A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood’s 1962 novella is a day in the life of George, university lecturer, British expat and ageing curmudgeon. He drifts around the home he used to share with Tom, his partner of many years, who died a year before in a car accident. Now George grumbles about the local kids winding him up, the homophobic fulminations of the letters page in the local paper, and the inability of his students to read the books he has set them.

George’s friend Charlotte is another expat, grieving for the breakdown of her marriage and the estrangement of her only son. She persuades George to come round for supper, and invitation he reluctantly accepts when he realises he can’t face another night alone in his house. He walks over to her house in the nearby hills where she’s promised a stew, and a couple of drinks:

“Have I told you Geo – no, I’m sure I haven’t; I’ve already made two New Year’s resolutions – only they’re effective immediately. The first is, I’m going to admit that I loathe bourbon.” (She pronounces it like the dynasty, not the drink.) “I’ve been pretending not to, ever since I came to this country – all because Buddy drank it. But, let’s face it, who do I think I’m kidding now?” She smiles at George very bravely and brightly, reassuring him that this is not a prelude to an attack of the Buddy-blues; then quickly continues, “My other resolution is that I’m going to stop denying that that infuriating accusation is true; Women do mix drinks too strong, damn it! I suppose it’s part of our terrible anxiety to please... So let’s begin the new régime as of now, shall we? You come and mix your own drink and mine too – and I’d like a vodka and tonic, please.” She has obviously had at least a couple already. her hands fumble as she lights a cigarette. (The Indonesian ashtray is full, as usual, of lipstick-marked stubs.)

The conversation quickly turns to Charlotte’s disastrous marriage and George is sent back to refill the glasses:

George goes into the kitchen, fixes another round. (They seem to be drinking up much faster now. This one really should be the last.)

After a long evening of putting the world to rights, and perhaps even making a plan for the future, George finally decides it might be a good idea to go home:

George turns, swings open the house door, takes one stride and – OOPS! – very nearly falls head first down the steps – all of them – oh, and unthinkably much farther – ten, fifty, one hundred million feet into the bottomless black night. Only his grip on the door handle saves him.

Fortunately, Charlotte doesn’t see the near catastrophe. George makes it home in one piece... before setting out on a whim to a local bar where he gets drunk with one of his students. It’s an eventful twenty four hours, and when his ticker gives up the next morning, it feels a reasonable send off.

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The film brought my career to a standstill...

One Day by David Nicholls

I wasn’t sure what to expect from David Nicholl’s One Day, but the hype behind its release as ‘a major motion picture’ and the cheesy cover on my edition using a poster of the film didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. This was a shame, because although the device of recounting the lives of two young people on the same day each year seems a little forced at first (its full impact isn’t felt until the end of the novel) it is a wonderfully skewed prism with which to analyse the triumphs and disappointments of life between youth and middle-age.


Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley meet on their graduation day at Edinburgh University, 15 July 1988. They spend the night together before going their separate ways, promising to stay in touch. The book then follows them each July 15th for the next twenty years as their friendship develops into a ‘will they won’t they’ love affair.

By the mid nineties, Dexter is a successful presenter on ‘post pub’ television, front man for an oafish late-night show called largin’ it, and living a hedonistic high life in central London. Flush with cash, and knocking back the drink and drugs like they’re going out of fashion, on this particular 15th of July, he is supposed to be driving back to the family home to see his mother, who is dying. Unfortunately, he has been out on the tiles the night before with dubious acquaintances, pilled up the eyeballs on ecstasy:

On the 15th of July 1993 the sun rises at 05.01 a.m. Dexter watches it from the back of a decrepit mini-cab as he returns home from a stranger’s flat in Brixton. Not a stranger exactly, but a brand new friend, one of many he is making these days, this time a graphic designer called Gibbs or Gibbsy, or was it maybe Biggsy, and his friend, this mad girl called Tara, a tiny birdlike thing with woozy, heavy eyelids and a wide scarlet mouth who doesn’t talk much, preferring to communicate through the medium of massage.

Only a few minutes beforehand the drugs have worn off and in a flash of realisation, Dexter is acquainted with the fact that he’s in a flat in SW9 with people he doesn’t know and that he needs to get home immediately. After he’s had a drink that is:

It is starting to get light. Blackbirds are singing on Coldharbour Lane and he has the sensation, so vivid that it is almost an hallucination, that he is entirely hollow; empty, like an easter egg. Tara the masseuse has created a great twisted knot of tension between his shoulders, the music has stopped, and someone on the bed is asking for tea, and everyone wants tea, tea, tea, so Dexter disentangles himself and crosses to the immense fridge, the same model as his own, sinister and industrial like something you’d find in a genetics lab. He opens the door and stares blankly inside. A salad is rotting in its bag, the plastic swollen and about to burst. His eyes flicker in their sockets, making his vision judder one last time, and coming back into focus he sees a bottle of vodka. Hiding behind the fridge door he drinks a good two inches, washing it down with a sour gulp of apple juice that fizzes repulsively on his tongue.

