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 Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

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...

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.

Couples by John Updike

I’ve enjoyed Updike in the past, but for some reason struggled with this one, his 1968 novel about the adulterous affairs between a set of ten families living in a small Massachusetts town in the mid 1960s. Apparently, it’s frank depictions of the sexual act and the post-pill paradise garnered it some notoriety; maybe I’m jaded, but I found it overwritten and below the author’s usual standard.


Anyway, this is a booze blog, not a sex blog, so on to the drinking. Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book, which describes the far too long a cocktail time before lunch. Foxy Whitman is a newcomer to the town of Tarbox, having just arrived there from Cambridge with her husband Ken:

To put herself at ease she had drunk too much. Under the mechanical urging of her inflexibly frowning host she had accepted two martinis and then, with such stupid false girlishness, a third; feeling a squirm of nausea, she had gone to the kitchen seeking a dilution of vermouth and had whispered her secret to her hostess, a drunken girlish thing to do that would have outraged Ken, yet the kind of thing she felt was desired of her in this company.

Ah, diluted vermouth. Perfect for morning sickness... All manner of social convention can be observed when alcohol is produced:

Frank Appleby was given two bottles to uncork, local-liquor-store Bordeaux, and went around the table twice, pouring once for the ladies, and then for the men. In Cambridge the Chianti was passed from hand to hand without ceremony.

Well, we’re not in Cambridge anymore...

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

I spotted this in the Shoe Lane library the other day and with the blog in mind I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never read any of the 007 novels before and rather enjoyed it, although I’d probably not disagree too much with the theory that the novel goes downhill a bit after the Baccarat game.


Published in 1953, Casino Royale seems very much of its time; Bond is a hard living womaniser with a faint whiff of prejudice about him... There’s an amusing moment with Fleming notes as an aside that he has just lit his seventieth cigarette of the day. Naturally, a man who refuses to do anything by halves will have a corresponding appetite for drinking as well. There’s certainly a panache about how he asks for a martini:

Bond insisted on ordering Leiter’s Haig-and-Haig ‘on the rocks’ and then he looked carefully at the barman. “A dry martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

Bond is, of course, a complete professional. He’s doing this for his country and knows when it’s time to stop:

He called for the bill and took a last mouthful of champagne. It tasted bitter, as the first glass too many always does.

Almost makes we want to dig out my dinner jacket...