides. The sensuality of it shocks and seduces her, and she takes another glass... A rebellious whim creeps up on her. She glances around as if to check that she is truly alone in the house, and then she stands up and shouts, “Bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody bloody.” She adds, “Bloody children, bloody bloody.” She attempts “bollocks” but merely embarrasses herself and tries “bugger” instead. She drinks more punch and says, “Bloody bugger.”

Sloshed on punch, Mrs Griffiths is spurred into uncharacteristic charity. She writes cards to everyone in the village, even to the people who own the pub and vote Labour. She boxes up the remaining mince pies and puts them on the doorstep of Obadiah Oak’s house. After that she comes home and completes what she’s started:

When she returns she finishes off the punch, and then heaves herself upstairs with the aid of the banisters. She is beginning to feel distinctly ill, and heads for her bed with the unconscious but unswerving instinct of a homing pigeon. She reminds herself to draw the curtains so that no one will be able to pry and spy, and then she undresses with difficulty, and throws her clothes on the floor with all the perverse but justified devilment of one who has been brought up not to, and has never tried it before. She extinguishes the light and crawls into bed, but every time that she closes her eyes she begins to feel seasick.

As well she might...

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham

2011-04-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I’m not a regular reader of crime fiction and would probably not have strayed from my usual beat of Ian Rankin and Agatha Christie had Caroline Graham’s books not been dramatised as the highly successful series Midsomer Murders. Watching a repeat of an early episode prompted me to pick up the source material from the library.

The book starts with a missing person. Simone Hollingsworth, wife of a local businessman, disappears from their home in Fawcett Green. Her vanishing act causes her husband to lock himself in the house and hit the bottle, although he doesn’t go so far as to call the police and tell them his wife has gone. The vicar, dropping by to ask why she has missed bell ringing practice, notices that he’s in a bit of a state:

“Now Alan,” said the vicar, “If I may call you that?” His kindly glance was momentarily distracted by the sight of a splendid silver tray holding two cut-glass decanters and several bottles including a Jack Daniel’s, nearly full, and a Bushmills, half empty. There was no way, on his stipend, the vicar could afford either of these splendid beverages. He heaved himself upright again saying, “You look as if you could do with a drink...”

Obviously Hollingsworth thinks so to and very quickly reports come back that he’s living off microwave food and whiskey:

Later, further verification of Alan Hollingsworth’s debauched state was provided when a stream of bottles descended from his wheelie bin into the masticating maw of Causton Borough Council’s refuse lorry. Avis Jennings said it sounded as if someone was disposing of a greenhouse. The vicar, put in the picture by his spouse, thought of all that Jack Daniel’s consumed in lonely isolation and wondered if he should once more attempt to offer solace.

Eventually the local plod are asked to check on him, and more importantly, Simone. Hollingsworth opens the door to the village bobby:

“You’re plainly not very well, sir.” “I’m pissed, you stupid idiot...” Hollingsworth picked up the nearest bottle, which was uncapped, poured a stream of liquid into a smeary tumbler and sloshed it down.

It’s soon after this that Causton CID are involved and the book’s hero, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is on the scene. Though when they get to the house it’s a little too late for Hollingsworth:

A man was lying on a brightly coloured rug in front of an empty fireplace. Barnaby crossed quickly over and knelt beside him. Troy stood on the threshold, his fastidious nature affronted by the mixture of stale offensive odours about the place, not least of which came from the pool of urine beneath the recumbent figure. Troy noticed a tumbler lying on its side a short distance from the man’s right hand.

It’s clear to the DCI that foul play is afoot:

...Barnaby felt certain that Alan Hollingsworth had not succumbed to a stroke or heart attack. Or alcohol poisoning even though, according to Perrot, he’d been lowering gallons of the stuff for days.

When Polaroids of Simone appear showing that she’s been abducted, the plot thickens... It’s great stuff and frequently very funny, but having been spoiled by over a decade of John Nettles chewing scenery, I’m having trouble adjusting to Graham’s original creation.

King Of The City by Michael Moorcock

2011-04-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

I find Moorcock an extremely frustrating writer, sometimes brilliant, but so ridiculously prolific that editing and quality control often go completely out of the window. His Pyat Quartet is wonderful, but I’ve tossed at least one of his books to one side after less than three pages, and his input into Hawkwind’s back catalogue has been distinctly shaky at times too.

King Of The City is typical of his work; not Moorcock at his best, but full of wonderful vignettes and turns of phrase, although it can get wearing. It’s probably meant to be that way, Dennis Dover, underground rock guitarist and intrepid photojournalist is such an intense character that being subjected to a relentless 400 page monologue is more trial by ordeal than reading. It is not without reward, however.