Back at his bachelor pad, he tries to get it all together, with a spectacular lack of success:

Dexter’s bed is imported, Italian, a low, bare black platform that stands in the centre of the large bare room like a stage or a wrestling ring, both of which functions is sometimes serves. He lies there awake at 9.30, dread and self-loathing combined with sexual frustration. His nerve-endings have been turned up high and there is an unpleasant taste in his mouth, as if his tongue has been coated with hairspray. Suddenly he leaps up and pads across high-gloss black floorboards to the Swedish kitchen. There in the freezer compartment of his large, industrial fridge, he finds a bottle of vodka and he pours an inch into his glass then adds the same amount of orange juice. He reassures himself with the thought that, as he hasn’t been to sleep yet, this is not the first drink of the day, but the last drink of last night. Besides, the whole taboo about drinking during daytime is exaggerated; they do it in Europe. The trick is to use the uplift of the booze to counteract the downward tumble of the drugs; he is getting drunk to stay sober which when you think about it is actually pretty sensible. Encouraged by this logic, he pours another inch and a half of vodka, puts on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack and swaggers to the shower. Half and hour later he is still in the bathroom, wondering what he can do to stop the sweating. He has changed his shirt twice, showered in cold water, but still the perspiration comes bubbling up on his back and forehead, oily and viscous like vodka which perhaps is what it is. He looks at his watch. Late already. He decides that he’ll try driving with the windows down.

His arrival at his parents home in a disgraceful state doesn’t auger well for the rest of the day, which gets progressively worse as he tops himself up with wine. Sent home on the train after his father tells him he’s too drunk to drive, he tries to phone Emma, but gets her answer phone instead. The course of true love, it seems, does not want to run smoothly...

London Tales by David Edward

Another wander into the library and another title picked on a whim, this time London Tales; a collection of short stories and little vignettes from the city, which are thought provoking and troubling at the same time.


In the story Adult Education, a conversation takes place between a young woman, Sabrina, and her employer, Lindsay. Lindsay, in her thirties and a heavy drinker, is just about to go away and Sabrina is finishing her last day at work, although the nature of that work is never made clear:

The living room door opens and Lindsay walks in with her handbag sandwiched under her arm and dragging two wheeled suitcases behind her. Sabrina watches in silence as she leaves the cases in the middle of the room and steps over to the wine rack in the corner... Lindsay examines the label on a bottle of wine. It’s the third she’s opened in a couple of hours.

Lindsay appears to have acquired the drinker’s habit of putting the world to rights, and she decides to tell Sabrina how things tick:

“Thirty-five years old. Three ex-husbands in six years; childless; a tendency to drink more that any sensible person should – take more risks than any sensible person should. But one thing I do know – one thing I’ve found...” “OK, here it comes.” “...is that, while constancy to causes may be a good thing, sometimes – just sometimes – constancy to individuals, especially young guys, seldom leads further than the bottom of a JD bottle. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Divorced and currently single, Lindsay needles Sabrina about her relationship with her boyfriend Cyrus. Lindsay it seems, is hedging her bets on the bottle:

Lindsay gives up on the selection in the wine rack and heads into the kitchen. She returns with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a full glass in the other. She slumps on to the sofa and, with her free hand, she opens up her handbag.

She is now determined that Sabrina should join her on a last night out together before she leaves. While Sabrina tells her that she won’t go, Lindsay bets that if she were alone with Cyrus, she could seduce him in seconds:

“You started drinking too early. I’d better go.” Sabrina rises to her feet. “Yep. Best to run perhaps.” Sabrina checks her phone and lets it fall into her leather tote bag. She moves slowly to the door. “You seriously think you can get my Cyrus to go for you?” she asks, with a teasing lilt in her voice and casually turning to Lindsay. Lindsay gives her a fixed stare. “That’s clear.” “What’s clearer is that you’ve been on the sauce too long.”

Sabrina reluctantly agrees to put her boyfriend to the test and sends him a text message to tell him to come around to Lindsay’s house. She leaves Lindsay, looking like a geriatric stripper as she ladles out the snorts, and hides in the back room. Cyrus arrives and is offered a drink by an over accommodating Lindsay:

She says nothing for a while, but saunters back to him, glass poised between her fingers. “The moment’s all we have in life,” she eventually says. “Just the moment.” She hands him back his drink, this time with ice. “You’ve got to grab it.”

