The Box of Delights by John Masefield

A topical post for Christmas; The Box of Delights is Masefield's fantasy of magic, dastardly deeds and box full of wonders that allows its owner to travel great distances instantly, to shrink in size, or to see into the past. Schoolboy Kay Harker, on his Christmas hols from school, becomes the guardian of the box when it's passed to him by a Punch & Judy man, and he spends the rest of the book trying to keep it out of hands of master criminal Abner Brown.

In his desperation to get hold of the box, Brown has kidnapped the bishop of Tatchester, along with most of the local clergy, and the millennial celebrations of the first Christmas service held at Tatchester Cathedral might be ruined. Kay must release the bishop as well as keep the box out of harm's way...

The action comes fairly thick and fast, although I rather felt that Masefield was making the whole thing up as he went along having sketched out the basics of the plot on the back of an envelope. He makes frequent allusions to his naval background and a cohort of Abner Brown's band of ne'er-do-well's turn out to be the crew of a pirate ship. The international drink of piracy is of course rum. Kay, shrunk down to the size of a mouse, passes them on his way to Brown's hideout, and they're in their cups:

As they slipped past the open door Kay glanced in. Oh, what a terrible scene was within! There, gathered round a table, lurching, shouting, swaying and clutching at each other to keep their balance, were the Wolves of the Gulf, all Benito's crew, whom the Rat would have described as marine cellarmen. On the table round which they lurched and carrolled were the remnants of a ham-bone without any dish, and a big bowl of rum punch. As Kay glanced, one of the ruffians fell forward with his head into the bowl. He splashed the rum over his head and another tried to set fire to him with a candle, but was too unsteady in his aim. All these men wore sea-boots, rough red caps and red aprons. No words can describe the villainy of their faces, all bronzed with tropical suns, purple with drink, scarlet with battle and bloated from evil living. "Sing diddle-diddle-dol," they cried. Then they drew their pistols and fired them at the ceiling, so that the plaster came down with a clatter. 

Fortunately, they're too juiced up to notice Kay spying on them, and he manages to fly to safety on the way back by exploiting the box to 'go swift'. Naturally, Kay saves the day in the end; the bishop is returned to his cathedral, Brown meets a watery end, and the whole thing is revealed to have been a dream all along and Kay is back at the beginning of the Christmas holiday. Hurrah!

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

Burgess’s magnum opus begins with one of the more striking opening sentences in English literature: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” So start the memoirs of Kenneth Toomey, successful if mediocre writer and playwright, homosexual, and brother-in-law to the late pope, Gregory XVII.

Roughly spanning the period from the Great War to 1980, Toomey’s dubious recollections are being gathered for the purpose of canonisation of Pope Gregory, Toomey being witness to a ‘miracle’ performed while he was still Don Carlo Campanati. Toomey is unable to stick to the story, however, and meanders across the events of the twentieth century, a few of which take place inside Nazi Germany. In 1937 one of his novels has been turned into a film by the regime and is being shown at a gala hosted by Goebbels. Kenneth finds the whole event pretty ghastly from the start, although the appearance of sparkling German wine improves his spirits:

I passed on into the huge brilliantly lighted reception room. The only uniforms were on the members of the Hitlerjugend, delectable boys with straight hair, probably performers in Hitlerjunge Quex. They carried the canapés round; gloved and whiteclad elders brought chilled Sekt, a wine I have always preferred to champagne.

It’s quite a spread of food and drink, although Ken steers clear of the grub:

...not only goulash, but a kind of rich soldier’s stew with bobbing sausages, pork cutlets with mushrooms and radishes, beef in a sauces of spiced mugwort, wobbling pink pyramids of saffron custard, a cream cake in the shape of a fylfot, a Tower of Babel chocolate confection reeking like a barbershop of rum, berries of the German forests, cheese the hue of lemons or of leprosy, and, like a warning of heroic times in store, wedges of tough black bread. I ate nothing but drank thirstily of the ample Sekt, while the two hundred or so others spooned in hard, some of them sweating. A godling in mufti who I did not doubt was of the special SS intake in whom not even a filled tooth was acceptable said to me, accurately, “You do not eat.” “No, I do not eat. But I drink.” and I drank, promptly to be refilled. “Danke sehr.”