Dover starts the book suspended from a hot air balloon, taking paparazzi shots of the supposedly deceased zillionaire Sir John Barbican Begg, who is in a compromising position in a hammock with someone else’s wife. It’s the tabloid scoop of the year, well worth maxing out the last credit card to get.

I only had one crack at the shots. Drunk or sober, mad or sane, I only needed one. As we dropped lower over the convulsing soul mates, I clipped on the D-ring so that I could lean further out and take some side views, hoping that in their ecstasy they couldn’t hear the thump of batty-gangsta rap vibrating from my pilot’s pulsing boombox and amplified by our vast silver canopy, or catch a whiff of the roiling cushions of reefer smoke probably keeping us airborne. Not that you could do much about steering or speed in an FG-180. Plus the volume was busted on the blasta. Plus Captain Desmond Bastable, the pilot, had insisted on bringing two magnums of champagne for the trip as well as a pound of ganja so strong you could get cheerful just being in the same city with it. Also a bottle of Stolichnaya. I never drink on the job, it interferes with what I put up my nose, so Captain B had enjoyed both magnums and now lay spread eagled on the bottom of the basket chewing on his dreadlocks and cackling at his own smutty porkboy stories. Every so often he did something amusing with his burner. I didn’t care. I had three full rolls of FX-15+ with digital back-up and was on my fourth. The smoke pacified my mind. I relaxed so much I almost went completely over the side. I started to laugh. Captain Bastable found the vodka bottle. Life was never going to be better.

He’s got his shots, so now all he has to do is relax, get home safely and all his money worries are over:

I dropped our penultimate sandbag, and we rushed rapidly upward and back the way we’d come... I waved farewell to the Isles of Greed and sat down on the floor, zipped up my camera, sealed my film bag, flipped back at the digitals, secured my disc, lit a spliff, popped my last E, sipped the dregs of the Moët, ate my wholefood patty, threw the bottles over the side and saluted the soft emerging stars, wondering vaguely whether Captain Bastable would wake up in time to get us down somewhere near Kingston or if by tonight we’d be trying to bribe ourselves out of Havana with eight dollars, some seeds and stems, and old climbing harness and about six thousand yards of second-hand balloon silk.

Unfortunately, Dover comes home clutching his paparazzi shots to an icy reception:

I’m not the first conquering hero who returns home expecting a big welcome only to discover that in the meantime the social climate has gone a bit radical and the mates who sent him off with wild applause are not all that pleased to see him now. Embarrassed silence as Lawrence walks into the mess. I had left the bosom of my nation, or at least Marriages new Wharf, Wapping, one of the lads, popular with my peers, credit at every pub, a well-respected pro people were proud to know. I’d returned to feel like Herman Goering popping in at his local to down a last stein before going on to his trial at Nuremberg. “Well, mates, wish me luck.”

What an earth could have happened? While Dover has been snapping his scoop in the Cayman islands, there’s been a rather nasty road traffic accident in Paris:

...an over-tired driver did a few pills too many, had a few extra Scotches and decided to take the tunnel rather than the bridge.

In the post-Diana landscape, nobody wants to know him or what he’s seen. The celebrity snapper is now a social pariah and Dover is out of a job and frighteningly broke...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

2011-04-14T05:36:00.000-07:00

Like the Cold War in previous decades, the post 9/11 years have produced their own fiction dealing with its various themes and conflicts, of which The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a fine example.

Hamid’s second novel is written in the form of a long conversation between Changez, a young Pakistani man, educated in at University in the US and once employed in a high flying New York firm, and an unnamed American who gets increasingly jumpy as the evening goes on.

Scion of a once wealthy family in Lahore, Changez graduates from Princeton and is soon interviewed for prestigious valuation firm Underwood Samson. This is not before he and his fellow graduates set out for a holiday on the Greek Islands. Among their group is Erica, whom Changez falls for. She tells him that she is grieving for her boyfriend who died about a year before. He tells her about his life growing up in Lahore:

She ordered a beer; I did the same. “So what’s Pakistan like?” she asked. I told her Pakistan was many things, from seaside to desert to farmland stretched between rivers and canals; I told her that I had driven with my parents and my brother to China on the Karakoram Highway, passing along the bottoms of valleys higher than the tops of the Alps; I told her that alcohol was illegal for Muslims to buy and so I had a Christian bootlegger who delivered booze to my house in a Suzuki pickup.

Life soon takes over after their return to New York and Changez is scooped up into the high spending lifestyle of Underwood Samson. He is amazed that spending a large amount of company money on drink is not only permitted, it is actively encouraged:

But for me, at the age of twenty-two, this experience was a revelation. I could, if I desired, take my colleagues out for an after-work drink – an activity classified as “new hire cultivation” – and with impunity spend in an hour more than my father earned in a day! As you can imagine, we new hires availed ourselves of the opportunity to cultivate one another on a regular basis. I remember the first night we did so; we went to the bar at the Royalton, on the Forty-Fourth Street. Sherman came with us on this occasion and ordered a bottle of vintage champagne to celebrate our induction... Sherman left when the champagne was done, but he told us to charge our bill to Underwood Samson. We did so, staggering out into the street around midnight.

