1984 by George Orwell

There’s not much I can add to the acres of writing on Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future. 1984 and its ideas – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, telescreens, newspeak, room 101 – have become embedded in the language, although most of them at a far remove from the author’s original concept.

At the beginning of the book, Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat tasked with constantly falsifying and updating back issues of The Times to make articles follow the party line, is about to start writing a diary, an act which will inevitably lead to arrest, torture and execution. Small wonder that before embarking on this risky venture, he decides to fortify himself with a spot of gin, the booze reserved for party members in Oceania:

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine. Instantly his faced turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled pack marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor.

It’s the first step in a journey of deception against the state that can only end one way. By the time Winston finally ends up in the dreaded room 101 at the heart of the Ministry of Love, gut-rot gin is the last of his worries...

Blood on the Saddle by Rafael Reig

Perhaps it was the translation, but Rafael Reig’s Blood on the Saddle reminds me more than a little of Charles Bukowski, especially his novel Pulp (qv).

Carlos Clot is a private detective in the Madrid of the near-future, a city that’s been swamped by water and half buried in the sand. One of his cases involves a character who has gone missing from a cowboy novel by Phil Sparks, better know to his family as Luis Peñuelas. Peñuelas can’t finish the book without her coming back, and Clot somehow has to find her in an increasingly surreal city filled with body snatchers, adulterous housewives and a sinister genetic engineering corporation run by the ruthless Manex Chopieta...

Clot is having no luck finding the heroine of Peñuelas’s new book, and the hapless writer, already a souse, hits the bottle for the last time. By the time Clot catches up with his old friend the man is in the throes of delirium:

It was hard for me to recognise him. Peñuelas/Sparks had deteriorated a lot since the last time. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his elasticated blue folder while he drank Bombay as if it were tap water. –There’s now way out, he kept repeating. Nothing to be done... He heard voices, received instructions and fended off invisible interlocutors with his hands. He described what seemed to be the DTs to me with their corresponding zootropic hallucinations and anatomical deliriums. He saw insects or was convinced he had one arm longer than the other, things like that. He spoke of his heart as a puddle of rainwater; his blood, the shadow of a tree that went on growing once day was done... –They’re coming for me, Peñuelas went on. You have to help me, Clot, my friend.

There’s nobody there but the two of them, of course, not that Peñuelas will listen:

In a supine position he went on drinking directly from the bottle. When the pins and needles started he began to scream. Hundreds of insects were running over his arms. He admitted he couldn’t see them, but he felt them, they were there, on his body, tiny and tireless. He lit the anglepoise. Nothing. Maybe there were too small to pick out with the naked eye, as he revealed to me. he scratched his arms with his nails, completely beside himself. –Peñuelas! Control yourself! You’re raving. This is formication, that’s all. –Oh shit! Fornication! Oh fuck! I knew it! The treacherous cow! –With an M, Peñuelas. It means you’re imagining ants, that’s all. Next he seemed to see it all clearly: the insects had to be under his skin!

After scratching his arms to pieces he feels as if he’s burning up. Tearing off his shirt, he makes for the bath:

He decided he couldn’t faint; that was precisely what they were waiting for! If he fainted they’d throw themselves upon him, so he began banging his head with ever increasing force against the edge of the bath. This seemed to him a very intelligent idea, a stratagem or ruse, as he termed it. I saw that the enamel of the bathtub was chipping off. I didn’t see, on the other hand, that his skull had sustained a similar kind of impact. I gave him two slaps in the face and called an ambulance. He screamed. We wrestled. I subdued him... They took him away. He died at dawn, without managing to wake up from the other dream, the overwhelming, violent nightmare of arriving, sure, but where?

Probably the most gruesome warning about the perils of drinking neat gin I’ve read since starting this blog...

Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensibly, Neidorf doesn’t show up:

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

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

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

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

I have been enjoying Jeanette Winterson’s books for half my life now, but have somehow not got around to reading Oranges are not the Only Fruit, her award winning debut and arguably her most famous book.


Based very loosely on the author’s upbringing in Accrington, the book follows the childhood and adolescence of Jeanette, a young woman adopted as a baby by a couple who are stalwart members of the local Pentecostal church. Jeanette’s mother takes her religion very seriously, and is quick to point out the wrongs of others. Especially those living next door:

“Drink,” said my mother grimly as we stepped out past their house. “That’s why they buy everything from Maxi Ball’s Catalogue Seconds. The Devil himself is a drunk” (sometimes my mother invented theology).