By the time the big speech by Goebbels is about to start Kenneth is feeling distinctly green about the gills. The poisonous little man begins his oration, bubbling with anti-Semitism and pomposity, while Ken takes a turn for the worse:

I had felt sick before and been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit. The Reichsminister seemed to have three or four closely typed pages still to get through. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be constructed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance. When it got back to listening to Goebbels he was on to point seven, which did not seem very different to point one.

It’s an inauspicious start to his stay in the country, but Kenneth, as his memoirs testify, is certainly used to living a colourful life...

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

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.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

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...

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...

Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières

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...

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

The classic pirate adventure, Treasure Island introduced the world (and myself as a young boy) to Long John Silver, the Black Spot and X marks the spot. Stevenson’s novel is full of characters described as a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like. With pedigree like that it can be rightly assumed that the book is soused in rum.


The author’s attitude to the sailors’ favourite tipple is actually rather damning: nobody who indulges in rum comes to any good. (The only abstemious pirate is old Long John himself, who is sober enough to save his skin when he’s given the Black Spot by convincing his would be executioners that they have damned themselves by ripping a page from the Bible for their summons.)

The novel starts with the arrival of Billy Bones at the Admiral Benbow inn. Once first mate to the infamous pirate Flint, Bones is now a derelict old soak with one eye permanently over his shoulder. The book’s narrator, Jim Hawkins, remembers him holding court in the bar at night, knocking back the drink:

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining in for dear life... Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

Too much rum isn’t good for a man, especially if he’s upset his old friends. Attacked by a scurvy old tar by the name of Black Dog, Bones has a stroke; although all he can think about is one more drink:

"Jim," says he, "rum"; and as he spoke, he reeled a little, and caught himself with one hand against the wall. "Are you hurt?" cried I. "Rum," he repeated. "I must get away from here. Rum! Rum!"

The doctor reads him the riot act:

“...what I have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won't kill you, but if you take one you'll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you don't break off short, you'll die—do you understand that?—die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible.”

Bones isn’t convinced, and begs Jim for a glass of the old poison:

“And now you see, mate, I'm pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, you'll bring me one noggin of rum, now, won't you, matey... I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab"; and he ran on again for a while with curses. "Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges," he continued in the pleading tone. "I can't keep 'em still, not I. I haven't had a drop this blessed day. That doctor's a fool, I tell you. If I don't have a drain o' rum, Jim, I'll have the horrors; I seen some on 'em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I'm a man that has lived rough, and I'll raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldn't hurt me. I'll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim."

Rattling with the DTs, Bones’ number is about to come up. When Blind Pew tips him the Black Spot a few days later, he drops dead of stroke number two. Everyone else blames the rum, of course...

Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard

I had the privilege of reviewing one of Elmore Leonard’s books a while back for the FT, so while leafing around the library looking for inspiration, I decided to pick up something from his extensive back catalogue.

Rum Punch is probably better known through Quentin Tarantino’s film adaptation Jackie Brown, which is a shame, because it’s a tightly written crime thriller that is more than worth investigating in its own right.

Odell Robbie sells guns to criminals, but his operation is under the surveillance of the feds and when they arrest Jackie Burke who ships his money into Miami from the Caribbean he’s under pressure to get her out of the picture, fast.

Unfortunately for Odell, some of his accomplices don’t work to his level of professionalism. Louis Gara, for example; a three time jailbird who knows Odell from Detroit. Louis has lost his edge since he’s been inside:

Four years staring at the walls and drinking shine, the man was burnt out, useless.

You see, in this business, you have to stay sharp:

Louis was thinking he should not drink rum. Or he should find a glass and have another one... He had started this afternoon in the bar at the Ocean Mall, Casey’s, hiding out from Melanie, thinking of her as a female cannibal. Bourbon this afternoon, rum this evening, nothing to eat in between...

So when the final pick up takes place and Louis has to get back to his car, he needs to remember where he’s left it:

Sometimes when he was living in South Beach and drinking a lot he’d forget where he parked and have to roam up and down the streets. He’d had a few pops this afternoon before he’d picked her up.

That kind of sloppiness will get you more than a hangover. Let’s just say, Louis doesn’t get to go to prison a fourth time...