Changez is a great success in the firm, a number one valuator, and he also meets up with Erica again. He is introduced to her friends and family and is served wine at home with her parents. He takes a moment to explain the relationship between Pakistanis and drink to his unnamed companion at the table:

You seem puzzled by this – and not for the first time. Perhaps you misconstrue the significance of my beard, which, I should in any case make clear, I had not yet kept when I arrived in New York. In truth, many Pakistanis drink; alcohol’s illegality in our country has roughly the same effect as marijuana’s in yours. Moreover, not all of our drinkers are western-educated urbanites such as myself; our newspapers regularly carry accounts of villagers dying or going blind after consuming poor-quality moonshine. Indeed, in our poetry and folk songs intoxication occupies a recurring role as a facilitator of love and spiritual enlightenment. What? Is it not a sin? Yes, it certainly is – as so, for that matter, is coveting thy neighbor’s wife. I see you smile; we understand one another, then.

The attacks on September 11th 2001 leave Changez feeling increasingly alienated and distracted as the world around him takes arbitrary positions. Erica, who had a severe bout of mental illness when her boyfriend died, becomes unwell again and their relationship disintegrates. As the America slides into conflict with Afghanistan his emotions become increasingly polarised:

My reaction caught me by surprise; Afghanistan was Pakistan’s neighbour, our friend, and a fellow Muslim nation besides, and the sight of what I took to be the beginning of its invasion by your countrymen caused me to tremble with fury. I had to sit down to calm myself, and I remember polishing off a third of a bottle of whiskey before I was able to fall asleep.

A trip home at Christmas causes him to finally take sides and he leaves his firm soon afterwards, and comes back to Pakistan on a permanent basis. There he lectures at the local university, encouraging students to break with the west. One of his protégés has been involved in an outrage and as the evening draws to a close, the identity of his American companion and why he is there becomes apparent...

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

2011-04-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

I was initially disappointed with The Lacuna, mainly because I just didn’t feel it measured up to her previous novel The Poisonwood Bible. In fairness, very few books I’ve read measure up to The Poisonwood Bible, and leafing through The Lacuna a second time for quotes, I came to appreciate its slightly more subtle tone.

Harrison Shephered starts life as the son of a Mexican mother and an American father who is a civil servant in the Hoover administration. The book starts in Isla Pixol, Mexico in the late 1920s where Harrison and his mother have come to live with her new beau, oil man Enrique.

The solitary Harrison spends his days floating in the sea with goggles on, burning his back to a crisp while watching the fishes. His mother Salomé ought to be worried about his long disappearances, but seems more interested in the contents of her glass:

He refused to come out of the sea all day, until the colors began to go dark. Luckily his mother and Enrique had enough to drink, sitting on the terrace with the men from America turning the air blue with their cigars, discussing the assassination of Obregón, wondering who would now stop the land reforms before the indios took everything. If not for so much mezcal and lime, his mother might have grown bored with the man-talk, and thought to wonder whether her son had drowned.

Far younger than Enrique, Salomé celebrates her birthday in style, just not the style that her new man and his guests are used to:

Afterward Salomé tried to get them all to cut a rug. She cranked up the Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go. It was her birthday, and not even her son to whom she had given life would cut a rug with her. “For God’s sake, William, you’re tedious,” she diagnosed. Nose in the books, you’re nothing but a cancelled stamp. Flutie, green apples, wet blanket, this is only a sample of the names that came to mind when Salomé was stewed to the hat. He did try to dance with her after that, but it was too late. She couldn’t hold herself up on her own stilts.

Nearly always juiced of a night, and fast falling out with Enrique, Salomé is quickly propelling herself and her son to disaster:

Everything about Salomé came from a jar or a bottle: first, the powder and perfume, the pomade for her marcel wave. Next, the headache, from a bottle of mezcal. Then the cure, from a bottle of Bellans Hot-Water-Relief. Maybe some other bottle gave her the flapper-dancing, crank-up-the-Victrola Twenty-Three Skidoo. Stashed under a table drape in her room, something to help her keep it up.

Well, she can’t keep it up forever and after getting the heave-ho from Enrique’s they eventually end up in Mexico City. There Harrison becomes cook to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Salomé dies in a car crash on the way to see Howard Hughes. Young Harrison, cast adrift in the world, becomes the part time secretary of the fugitive Lev Trotsky, and slides into the history books, complete with a run in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a walk on part by Richard Nixon...

Never Trust A Rabbit by Jeremy Dyson

2011-03-31T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

2011-03-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

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!