Even so, despite holding forth on the evils of booze, Jeanette’s mother is no stranger to licensed premises:

During the first year my mother had gone into all the pubs and clubs urging the
drunkards to join her at church. She used to sit at the piano and sing Have You Any Room for Jesus? It was very moving, she said. The men cried into their tankards and stopped playing snooker while she sang. She was plump and pretty and they called her the Jesus Belle.

Problems start to appear in this regimented lifestyle when Jeanette is forced to go to school (a breeding ground) and as she becomes older, realises that she has fallen in love with another girl called Melanie. She urges Melanie to come along to the church. It’s a special occasion; a visit from Pastor Finch who has turned up in a Bedford van decorated with damned sinners on one side and saved souls on the other, and HEAVEN OR HELL? IT’S YOUR CHOICE painted across the bonnet:

After we had all admired the bus for long enough, Pastor Finch led us back into the church and asked his choir to sing his latest composition. “It came to me from the Lord, just as I left Sandbach Motorway Services.” The song was called You Don’t Need Spirits When You’ve Got The Spirit. The first verse went like this...

‘Some men turn to whisky, some women turn to gin,
But there ain’t no better rapture than drinking the spirit in.
Some men like their beer, others like their wine,
But open your mouth to the Spirit, if you want to feel fine.’

The choir sang this and the rest of the verses, six in all, and we had a sheet to join in the chorus, which was accompanied by Pastor Finch on the bongos. The chorus went like this...

‘Not whisky rye not gin and dry not rum and coke for me,
Not brandy fizz but a Spiritual whizz puts the fire in me.’

Melanie stays, despite the peculiar nature of the service, and Jeanette’s love for her blossoms into an affair that sees her exorcised and finally forced to leave home and church.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

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...

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

Gatsby certainly knows how to show people a good time:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Week In December by Sebastian Faulks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

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...

The Shining by Stephen King

A bit like Jaws (qv) I came to The Shining having originally seen the film with its iconic performance by Jack Nicholson (“Here’s Johnny!”) and direction by Stanley Kubrick. A step back to the original source material is well worth the effort; The Shining is easily one of King’s best novels.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Disgraced English teacher and retired alcoholic Jack Torrance is hired to looked after The Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies during the closed winter season. Isolated there with his wife and son, whose telepathic abilities are dubbed shining, he succumbs to cabin fever and tries to kill his family, aided and abetted in no small way by the supernatural forces in the hotel itself. King sets this up in a few chapters, and then spends the next four hundred pages scaring heck out of the reader...

It’s certainly a drinker’s book. By all accounts King was shifting it a bit around the time of writing, and Jack’s struggles with the sauce are heartfelt and visceral. Sober for over a year since he broke his son’s arm, Jack has ‘white knuckled’ his withdrawal from the drink with no AA meetings or medical assistance, no help whatsoever, just his ever weakening resolve:

...a bitterly powerful wave of nostalgia swept over him, and the physical craving for a drink seemed to work itself up from his belly to his throat to his mouth and nose, shrivelling and wrinkling the tissues as it went, making them cry out for something wet and long and cold.

Having just been accused of trying to strangle his son, he has left his terrified wife locked in the staff quarters upstairs in the hotel and wandered into the deserted Colorado Lounge. Peering into the dark, he sees bottles on the empty shelves.

The shelves were totally bare. But now, lit only murkily by the light which filtered through from the dining room (which was itself only dimly lit because of the snow blocking the windows), he thought he saw ranks and ranks of bottles twinkling mutedly behind the bar, and siphons, and even beer dripping from the spigots of all three highly polished taps.

Hallucinating, play acting, reminiscing, Jack approaches the bar:

“Hi Lloyd,” he said. “A little slow tonight, isn’t it?” Lloyd said it was. Lloyd asked him what it would be. “Now, I’m really glad you asked me that,” Jack said, “Really glad. Because I happen to have two twenties and two tens in my wallet and I was afraid they’d be sitting right there until sometime next April. There isn’t a Seven-Eleven around here, would you believe it? And I thought they had Seven-Elevens on the fucking moon.” Lloyd sympathized. “So here’s what,” Jack said. “You set me up an even twenty martinis. An even twenty, just like that, kazang. One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on. You can do that, can’t you? You aren’t too busy?”