He certainly makes a grab for it. And as Sabrina comes into the room to remonstrate, things get more than a little out of control...

Capital by John Lanchester

It’s been an interesting few years since the wheels came off the world of finance. An atmosphere that lends itself to apocalyptic predictions develops and everything is freighted with a feeling of ‘the last days’ or ‘the end of’ rather than another variation of the same old plod which sustains us through quieter times. The same atmosphere also gives writers the idea that they have to capture this spirit of the age on paper. Sebastian Faulks got in first with his disappointing A Week in December. I’m pleased to say that Capital is a much better book.


Like A Week in December, Capital features a host of different characters whose station in life holds a certain grip on the public imagination: the banker holding out for his £1,000,000 bonus, his awful wife, the premiership footballer, the asylum seeker who works as a traffic warden, the young man getting mixed up with Islamist firebrands. Another character is Zbigniew, a Polish builder and decorator who shares a room in Croydon with his old friend Piotr, both over in Blighty for a few years so that they can save enough money to take back home and help their families.

Zbigniew has got himself mixed up with an English lady who with all charity, can only be described as an emotional boa constrictor. He decides to tell Piotr all about it, a confession made a lot easier with a drink in hand:

At the Polish club in Balham, Zbigniew sat with a bison-grass vodka and a bottle of Żywiec beer, waiting for Piotr... Piotr came in, looked over, saw what he was drinking, made a sign with two fingers pointing up in curls at the sides of his head – their private gesture for bison, therefore for bison-grass vodka – and came over from the bar with two more vodkas and two more Żywiecs. They touched glasses and downed the vodkas and then took a shot of beer.

Zbigniew explains the situation, only for Piotr to get on his moral high horse and inform him that he has trapped the lady into falling in love with him, and that it will only end in trouble.

Zbigniew, because he had not been expecting this, and because much of it was right, felt himself become very angry. His head filled up with blood; he was exalted and exhilarated by rage. “You say this because you are a priest? A priest hearing my confession, or giving a denunciation from the pulpit?” Piotr got up and walked out. And that was that. Zbigniew sat there and drank his beer and vodka, then another round, then another, and went home drunker than he had been for a long time.

Still, he’s in the right place to get pissed. He reflects on this the night when he finally gives Davina her papers:

The bar was crowded for a Tuesday night – but then it was always crowded, like everywhere else around this part of town. If Zbigniew had to sum up London in a single image, there would be a number of candidates: a group of young Poles sitting in a flat watching television in their socks; two dustbins outside a house, with a plank of wood balanced between them, to reserve a parking space for a builder’s van; the Common on a sunny weekend day, with exposed white skin stretching to the horizon. But the winner would be the high street on a busy evening, full of young people bent on getting drunk – the frenzy of it, the particular pitch of the noise, the sex and anger and hysteria. Zbigniew had once had a sense of the British as a moderate, restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn’t true at all. They drank like mad people. They drank to make themselves happy, and because alcohol was and end in itself. It was a good thing and people want good things, want more and more of them. So, because alcohol was good, the British wanted more and more of it. With drink, they were like Buzz Lightyear: to infinity and beyond!

Booze, bad banking and bad relationships. It’s only going to end badly...

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Simple by Peter James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

Abandoned by Anya Peters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The Woods by Tana French

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King Of The City by Michael Moorcock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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...

He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W Axl Rose by Mick Wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polo by Jilly Cooper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trix by Stephanie Theobald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Soviet Kitchen by Amy Spurling

“Let’s start from the fact... that beer isn’t alcohol.” An observation that suggests it is in fact a palette cleanser between shots of vodka. But then again, we are in the land of Homo sovieticus, the collection of countries that formerly made up the USSR.

Ivy Stone is a shy Ph.D. student, ostensibly in Russia for a few weeks to research The Colorado Potato Beetle Phenomenon and Reduction Consequences for the Ovcharskii Oblast post-Soviet Collectivization. That’s the plan at least, but pretty soon she runs into old friends and wakes up with a crashing hangover and proposal of marriage to someone she can’t remember. Still, this is the place for it:

But I’m now in the country of maximalism and white spirit suitable for human consumption (‘drinkable’ is written on the label with a sort of black and white Kwik-Save ‘No Frills’ stamp). It’s so strong, practically 100 percent, that you have to dilute it with water... Once drunk, this liquid refreshes parts of your personality that other spirits cannot reach.