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

2011-02-24T00:05:00.000-08:00

I was inspired to pick up Franzen’s The Corrections after reading a comment about books and alcohol on the excellent Henry’s World of Booze blog recommending his latest novel, Freedom. Now, I do actually own a copy of Freedom, although I must confess I’ve not read it yet, but could recall enough of this earlier novel to scrape together a post. Here goes...

The book focuses on the Lamberts, a somewhat staid and increasingly dysfunctional family from the Midwest. Patriarch Alfred is succumbing to Parkinson’s Disease, his wife Enid barely coping with his behaviour, which was difficult enough to begin with, and with that of her three children, Gary, Chip and Denise, who have all fled to the East Coast and have all failed to make their parents proud. As the family disintegrates around her, Enid determines that they will have one last family Christmas together.

All three offspring seem partial to a spot to drink, but I particularly remember Gary’s attempts to barbecue the family supper and trim the garden hedge after half a bottle of vodka. A high earning banker, Gary is depressed and paranoid, convinced that his wife and kids are spying on him. Admittedly, knocking out three lethally strong martinis one after another isn’t going to help matters:

He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he, a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard day’s work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it. Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him in plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.

Nothing that can’t be mended with a bucket of water, even it if does render the meat inedible. Trying to masticate scorched but still raw chicken, Gary is needled into action by his wife. He decides that now would be an appropriate time to trim the hedge that he’s been meaning to sort out. It all goes well until he realises that he has to move the ladder to get to the last twelve inches. He leans across instead:

The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection to have made deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create by coming out to trim the hedge.

Pishing blood all over the house, he wraps himself up in toilet paper and towels before going to get something to clean up the mess:

He went to the kitchen for a bucket and a mop, and there, in the kitchen was the liquor cabinet. Well, he opened it. By holding the vodka bottle in his right armpit he was able to unscrew the cap with his left hand. And as he was raising the bottle, as he was tilting his head to make a late small withdrawal from the rather tiny balance that remained, his gaze drifted over the top of the cabinet door and he saw the camera.

His son Caleb has been working on a CCTV project and the house is all wired up. Needless to say, Gary’s impending collapse is duly hastened. Still, things could be worse. His mother might ring the next day to say that his father has just fallen off the side of a cruise ship into the ocean...

Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor

2011-02-17T05:37:00.000-08:00

Alcohol is not just for diversion into anecdote in books, it can serve move the plot as well. One of the author’s greatest fears is (or certainly should be!) the dumping of large amounts of factual content in one go, pages and pages of detail that leaves the reader numb and flicking forward to the beginning of the next chapter. This is where a couple of libations can really come to the rescue...

Take this example from Andrew Taylor’s Bleeding Heart Square. I picked this out of the library because I work a couple of minutes walk away from many of the locations, and because I’d seen a review which mentioned that one of the main characters was a lush, therefore making it ideal blogging material.

In two pages, Taylor demonstrates how to use a bottle of wine to introduce some back story and a bit of characterisation:

At that moment there came a tap at the door.

“Come in,” cried Ingleby-Lewis, and struggled to his feet.

The door opened, revealing Malcolm Fimberry on the threshold with a bottle of wine cradled in his arms.

“I say,” he squeaked. “Sorry to disturb you. I – I thought I might open some wine and I wondered if I could borrow a corkscrew.”

“Wine, eh?” Ingleby-Lewis sprang towards him. “Nothing simpler, old man. Come in and sit down. Lydia, my dear, would you find Mr Fimberry a corkscrew in the kitchen?”

“If you would like to join me in a glass,” Fimberry suggested, “I’d be more than pleased.”

“How very kind.” Ingleby-Lewis patted him on the shoulder and removed the bottle from his grasp. “Three glasses as well then, please, Lydia. Ah, a Beaujolais, I see. How very wise. You’re quite right of course – solitary drinking is not something one should encourage. Besides, life holds few finer pleasures than a glass of wine with friends.”

When Lydia returned with three unmatched glasses and a corkscrew, she found her father and Mr Fimberry sitting on either side of the fireplace and smoking Mr Fimberry’s cigarettes. Her father took the corkscrew and removed the cork with a skill born of long experience. He poured a stream of wine into the nearest glass.

“None for me, thank you,” Lydia said.

“Nonsense,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “Just a sip. Do you good. Warm you up.” He turned to Fimberry. “My daughter feels the cold, you know. Especially at night.” He measured a thimbleful into he smallest of the glasses and handed it ceremoniously to Lydia. He gave another glass to Fimberry and the largest one to himself. He raised his own glass to the light. “A fine colour. Your good health.” He swallowed a third of the contents.

“I hear you have a position at Shires and Trimble in Rosington Place, Mrs Langstone,” Fimberry said, leaning towards her. “That must be interesting. Working for a solicitor, I mean.”

“It’s early days yet,” Lydia said grimly.