And somewhere in Jacks mind it’s very real indeed:

Jack contemplated the twenty imaginary drinks, the martini glasses blushing droplets of condensation, each with a swizzle poked through a plump green olive. He could almost smell gin on the air.

As Jack starts his inexorable descent into madness and violence, The Shining shows itself to be a masterpiece of psychological terror.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

One of my favourite books, this was first lent to me in January 1994 while I was doing my A-Levels and created quite an impression on me at the time, especially in the way that the gender of Winterson’s protagonist, a vulnerable and subversive Lothario, remains undeclared throughout the novel.

The story is about a love affair, or rather the end of an affair, ended by what appears at first to be the narrator’s noble intentions but turns out to be foolish heroics. After numerous affairs in their youth, (including one with a woman who blew up men’s lavatories and another with a giant who carried his midget parents around on his shoulders), the narrator tells us that they are in a steady and unexciting relationship with a woman who works with small furry animals at London Zoo. Into this staid existence comes Louise, an Antipodean redhead, married.

Their affair is passionate and destructive. The furry animal specialist leaves, distraught. Louise’s husband Elgin gets nasty. They leave it for three days but the pressure starts to get to our narrator:

Was I in sound mind and body? I took my temperature. No. I peered at my head in the mirror. No. Better go to bed close the curtains and get out the gin bottle. That was how Louise found me at six o’clock on the evening of the third day. She had been telephoning since noon but I had been too sodden to notice.

And after that? Bliss, happiness, cancer.

Louise has a rare form of leukaemia. The only person who says he knows how to treat her is her estranged husband. Arguing that saving Louise’s life is more important than their love, the narrator leaves her to get help from Elgin and holes up in Yorkshire. She finds work in a local wine bar, a far cry from her life in London with Louise:

The wine bar, otherwise known as ‘A Touch of Southern Comfort’, was staging a spring festival to attract back customers whose overdrafts still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas festival. For us who worked there, this meant dressing in lime-green body stockings with a simple crown of artificial crocuses about our heads. The drinks had a spring theme: March Hare Punch, Wild Oat Sling, Blue Tit. It didn’t matter what you ordered, the ingredients were all the same apart from the liquor base. I mixed cheap cooking brandy, Japanese whisky, something that called itself gin and the occasional filthy sherry with pulp orange juice, thin cream, cubes of white sugar and various kitchen colourings. Soda water to top up and at £5.00 a couple (we only served couples at Southern Comfort) cheap at the price during Happy Hour.

The narrator spends the next months fending off the advances of Gail, the wine bar’s owner, (fifty-three and as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse). After a pretty alcoholic evening, Gail sets out a few home truths:

Gail was drunk. She was so drunk that when her false eyelash fell into her soup she told the waiter it was a centipede. “I got something to tell you kiddo,” she said leaning down at me the way a zookeeper drops fish at a penguin. “Want it?” There was nothing else to have. Magic Pete’s was an all-night drinking club, low on amenity, high on booze. It was Gail’s revelation or find 50p for the jukebox. I didn’t have 50p. “You made a mistake.”

Desperate, the narrator runs back to London to find Louise, but she has vanished without a trace. She never took help from Elgin; she stayed in their shared flat but is no longer there. The book ends with a return to Yorkshire and Gail, who looks like she’s moving in... And in the last few lines, something wonderful, or is just as vague as he narrator’s real identity? (Interestingly enough, the last time I read it I was much more optimistic as to the outcome.) Why is the measure of love loss?

The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison

I got passed a review copy of this claustrophobic thriller a few months ago but only got around to reading it recently. An ultimately sinister take on the weekend in the country theme, The Last Weekend is a brilliant piece of writing.

Ian Goade and his wife Em are invited to stay for the summer bank holiday weekend with old university friends Ollie and Daisy. Narrating the story, Ian is quick to point out that Ollie and Daisy are a ‘golden couple’, both successful and rich, while it soon becomes apparent that Ian and Em are far from either.

Ollie resurrects a bet between the two men, made twenty years previously in which they play the best of three sports, the winner taking an insanely large amount of money from the other. Ian wins the first game, but unperturbed, Ollie takes everyone out for supper at the local fish restaurant close to the Norfolk cottage they’ve rented. He shows off, buying expensive wine:

...Ollie ordered a second bottle – a Chateau La Perle Blanche 1976. “When people talk bollocks about the greenhouse effect, I remember that summer,” he said, “The heatwave lasted six weeks...” “Steady with the drink,” Daisy said, as Ollie topped us up. “You’re driving.” “I’ll be fine,” Ollie said, laughing her off, “They haven’t introduced the breathalyser around here.”

