Floyd on Hangovers by Keith Floyd

I’ve been meaning to post on this legendary book for a while now. Sadly, we finally discovered the fate of our last copy when we removed a whole load of rotting books from the bottom of a set of shelves in the lounge where the rain had made ingress. The leak is now secured, the walls dry, but Floyd on Hangovers ended up in the tip, so I’ve recently invested in a new edition.

Floyd liked a drink, although the trademark glass of wine during the filming was for show rather than getting sloshed, or so he claimed in his biography. Certainly by the time this was published in 1992, he had a reputation as a bon viveur, and who else could have published a book quite like this, declaring itself as an authoritative guide on the cover? There is also a five-day detoxification programme at the back of the book, which even includes a few recipes, for those of us who might have forgotten that he originally made his living as a chef. I certainly can’t think of anyone else who could written the following titled Findings on Congeners and Inner Peace:

If you have been foolish enough to drink three litres of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon, before moving onto a slightly heavier port wine, significantly bottled in Hartlepool, then the three miserable looking judges sitting at the end of your bed when you wake will give you 9.8, 9.8, 9.9 respectively. If you really had wanted to beat this score, then you should have had several large Scottish ones before starting on the wine. However, this is a fine score, as the hamster gnawing away on your cortex will testify. 
It is not just the alcohol but all those beastly congeners, so prevalent in the fermentation process in the making of red wine and port, that would have scored a direct hit on the intestinal tract and the nervous system. Very often chemicals are added to the drink to make it look more attractive - brighter and clearer - and it is these chemicals, which, combined with the amount of alcohol, are frequently the cause of the worst kind of hangover. Generally speaking, brandy, dark rum, red wine, port and sherries are the worst offenders followed by Vermouth, beer, whisky and gin, and then white wine, lagers and the purest of all - vodka.
With all of this congener-laden alcohol on board the simple task of posting a cheque to pay the gas bill would become complex and so full of important decisions that just addressing the envelope, if you were able to find one, would seem like writing a summary of War and Peace. This is as low as it goes. You feel that you are on the wrong end of a telescope with ‘The Big Eye’ gazing down at you as you fumble around the bedroom trying to decide what’s best. 
This is the time when you need someone who is in a worse state than yourself. Talking about how bad you feel helps. If there is no one around, go to the nearest railway station and look at the guys who have been sleeping rough. Look at those faces ravaged by strong cider, Carlesberg Special Brew, metal polish and broken dreams. You may think you can hear the faint strains of a heavenly choir singing ‘Never, ever, ever again’! You may also feel that is only a matter of time before you join them. This is good. Do not dally too long. Stride along out through the bus exhausts and Kentucky Fried Chicken packets of life. Cancel all appointments. Find a field, preferably with a small stream gurgling nearby, and ponder the marvels of nature. Soon an inner spiritual light will start to glow inside you and the hamster in your head will begin to snooze. 
Now is the time to make a private deal with yourself that you must swear will be honoured for the rest of your drinking life. Never touch a drop of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon again. 

Sage advice indeed...

The Centauri Device by M John Harrison

I don’t usually read much science-fiction but I’d been recommended Harrison’s novel Light, which typically wasn’t in the library, so ended up taking this out instead. Bleak and disturbing, it’s nonetheless a truly inventive novel, credited with revitalising the ‘space-opera’ genre.

Lowlife space-ship captain John Truck is loafing his way around a seedy, dystopian future, when the discovery of his connection to the titular device puts him in the middle of a war between the last two Earth based power-blocks who have carved up the galaxy between them, interplanetary drug pushers, a religious cult devoted the human digestion and a gang of aesthetes called the Interstellar Anarchists.

Rescued from the dealer Chalice Veronica by the dandy Himation, Truck and his crew are brought to a hollowed out asteroid floating between our sun and Alpha Centauri, the base of Sinclair-Pater, the Anarchists leader. His domain is an Aladdin’s Cave of art treasures, both authentic and recreated. The white-suited Pater is an artist as well as the pilot of a fantastical space-ship named The Green Carnation. Truck is brought to his apartment and drinks are served:

By contrast, the suite of rooms adjoining the studio was frugal and austere, with little chintz curtains, stained floorboards bordering Turkey carpets and an atmosphere of cherished isolation. In the sitting room, which was achieved by way of a low passage and a Gothic doorway, there were a few short shelves of old books, a scrubbed deal table and some stiff but charming high-backed chairs. For ornament, a bowl of dried rose petals stood in the precise centre of the table. On the walls of this prim apartment were hung two pictures: one of a head of some wine-god, unfathomable and sensually cruel; the other a rough sketch of a morose, stooping young man – thin, heavy jawed, with deep, close-set eyes, dressed in the garments of a defunct High Church order. Here, they sat down, Himation disappeared into the depths of the suite, returning shortly to flourish his cloak over the table-top (rose petals stirred like leaves of another year, and a remote scent filled the room) and manifest a bottle of wine. He held up his hand – prolonged the moment – four glasses appeared, their stems between his fingers. A faint musical tone. Pater smiled on indulgently.