Of course, the sensible thing to do when faced with a mystery fiancé is to get involved with someone else, so neglecting her studies, Ivy starts a whirlwind romance with K.K., physicist and shady businessman, who takes her off to Tashkent and Tallinn where she encounters the local firewater:

I took a sip from my shot glass of Vana Original and my mouth immediately felt fiery. The next sip burned and soothed the back of my throat in equal measure... A wonderful warming sensation was emanating from my cheeks to my neck glands. After a few glasses of this stuff I wouldn’t mind betting you’re ready to start a really good family row.

The problem with whirlwind romances though is that they have a habit of going awry and Ivy finds herself alone with a bottle of vodka in her Moscow flat on New Year’s Eve when she’d expected to spend it with a now incommunicado K.K. These are the moments that you need your friends and an impromptu party is convened on the first day of the New Year. It’s quite a hooley. Eighteen seems-like-eighty guests turn up with drink, snacks and a starting pistol:

It appears that during a drunken argument or bet – something drunken anyway – Sportsman fired his pistol... “Give me that,” I say. It is the vodka that grabs a shiny weapon off a pumped-up male. To keep it out of sight I temporarily put it in the fridge.

There’s an acknowledged debt to Bridget Jones, but Fielding’s book doesn’t come with a companion guide of recipes and anecdotes. And neither does she produce little gems like the following:

“In a survey which asked, ‘How much can you drink?’ 40 percent of the nation said, ‘Can’t remember, the evening began early’; 40 percent said, ‘Don’t know, the evening finished late’; 15 percent said, ‘Can’t say, we’re still drinking’. And the rest didn’t understand the question.”

All you ever needed to know, really...

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

"He had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," said Christopher Robin Milne of his father, author of Winnie the Pooh, which is a good point of reference for the poisonous legacy of the Hayseed Chronicles featuring Mr Toppit, the book within a book in Charles Elton’s debut.

Arthur Hayman has published five books in the Chronicles but is killed (run over by a cement truck in Soho) just as the sinister presence in the books, Mr Toppit – a sort of diabolical counterpart to Enid Blyton’s Mr Pink Whistle – emerges from the Darkwood in their final paragraph.

His son, Luke, immortalised as Luke Hayseed both in print and the ridiculous illustrations by the family German teacher, Lila, narrates most of the book with an icy detachment, his way of coping with the sudden fame incurred by the books becoming a posthumous publishing phenomenon thanks to Laurie Clow, a DJ on a hospital radio station in California.

Five years after his father’s death, Luke is at a party the night before he goes to America to visit Laurie, now a chat show host in LA. The books have bought the family great wealth, but it’s a tainted legacy. His sister Rachel, who invites him round, is drug addled and neurotic. Still, the rest of the guests are an entertaining mix of foreigners, actors and a priest:

Although it was summer and still light outside, the curtains were drawn and the room was lit by candles. There was a peculiar smell that Claude said was church incense. “The best, the very best,” he said. “I nicked it from All Saints, Margaret Street.” The priest laughed so much that he knocked over the jug that contained the special cocktail Claude had made with vodka and blue Curaçao.

Rachel flees the party and Luke finds her downstairs:

She handed me a bottle of clear liquid. “What is it?” “Grappa. It’s made from all the grape crap left behind after they’ve done the wine. Claude loves it. It’s Italian. Don’t’ drink it all.” The grappa seemed to avoid my stomach and go straight to my head so when Rachel came back I was feeling a bit dizzy.

The party carries on into street and finishes with a police caution for all involved. Still, it’s a fairly abstemious evening compared to a night out in California when Luke ends up visiting Travis, one of Laurie’s staff, late at night. He’s with Merry, the daughter of Laurie’s friends. She’s also cutting up lines of coke and knocking back the tequila:

She showed me how they had been drinking the tequila. You put some salt on the back of your hand, licked it off, took a big swig, then sucked a lime quarter. Its sharpness made me shiver as the tequila went down.

And then the toot kicks in:

I was trying to concentrate. Of course, nothing happened instantly. I’d had quite a lot of wine at dinner and then there had been the tequila so I knew I was a bit drunk, but the odd thing was that gradually my head cleared. When you’re drunk you get a bit sluggish but suddenly the blood was moving round my body more efficiently. In a while I could feel every pulse inside me working in unison, like those oilfields you see with the pumps going up and down like crazy. The next time we combined it with tequila. Slug of drink, lick of salt, suck lime, snort line.

Needless to say, all this hellraising is going to come to bad end and Luke finds himself compromised, to say the least. But then again, the misfortune is spread around equally. As the Chronicles themselves say:

And out of the Darkwood Mr Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

A satire not exactly endowed with subtlety, American Psycho is Ellis’s take on the late-eighties, early-nineties super rich, the gilded youth working in the top banks in New York. Among them is Patrick Bateman, twenty six, sophisticated, suave, handsome and psychotic.