“You’re just opposite the chapel, of course. In fact, as far as I can work out from an eighteenth-century plan of the palace, the house where Shires and Trimble are must be built over part of the Almoner’s lodging. Remarkable to think of the people who must have walked about here in their time. Good Queen Bess, Sir Thomas More, Richard the Third, John of Gaunt, all those splendid prelates of the Church. Why, we walk on history in this part of London. And that’s why we Mr Howlett to guard our gates and keep order. In legal terms, Rosington Place, Bleeding Heart Square and their environs form the Rosington Liberty, and hence in many respects they still fall under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rosington.”

“Very true,” Ingleby-Lewis said. “A spot more? No?” He refilled his own glass. “You must know the place like the back of your hand.”

Mr Fimberry simpered, his eyes huge behind his pince-nez. “Oh, there are some fascinating stories associated with it, no doubt about that. After the Reformation, the Catholic dead were sometimes secretly interred beneath the chapel, in the days when the palace was rented to the Spanish ambassador. It is said that the bodies were brought here to Bleeding Heart Square, and then transferred to the chapel in Rosington Place. They were secretly buried at midnight, to the accompaniment of solemn masses, beneath the undercroft floor.

“Extraordinary yarn,” Ingleby-Lewis said, his eyes straying again towards the bottle.

In just under 600 words the reader now knows that Ingleby-Lewis is a soak, the gloriously Dickensian Mr Fimberry is a funny sort who buys a bottle of wine when he doesn’t own a corkscrew and bothers his neighbours using it as an excuse for a chat and the chapel on Rosington Place, which features later on in the story, is introduced, along with its history, without boring the reader to tears. Simple, when it’s done well...

Stirred But Not Shaken by Keith Floyd

2011-02-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in our flat there is a copy of the brilliant Floyd on Hangovers, a potted history of drink, boozy escapades and spurious cures for over indulgence. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anywhere, so until then, here is Floyd’s autobiography, Stirred But Not Shaken.

Floyd sets the scene at the start of the book with an evening of Bacchanalian excess; there is bare knuckle boxing, glorious roasts, and lakes of whisky and port. At the end of the night, after staggering to his room, he finds himself lying flat on a hard mattress, wired up to tubes and a ventilator. When he can eventually speak, he asks the people milling around his bed about the party:

I said to them, “How did you enjoy the dinner and boxing?” Silence. I said, “Well surely you were there. It was a great night. I mean, there was betting, there was the port, there was the whole baron of lamb, and then there was the dawn. How do you manage to have such a place in what appears to me to be a hospital?” It was a hospital.

After an alcoholic collapse, Floyd had been suffering hallucinations in intensive care brought on by the drugs keeping him alive and a nasty attack of the DTs. As the doctor kindly pointed out:

“...Drink again as you have before and you will die.”

Floyd started off his professional life as a cook after leaving the army. After several briefly successful ventures in the West Country that all ended in financial disaster, he found himself doing a one off cooking slot on a regional television broadcast at the beginning of the 1980s. It snowballed from there.

For better or for worse, Floyd, and his director David Pritchard, invented the modern TV chef. Before Floyd, everything was a bit staid and formal; Floyd took food out of the studio and into the great outdoors, chatted to the film crew, and most famously, had a constant prop of a glass of wine. Despite his reputation as a rogueish guzzler, he claimed never to have drunk once while filming his series, and the glass of wine was to give him something to do between the action:

I had a bottle of wine on the prep table intended for cooking. But in the absence of any direction from Pritchard, when I ran out of inspiration and words, I said, “I think I’ll have a quick slurp,” to buy valuable seconds to recompense my thoughts.

Despite his insistence that he was never sozzled while on the show, he was shifting a lot of whiskey in between filming:

Increasingly, however, I found myself staying up all night, unable to sleep because I was worrying about how it would go the next day. Slowly and, it seems, inevitably a bottle of whisky was becoming my crutch: a companion that would help me through the hours from midnight to dawn.

This seeped into his home life, and by the time his TV career was over and his fourth marriage was collapsing, he was drinking like a pissed fish:

As far as booze is concerned, I thought I could knock it on the head quite easily. But on the other hand, I felt under pressure with Tess and I couldn’t help myself... Our relationship was deteriorating rapidly, and our life was one long round of screaming matches interspersed with my complete alcoholic blackouts, and romance had long gone. The fairy tale we’d once lived turned into the grim reality that I can now talk about, but it pains me to do so. The fact is I kept a bottle of Scotch in my bedside table. In the mornings, when I awoke I had to have – I didn’t have to but felt that I did – a few large glasses of whisky before I could get downstairs.

The near death experience (his third admission to hospital suffering from the effects of drink and malnutrition – sadly for Floyd, he had come to hate eating) seemed to make him turn things around and late in life he found love again with an old friend and was ready to go back onto the television. A programme was produced for Channel 4 and at the time the book was published he had several new opportunities lined up. He died of a heart attack the night the show was broadcast.