But there’s a reason for his extravagance: Ollie has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and is convinced he’s dying. At least, that’s what Ian says, but as the story progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to work out whether Ian is delusional, or just not telling the truth. His alcoholic intake isn’t helping matters. Despite his protestations that he’s sober, they’re all knocking it back a fair bit:

On the dining table, there were five empty bottles, (one champagne, two reds and two whites), as well as two more in the living room. I found a cardboard box in the cupboard under the stairs and filled it as quietly as I could, adding an empty gin bottle (Ollie and I had been drinking G&Ts before supper) to fill the last space.

The dynamic is further upset by the arrival of Daisy’s artist friend Milo and his two daughters, pushing Ian into further misanthropy. Suspicious of Daisy’s feelings for Milo, he does something utterly unspeakable, before poisoning Ollie’s mind with suspicion. Over a twenty year old Glenmorangie, tanged with bitterness, he accuses them of having an affair. Ollie gets ridiculously drunk over supper, making snide comments at Milo and topping up everyone’s glasses:

I put my hand over the glass as Ollie tried to pour me a dessert wine but consented to the red. He filled his own glass at the same time, then half emptied it in one swig. Marooned at the head of the table, he looked lost...

When Ollie makes a bet with Milo that he can’t draw a good likeness of anyone with a pencil and paper and isn’t a real artist, Ian concludes that alcohol had mugged him and scarpered with his brains. It’s time for Ollie to go to bed:

Smiling and nodding, he grabbed the edge of the table with both hands, a manoeuvre that pivoted him into a standing position but also jerked the table. Several glasses tipped over. The wobble sent him lurching backwards but he steadied himself on the wall behind and, with great deliberation, like someone avoiding stepping on cracks, he made his way across the room and down the corridor.

Oh well, there’s still one more day of the bank holiday to come, and one more contest yet to play. Surely things can’t get any worse than they are already?

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I’ve spent the last week reading Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm and although it’s not a drinker’s novel by a long chalk, I’ve found one reference so far that I felt would do nicely for the blog.

Flora Poste, expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, descends on her extended family at their farm in Sussex and sets to bringing order into their chaotic and bizarre lives. Out one evening with cousin Amos, who preaches hellfire sermons at the Church of the Quivering Brethren, Flora escapes the chapel and hides in a tearoom opposite. Unfortunately, she runs into another refugee from London, Mybug, a thundering crashing bore of a man.

Mybug is writing a book about the Brontës. Apparently, the three sisters didn’t write any of the novels for which they were famed, but passed off the work of their brother Branwell as their own:

“You see, it’s obvious that it’s his book and not Emily’s. No woman could have written that. It’s male stuff... I’ve worked out a theory about his drunkenness, too – you see, he wasn’t really a drunkard. He was a tremendous genius, a sort of second Chatterton – and his sisters hated him because of his genius.”

Flora is forced to sit through even more of this piffle as Mybug warms to his theme:

“They wanted to have him under their noses so that they could steal his work and sell it to buy more drink... They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot. Branwell, who adored her, used to pretend to get drunk at the Black Bull in order to get gin for Anne. The landlord wouldn’t let him have it if Branwell hadn’t built up – with what devotion, God only knows – that false reputation as a brilliant, reckless, idle drunkard.”

Well, it’s a theory, I suppose...

My Summer of Love by Helen Cross

I picked this up after watching Pawel Pawelikowski’s beautiful film version, but Helen Cross’s stunning debut novel is much more raw and visceral than its dramatisation. I read it again for the blog and found it even more spellbinding and shocking than I had the first time.


Bored by her dysfunctional home life shared with her publican father and overweight stepbrother, PorkChop, fifteen-year-old Mona spends her time drinking, playing on fruit machines and starting out a minor criminal career of petty burglary. Against the backdrop of the escalating miners' strike, Mona meets the rich and beautiful Tamsin.

Tamsin seduces Mona with a terrible lie that her sister has starved herself to death and Mona is quickly besotted by Tamsin’s every word:

She had pronounced my name heavily, the way Lindy used to when emphasising the meaning she originally intended. Tamsin’s eyelids were drooping. That was the first time that it occurred to me that she was a drinker. A true, heavy, girl drinker... Oh praise the Lord she was a drinker!