Of course, take a step back from Bateman and it’s quickly apparent that the high living circle that he works and parties with is effectively sociopathic in its unrelenting pursuit of an ideal: the best restaurants, the best clothes, the best sexual partner. Bateman is the satirically logical extension of this in that he has taken his sociopathic nature to the point of killing people in increasingly gruesome ways.

Alcohol plays its part, but brand names only. There’s a running gag (one of many) in the book that Bateman’s friend Price can never get hold of Finlandia vodka:

“I told you to keep Finlandia in this place,” Tim mutters, looking through the bottles – most of them magnums – at the bar. “She never has Finlandia,” he says to no one, to all of us. “Oh god, Timothy. Can’t handle Absolut?” Evelyn asks...

In fact faux-pas with beverages are two-a-plenty. On their way out to a soirée, Price whines to Bateman about the choice of dinner guests:

“Maybe one of Evelyn’s ‘artiste’ friends from ohmygod the ‘East’ Village. You know the type – the ones who ask Evelyn if she has a nice dry white chardonnay – ”

Bateman finishes the evening, concentrating on:

...the Absolut and cranberry I’m holding and it looks like a glassful of thin watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.

Of course, in a world that’s only interested in status, booze can be used as a slight. In an evening out at ‘Pastels’, a fellow trader sends over a complimentary bottle of champagne. Leaving it untouched, Bateman and his friends depart for a nightclub:

“Van Patten,” I say. “Did you see the comp bottle of champagne Montgomery sent over?” “Really?” Van Patten asks, leaning over McDermott. “Let me guess. Perrier-Jouët?” “Bingo,” Price says. “Nonvintage.” “Fucking weasel,” Van Patten says.

There was a temptation in the mid nineties to say that this was an eighties infatuation and that the madness had passed: books like American Psycho and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities could be seen as historical texts. The recent financial crash and the subsequent resurgence of an unapologetic, all devouring, super wealthy class of bankers prove that this was not the case. There is still a section of society that is just as psychotically money crazed as it always was and Ellis’s novel is as pertinent today as it was when it came out two decades ago.

E Squared by Matt Beaumont

I’ve decided to post on a sequel because, frankly, it’s too good to pass up. And also because it gives me an excuse to read a few more Flashman novels for the purposes of 120 Units...


Picking up almost a decade later from e, E Squared is basically more of the same, only this time the format has been expanded to include text messages, blogs, MSN, etcetra along with e-mails to tell the story. The remains of the cast from e are employed at Meercat360, an agency so cutting edge it employs a hairdresser. That said, Brett and Vince are still in the pay of Miller Shanks, although they have found themselves posted to their Dubai Office:

When we joined, we got the standard Miller Shanks letter about the need to show ‘cultural sensitivity’. Vince reckons that cuts both ways and when the Dubai police start showing sensitivity towards his need to throw up outside the Grand Hyatt after half a dozen banana daiquiris, he’ll return the favour.

Needless to say, things quickly go downhill:

Vince and I are lying low today. Bit of a kerfuffle last night. You know that complex of artificial islands they’re building in the shape of the world? Vince got a bit ADHD on whisky sours and emptied a very large dumper truck of rocks into the sea. Now the toe of Italy is sporting an outcrop that looks like a severely inflamed bunion. I’ve Google-Earthed it and you can see it from space. Dubai’s Finest are out in force.

Meanwhile back in London, Liam O’Keefe is flogging off the office fixtures and fittings on e-bay to settle his astronomical gambling debts, the creative assistant is on the window ledge threatening to jump, another member of staff is in Guantánamo Bay and director David Crutton’s son has gone AWOL while his teenaged daughter is in hospital with an infected tattoo... Things are looking ugly:

No calls or disturbances from anyone, including you. Except get me a bottle of vodka from the special cupboard. Then no disturbances.

It requires a little perspective. Over in France, Simon Horne, formerly of Miller Shanks, is now living in the Dordogne being abused (verbally and otherwise) by his disgusting housekeeper Papin. He has however, started a blog, Crépuscle dans le Périgord, where he keeps note of all the little things that happen to him, like a letter from his wife’s lawyers:

After such a start to the day, there is only one thing for it, I’m going to have to uncork the ’59 Armagnac. I shall post later with an update.

That said, compared to an office full of suicidal staff and an operation to catch the office thief using interrogation by Serbian paramilitaries, Hornblower’s tribulations in France are a walk in the park.