Floyd was a culinary inspiration to millions of viewers who, like me, regard him with great affection. This rambling memoir sounds like a long afternoon at the bar with the man himself and I could hear his distinctive voice rattling off the anecdotes as I read it. I feel it would be appropriate (raises glass) to leave the last word to him:

Sometimes I worry about what I’ve left out. And sometimes I worry about what I’ve put in. but for now, as this book fades to black, I’ll have another pastis. Thank you and au revoir.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

2011-02-03T05:35:00.000-08:00

The ultimate hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon and its subsequent screen versions (most famously with Humphry Bogart) brought the tough, morally ambiguous, chain smoking and hard-drinking PI into the public consciousness.

Sam Spade is a small time private investigator in San Fancisco who is asked by the beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy to track down her errant sister. He sends his partner Miles out on the job, but that night the other man is shot dead and it quickly transpires that their commission wasn’t what it seemed. Called out by the police when they find Miles’s body, it’s well into the small hours when he gets back to his apartment:

Spade’s tinny alarm-lock said three-forty when he turned on the light in the suspended bowl again. He dropped his hat and overcoat on the bed and went into his kitchen, returning to the bedroom with a wine-glass and a tall bottle of Bacardi. He poured a drink and drank it standing. He put bottle and glass on the table, sat on the side of the bed facing them, and rolled a cigarette. He had drunk his third glass of Bacardi and was lighting his fifth cigarette when the street-door-bell rang. The hands of the alarm clock registered four-thirty.

The visitors are the police again, this time trying to insinuate that Spade has something to do with Miles’s murder. The next day, he’s visited by a sinister Levantine by the name of Joel Cairo who asks him if he knows the whereabouts of a black metal figurine in the form of a falcon, then pulls a gun on him... A drink is required after this sort of intrusion:

For half an hour after Joel Cairo had gone Spade sat alone, still and frowning, at his desk. The he said aloud in tone of one dismissing a problem, “Well, they’re paying me for it,” and took a bottle of Manhattan cocktail and a paper drinking-cup from the desk-drawer. He filled the cup two-thirds full, drank, returned the bottle to the drawer, tossed the cup into the wastebasket, put on his hat and overcoat, turned off the lights, and went down to the night-lit street.

Spade finally gets to see the man behind the mystery, the obese Mr. Gutman who tells him the story of the Maltese Falcon, a fabulously valuable jeweled statuette that has been painted black to hide its value. Not before pouring him a Johnny Walker and soda, of course:

Spade sat in the green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street. “We start well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

Sage advice. That said, none of the people Spade has met are to be trusted at all, drink or no drink. What follows is a masterpiece of suspense and two-fisted action and one of the best crime novels ever written.

The Children’s Book by AS Byatt

2011-01-27T00:05:00.000-08:00

Not unlike a traveller wandering through a dry county looking for a pub, I frequently find myself reading a book with an eye out for references to drink in the text. The Children’s Book is exceptionally dry, and about the size of a county as well, but even this high density literary work slips in for a metaphorical quick one at least once.

One of the novel’s main characters is a young man named Phillip, discovered sketching in the nascent Victoria & Albert Museum in London. He has walked all the way there from the Midlands, determined to better himself. He gains an apprenticeship with Benedict Fludd, a genius potter who bears more than a passing resemblance to the disgusting Eric Gill.

On a visit to Paris to the Exposition Universelle in 1900, Philip and Fludd spot Rodin’s Crouching Woman amongst the works on show. This seems to stir something in Fludd’s deranged imagination and he later suggests an evening out to Philip, then promptly takes him to a brothel he knows in the French capital. That most erotic of drinks, champagne, is produced:

There was a confusion of smells – orris root, which Philip had never met and found sickly, attar of roses, wine, cigarette smoke and an undertone of human bodily odours. He made out faces through drifts of smoke, faces weary, faces laughing, faces middle-aged and faces very young. The fully and fashionably dressed lady of the house hurried forwards to welcome Benedict Fludd. Champagne was brought, and Philip, now sitting gingerly on a sofa facing a watchful row of ladies, had his first taste of it. It steadied him. He was excited and afraid. More champagne was brought. He was studied and discussed in incomprehensible French... He remembered the Crouching Woman, and primitive desire stirred in him. He drank more champagne and looked at the women.

Philip is sent off with a young lady called Rose. He hasn’t a clue what he’s supposed to be doing. Champagne to the rescue!

She began to teach him the parts of the body, in her language, pouring him more champagne, dabbing his fingers and chin and eyes with it, naming them in French and licking away the champagne.

And so on...