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

This entry came about after a discussion with my cousin about our mutual antipathy to Thomas Hardy which doesn’t exactly sound like a recommendation... However, I then remembered that the Mayor of Casterbridge opens with the infamous scene where a man sells his wife at auction while drunk, so I reckoned that for the purposes of 120 Units it was worth another look.


Field labourer Michael Henchard arrives at a country fair with his wife and daughter. Spotting the refreshments tent, is about to slip under the sign Good Home-brewed Beer, Ale, and Cyder when his wife insists that they go for a pot of furmity instead. In retrospect this might have been a mistake... Furmity is wholesome stuff; a mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, but it’s a little dull on its own. Henchard turns back to the woman serving the slop and catches her eye:

He winked to her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its contents, and tipped the same into the man's furmity. The liquor poured in was rum... The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.

Before long, Henchard is royally Brahmsed and starts to get argumentative with his wife. There’s a blazing row and he sets up an auction, finally selling her to a sailor for five guineas. Silence descends as the transaction is completed:

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load.

In the way of Nineteenth Century literature, Michael becomes hugely successful and eventually attains the title of Mayor of Casterbridge, but his shameful past comes back to haunt him. Finally ruined and reduced to vagrancy, Henchard leaves Casterbridge and dies in a hovel, leaving a brief will:

…no murners walk behind me at my funeral, & that no flours be planted on my grave, & that no man remember me. To this I put my name, Michael Henchard.

And one day I suppose I ought to read the rest of the book...

The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson

My friend Rory reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary which I recall reading not long after it came out in 1998, although it was actually written in 1958 but was left unpublished for four decades before Thompson finally released it.


It was worth the reappraisal of a re-read. Thompson’s prose hadn’t sharpened up to the Gonzo craziness of his Fear And Loathing period, but it’s still brilliantly written. The story is narrated by Paul Kemp, a thirty year old ‘vagrant journalist’ who has taken a job on at a failing English language paper in Puerto Rico. He falls in with the unpredictable and violent Yeamon and his beguiling girlfriend, Chenault, who leaves him stewing in his own lust.

As the title suggests, alcohol plays a big part in the novel and it courses through the pages, each drunken outrage soaked up the next day with beer at breakfast and then bottle after bottle of rum. When Sala, the staff photographer on the paper, claims he feels like he’s one hundred years old at thirty, I could feel the three day hangover.

The frustration of an aimless life spent in the sapping heat is palpable:

The only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn’t help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster.

It’s a sozzled minor masterpiece that comes down to earth in the end with a hell of a bump, as always happens with rum...

The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek

A must for any literary booze blog, here's the legendary toper, practical joker and Czech hero, Jaroslav Hašek.



The Good Soldier Švejk was a present for my 18th birthday from my parents and I therefore read it at the start of a period in my life I may look back on one day as the ‘pub years’. Švejk himself is a national icon, and in Hašek’s satire on the Great War there are copious references to drinking. I also have Cecil Parrott's translation to thank for adding the phrase 'thoroughly pickled' to my drinker's lexicon.

Flicking through the book at random, I find this episode where a boozy chaplain knocks out a whole bottle of rum he’s taken off a corporal:

“Jesus Mary,” gasped the corporal, observing that after a thorough swig half the bottle had disappeared.
“Oh you rogue, you!” said the chaplain, smiling and winking knowingly at the volunteer, “You’re even taking the name of the Lord in vain into the bargain The Lord must punish you for this.”
The venerable father again took a swig from the flat bottle and giving it to Švejk gave the imperious order: “Bottoms up!”
“War is war,” Švejk said good-humouredly to the corporal as he returned him the empty bottle, the emptiness being confirmed by a strange glint in the corporal’s eyes such as can only appear in a mental patient.

However, my favourite reference to drinking in the book has to come from a Colonel Shröder complaining about the capacity of the new intake to the Austrian army:

“...And the younger officers don’t even know how to hold their drink. It’s not yet twelve o’clock and around this table as you see there are five people drunk already. There were times when we sat for two days and the more we drank the more sober we were. We went on pouring beer, wine and liqueurs into ourselves without stop. Today there’s no longer the real military spirit...”

The drinker's lament: things just aren't what they used to be...