Mona plots to spend the summer with Tamsin who is alone, ignored by her preoccupied and selfish parents. Tam shows her around their big house:

“Next, Mona, proof that you don’t have to die to go to heaven,” she said when I caught up with her at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ll like this one darling.” “Oh?” I exclaimed brightly. “The cellar. Rows and rows of dusty bottles of booze just waiting for girl drinkers.”

Drunken antics escalate from high jinx to malicious and increasingly destructive pranks. As Mona gets herself deeper and deeper into trouble, her devotion to Tamsin is the only thing that keeps her going. When she finally discovers that Tam has been lying to her all summer she is distraught, but agrees one last attempt to run away together:

“Let’s go,” whispered Tam, pushing her damp fingers through mine. “Let’s get some wicked liqueur first, honey,” I said, and lifted a bottle from the new drinks tray which rested on the sideboard in the hall.

Demented on gin, they stumble into the unfortunate PorkChop and the summer suddenly gets a lot nastier...

London's Best Pubs by Peter Haydon

A quick foray back into non-fiction this week for Peter Haydon’s beautifully produced guide to London’s most interesting and unusual pubs. I include it because it contains not one but two pictures of my favourite pub cat, Tom Paine at the Seven Stars, but also a rather fine historical introduction to the public houses of London.


Descended from coaching inns, taverns and alehouses, the London pub as an institution has changed considerably over the last few hundred years. Back in the 1700s, for example, the drink of the tavern was wine, until wars with France conspired to disrupt supply. Portugal came to the rescue:

Our long-standing friendship with Portugal meant that port was the popular tavern drink of the 18th century. Consumed as it was in very large volumes, port can be considered largely responsible for having made the 18th century the era of gout and the skull-splitting hangover.

William III’s policy to wean the population off wine popularised gin instead. He succeeded only in making the nation drunk. Indeed, until this point, alcohol wasn’t really considered particularly harmful:

...with gin came the revelation that there was an alcoholic drink that was actually bad for people.

After the gin fevers of the 18th and 19th centuries came the Temperance movement and drink as a political issue. London’s taverns, gin palaces and inns have been shaped by licensing acts, brewery speculation, social mores and trends and have arrived in the beginning of 21st century as unique and remarkable public spaces. Haydon describes them thus:

For me, the chief virtue of a pub is that it can almost anything you want it to be. Provided you do the landlord the courtesy of buying a drink you can stay as long as you like, be as gregarious or reticent as you like and be as idle or as studious as you like. You can enjoy the company of all or engage in solitary reverie. You can talk to strangers, make lifelong friends, catch up on gossip, commit to memory a cracking good joke for later use, hold forth on any subject close to your heart and leave whenever you wish (within opening hours, of course). The pub is egalitarian, libertarian, non-judgemental and subversive. For these reasons alone, I rate it as priceless.

He helpfully includes an excellent quote from Dr Johnson, regular at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese:

No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

I’ll quite happily raise a glass to that.

Tom Brown’s School Days byThomas Hughes

The ultimate public school novel, Tom Brown’s School Days follows Thomas Hughes’s eponymous hero through his education in the 1830s, much of it taking place at Rugby School under Doctor Arnold.


So far all very worthy, and not too much about drink, although flicking through the book, I was amused to see the boys drinking beer. Probably of the ‘small’ variety. Anyway, it’s Flashy the school bully and his exploits I was looking for. Later resurrected by George MacDonald Fraser for an excellent series of novels, Flashman is a toady and a creep who after persecuting Tom Brown and his chum ‘Scud’ East all term, finally goes to far and ‘roasts’ young Brown over a fire. (Boo, hiss!)

Flashy is first encountered on the rugger field, playing the game in a most ungentlemanly fashion. Later at supper, the head of the winning team stands up on the table to make a truly gushing speech, firstly about how well the team played (hurrah!) then to impart a word of warning about the vices available in the local boozer.

Then there's fuddling about in the public-house, and drinking bad spirits, and punch, and such rot-gut stuff. That won't make good drop-kicks or chargers of you, take my word for it. You get plenty of good beer here, and that's enough for you; and drinking isn't fine or manly, whatever some of you may think of it.