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

2011-01-20T00:05:00.000-08:00

I found myself browsing the crime shelves again and dug out this nugget of hard boiled fiction from one of Britain’s overlooked writers, Derek Raymond. He wrote five books in the ‘Factory’ series about an unnamed detective sergeant in the ‘Department of Unexplained Deaths’.

Left with the unloved and the unmissed cases that never make the news, the detective is investigating the murder of a middle aged drunk, Charles Staniland, found brutally beaten to death in West London. There’s not much to go on at first, just a face, (what’s left of it), a few letters and a stack of audio cassettes in his squalid flat:

He was a drinker, too – you could tell that from his nose, and from his problems, as shown up in what he had recorded. Not an alcoholic, though; his handwriting was too precise, the letters as a rule well-formed for a man who had written quickly, and well-spaced between the lines, the lower loops never entangling themselves with the upper loops of the line below. It was an educated, reflective, intelligent hand that didn’t go with the cheap suit he was found in. What the hell had the man been doing?

Listening to the tapes, the DS discovers that Staniland was a regular at the Agincourt, a rough pub in Lewisham, where he drank heavily, despite the mocking and casual violence from a local criminal whom he nicknamed the Laughing Cavalier. Our man goes to investigate:

Inside, the place was built entirely of concrete, which nevertheless bore signs of attention from various demented customers. The bar was narrow, and behind it stood an unbelievably disagreeable-looking stout man, who had to be the governor. It was only a quarter past eleven in the morning; however, as I came in, he was helping himself to a triple vodka, obviously not his first in the day.

His queries paint a picture of a talented man, ruined by a marriage that didn’t work out and the subsequent flight of his wife and daughter. Staniland was even a scriptwriter at the BBC once, although the booze tempered his success:

“Well, he drank,” said Viner, “And I mean he really drank. The Beeb’s idea of drinking in the office is an occasional pale ale – Charles’s was a bottle of Scotch a day. Or two. Mind, he never passed out; his eyes just used to turn inward. I remember he was sick in his handkerchief once, but he was never incoherent, even. The bottle would be on his desk out in the open, and if a passing bigwig didn’t like it – well, Charles had rather a sharp tongue.”

The tapes refer to an antagonistic and abusive relationship with a woman called Barbara whom the DS is soon convinced holds the answer as to why Stanliland was killed. While his search for her combs the sleazy nightclubs of South London, he continues to listen to the tapes, finally discovering Staniland’s fatal raison d’être:

Most people live with their eyes shut, but I mean to die with mine open. We all instinctively try to make death less difficult for ourselves. Personally, I’ve got two ways. First, I drink. I drink for oblivion, and then a fall of some kind of blow, once I’m beyond thinking and feeling. That’s how I’d die, with my eyes shut. My other way is to rationalize my experience.

Looking into his own past, the DS is reminded of an artist whose wife has gone insane:

“She looks at naked existence all the time, you know, the way we only do with a bad hangover.”

The Detective is now far too involved; identifying with Staniland to the point that he even moves in with the woman who brought him down, an action that could cost him his own life...

Brutal and unflinching in its description of evil, He Died With His Eyes Shut is also an acutely sharp and uncomfortable insight into the human condition. With echoes of Hamilton’s Hangover Square, the Factory series are a piece of cult London fiction that I know I’ll be returning to.

Luke And Jon by Robert Williams

2011-01-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

Winner of the National Book Tokens Not-Yet-Published prize, Luke And Jon is the engaging story of Luke Redridge and his father who have moved to a rundown Northern town in England after the sudden death of Luke’s mother. Moving into a dilapidated home on the fells outside the town, they meet Jon, a strange boy who dresses in 1950s clothes and who the local kids call ‘Slackjaw’.

It soon becomes apparent that Luke’s father is hitting the bottle as he tries to get over the death of his wife. Luke spots the evidence; a glass to hand, always; his father asleep at the kitchen table, an inch left in the bottle:

I don’t remember when I started noticing but it got to be that there was always a glass of whisky in his right hand. He held it low and to his side, almost behind his back, so that maybe I wouldn’t notice. When Mum was alive he used to buy bottles of beer, different brews with silly names, ‘Blond Witch’ or ‘Bowden’s Bathwater’, but he never came back with those now, just the whisky... He was still always up before me, no matter how bad he looked. He would be sat in his chair at the kitchen table with the morning sun streaking through the greasy windows, spotlighting his grey face and bloodshot eyes. His shaky hands were always wrapped around a cup of thick black coffee and if his hands were trembling too much he would leave the room and come back a couple of minutes later, less jumpy. I knew he went for a drink and he must have known that, but neither of us let on. He didn’t want me to see him drinking too early that was all.

Luke makes friends with Jon but the boy is cagy about where he lives and doesn’t invite him around. When Luke finally gets to visit Jon’s home he discovers that his friend is looking after his housebound grandparents, one of whom has severe senile dementia. Their house is filthy and Jon is doing his best to keep all three of them out of the clutches of social services. The council eventually catch up with him and Jon ends up in hospital, suffering from malnourishment.

Luke visits Jon with his father who has been so sozzled over the last few months that he hasn’t noticed that there’s been something wrong with his son’s pal:

And we all knew that whilst this was true it was also true that at times during the last few months a hurricane could have lifted our house up off the ground, spun it around in space and landed it in Latvia, and Dad probably wouldn’t have noticed, would have just opened another bottle and poured another glass when the dust settled and the windows stopped shaking.

Luke and his father find new focus in their lives, first by constructing a large wood sculpture of a horse which they secrete into a nearby forest, then by offering to adopt Jon. Williams ends his novel with Luke deciding I think that is enough, and although I felt that there was a lot more that he could have done with the story, it remains a moving debut novel about loss, grief and renewal.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

2011-01-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

I made the case a while back that I got far more from reading a good Stephen King novel than I had trudging through a particularly dreary offering by John Updike. If I required further proof that the fellow knew his stuff, then this is it.

Part personal memoir on how he got where he did, and part guide for people seriously interested in getting published, On Writing is funny, educational and a good read in itself. It also covers the period in his life when he was drinking heavily, and how his family intervened to stop him before he destroyed all he’d worked for.

King first got pissed on a school trip to Washington from his native Maine in 1966. The coach stopped in New York overnight and the boys lit out for the nearest off license:

A bunch of us more adventurous boys found a package store around the corner from the hotel. I cast an eye over the shelves, aware that my spending money was far from a fortune. There was too much – too many bottles, too many brands, too many prices over ten dollars. Finally I gave up and asked the guy behind the counter (the same bald, bored-looking, gray-coated guy who has, I’m convinced, sold alcohol virgins their first bottle since the dawn of commerce) what was cheap. Without a word, he put a pint of Old Log Cabin whiskey down on the Winston mat beside the cash register. The sticker on the label said $1.95. The price was right. I have a memory of being led onto the elevator later that night – or maybe it was early the next morning... This memory is more like a scene from a TV show than a real memory. I seem to be outside of myself, watching the whole thing. There’s just enough of me left inside to know that I am globally, perhaps even galactically, fucked up.

He spent the rest of the night violently throwing up and wakes up the next day with a demonic hangover. Only a lunatic – a masochistic lunatic, would do the same thing again... On the next day on their way through Pennsylvania, they stop in Amish country. He sidles into a store and goes straight to the top shelf:

The clerk sells me a fifth of Four Roses without asking to see any ID, and by the time we stop for the night I’m drunk again.

Stephen picks up the habit pretty quickly, and it soon develops into a raging drink problem:

Ten years or so later I’m in an Irish saloon with Bill Thompson. We have lots to celebrate, not the least of which is the completion of my third book, The Shining. That’s the one which just happens to be about an alcoholic writer and ex-schoolteacher. It’s July, the night of the All-Star baseball game. Our plan is to eat a good old-fashioned meal from the dishes set out on the steam table, then get shitfaced. We begin with a couple at the bar, and I start reading all the signs. HAVE A MANHATTAN IN MANHATTAN, says one. TUESDAYS ARE TWOFORS, says another. WORK IS THE CURSE OF THE DRINKING CLASS, says a third. And there, right in front of me, is one which reads: EARLY BIRD SPECIAL! SCREWDRIVER A BUCK MONDAY-FRIDAY 8-10 A.M. I motion to the bartender. He comes over. He’s bald, he’s wearing a gray jacket, he could be the guy who sold me my first pint back in 1966. Probably he is. I point to the sign and ask, “Who comes in at eight-fifteen in the morning and orders a screwdriver?” I’m smiling but he doesn’t smile back. “College boys,” he replies. “Just like you.”

He continues in denial, employing the world-famous Hemingway Defense:

...as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on. I can handle it. A real man always can.

Eventually, with the help of family and friends, he faces down the drink (and by then the drugs too). He debunks the idea that drinking and writing have to go together:

The idea that creative endeavor and mind altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn’t matter if you’re James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemmingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

It’s not glamorous and not conducive to getting the written word on the page...

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes

2010-12-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

2010-12-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

2010-12-16T05:20:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

2010-12-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W Axl Rose by Mick Wall

2010-12-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greenmantle by John Buchan

2010-11-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

2010-11-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the day finishes, the drink wears off:

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

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

Polo by Jilly Cooper

2010-11-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

2010-11-04T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Naturally, they’re there to talk shop:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

2010-10-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willets

2010-10-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

2010-10-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

After which, things get a little messy:

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

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

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

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

Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott

2010-10-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunkards Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

2010-09-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trix by Stephanie Theobald

2010-09-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

2010-09-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

2010-09-09T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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