Flashy, as is well known, comes to a bad end. After scorching Tom Brown, he eventually finds himself thrown out for drunkenness:

One fine summer evening Flashman had been regaling himself on gin-punch, at Brownsover; and, having exceeded his usual limits, started home uproarious. He fell in with a friend or two coming back from bathing, proposed a glass of beer, to which they assented, the weather being hot, and they thirsty souls, and unaware of the quantity of drink which Flashman had already on board. The short result was, that Flashy became beastly drunk.

Doctor Arnold, who had long had his eye on Flashman, arranged for his withdrawal next morning, and he exits the novel in disgrace. The book is frankly the poorer for that.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

The wonderful thing about this blog is that I have been lent several books with suggestions for posting; today’s excerpt is from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a man who knew a few things about alcohol.

I cold quote large parts of the book; there are copious references to drinking, all in Chandler’s deadpan prose which is a thrill to read. I’ll kick off with a cocktail recipe. My friend Rich who passed the book on to me, reported that the description of gimlets is so vivid, you can almost taste the lime.

A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.

The doomed Terry Lennox, who introduces Chandler’s PI, Phillip Marlowe, to gimlets expands on the theme of alcohol:

“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”

There are obviously only so many gimlets you can drink...

Staying On by Paul Scott

A sort of coda to the more famous Raj Quartet, Staying On describes the demise of Colonel ‘Tusker’ Smalley, who has remained in India with his wife Lucy after the end of British Rule. Narrated variously through the eyes of Lucy, Mr Bhoolabhoy – owner of the hotel where the Smalleys live – and Ibrahim, the Smalley’s manservant, it describes the final chapter in the story of a particular class and their way of life.


I’ve read the book twice now and it had the rare effect of making me laugh aloud several times while on the train, as well as making me distinctly misty eyed between Clapham Junction and Vauxhall. I also saw a stage version, which despite the best efforts of a cast including Prunella Scales and Saeed Jaffrey, I felt was not a roaring success.

Scott makes no attempt to disguise the British reputation in India for putting away a formidable amount of alcohol and there are many references to it in the book, from the Monday night drinks that Tusker enjoys with Mr Bhoolabhoy, where he often persuades ‘Billy-Boy to “Have another peg” to Ibrahim cleaning Lucy’s jewellery in gin. Then drinking the gin. “The Shadow of the disapproving Prophet fell on him. ‘Waste not want not,’ he said aloud.”

My favourite boozy vignette, however, comes from Ibrahim recollecting what his father told him about his previous employer, Colonel Moxon-Greife, and how he got drunk at Mess dinners:

“First, my son,” his father told him, “Colonel Sahib speaking with much vitality, but in a very discreet way, understand? Then towards end of dinner he stops speaking at random, and sits at attention. Speaking only when spoken to, but always speaking to the point. Hand always on glass. Glass always being refilled... After that immovable. We take him out in his chair. It is special chair with iron circular attachments, through which poles are passed so that it becomes like dooli. Some fellows come in with poles. The poles are passed through the rings. We carry him out and across the road to his bungalow. I put him to bed. At six o’clock next morning he is on parade. A real Burra Sahib.”

Apparently on Ladies’ nights at the Mess, the Colonel would only imbibe to the point where he could still escort the Memsahib back to the bungalow himself...

Blue Mondays by Arnon Grunberg

I chanced across a copy of this in Guildford Library a few years ago. With its fruity cover and lure of the seedy side of life, I picked it up.



The narrator is a nihilistic youth chronicling his dead end life in Amsterdam; firstly his teenage years and his amorous pursuit of a girl called Rosie, then his early twenties spent drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. Hardly elevating, but there’s something about the detached prose that I liked, and I wasn’t alone. Apparently written on a dare, it sold 70,000 copies in the Netherlands and went on to be published in translation globally.

The book is awash with booze but his father’s sozzled performance at his son’s bar mitzvah seems as good an example as any:

After the service there was a reception, and for some reason there was no vodka, only Dutch gin. So my father had tossed back quite a few little glasses of Dutch gin even before he started to shake people’s hands...
That evening my father sat next to me in a grey suit that had been made specially for the occasion. He didn’t open his mouth. But in the middle of a speech by some rabbi he suddenly pulled me toward him by the jacket and whispered, “No more gin for me ever again. It makes me go all to pieces.”

Curiously, when I tried to find the book in the library a year later, it had disappeared from their catalogue...