Pater explains that he wants the Centauri Device simply because everyone else does, and goes on to execute a daring and suicidal raid on the convoy he thinks is carrying it. When the dust settles Truck finds himself on the run from his enemies who are prepared to kill anyone in their way. He must now face the device itself alone...

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe

A nice creepy story by Poe involving a large amount of fortified wine used as a lure to bump someone off, The Cask of Amontillado is narrated by Montresor, an Italian nobleman, who wreaks a terrible revenge on another noble, Fortunato, whom he believes has insulted him.

Montresor has gone out to the local carnival in search of his quarry. He needs to bait the line and remembers that Fortunato, a braggart and a bullshit artist, likes to think of himself as a master wine-buff:

He had a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity—to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.

Fortunato himself is discovered stumbling around the carnival in jester’s motley:

He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.
I said to him—"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking to-day! But I have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts."
"How?" said he. "Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!"
"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain."
"Amontillado!"
"I have my doubts."
"Amontillado!"
"And I must satisfy them."
"Amontillado!"
"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchesi. If any one has a critical turn, it is he. He will tell me—"
"Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."

The bait taken, Montresor takes Fortunato back to his palazzo and then down to the cellars beneath the house. It’s cold and damp and the walls are white with nitre so he warns Fortunato, who has a terrible cough already, that it might prove injurious to his health:

"Enough," he said; "the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough."
"True—true," I replied; "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily—but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps."
Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.
"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine.

They knock out a couple of glasses, before setting off further into the vaults. Montresor tries one more time to time to dissuade his adversary from continuing. The unwitting victim scoffs, downs a glass of De Grâve in one go, then pretends he’s a Mason:

"The nitre!" I said: "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough—"
"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc."
I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grâve. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.

Montresor responds by producing his trowel from under his cloak. Unperturbed, Fortunato carries on towards the prize, the nonexistent cask of sherry. He is guided into a small niche at the back of the cellar.

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depths of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.
"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchesi—"
"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.

The vengeful Montresor then proceeds to wall up the niche, leaving the unfortunate Fortunato immured...

The Book of Household Management by Mrs Beeton

Often and erroneously referred to as Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook, The Book of Household Management has a great deal more to it than just recipes. A portion of the book is set over to the duties of staff, including those responsible for the cellar:

2163. ...but the real duties of the butler are in the wine-cellar; there he should be competent to advise his master as to the price and quality of the wine to be laid in; "fine," bottle, cork, and seal it, and place it in the binns. Brewing, racking, and bottling malt liquors, belong to his office, as well as their distribution. These and other drinkables are brought from the cellar every day by his own hands, except where an under-butler is kept; and a careful entry of every bottle used, entered in the cellar-book; so that the book should always show the contents of the cellar.
2164. The office of butler is thus one of very great trust in a household. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is the best policy: the butler should make it his business to understand the proper treatment of the different wines under his charge, which he can easily do from the wine-merchant, and faithfully attend to it; his own reputation will soon compensate for the absence of bribes from unprincipled wine-merchants, if he serves a generous and hospitable master. Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar, and all that is required is wines well chosen and well cared for; and this a little knowledge, carefully applied, will soon supply.
2165. The butler, we have said, has charge of the contents of the cellars, and it is his duty to keep them in a proper condition, to fine down wine in wood, bottle it off, and store it away in places suited to the sorts. Where wine comes into the cellar ready bottled, it is usual to return the same number of empty bottles; the butler has not, in this case, the same inducements to keep the bottles of the different sorts separated; but where the wine is bottled in the house, he will find his account, not only in keeping them separate, but in rinsing them well, and even washing them with clean water as soon as they are empty.
2166. There are various modes of fining wine: isinglass, gelatine, and gum Arabic are all used for the purpose. Whichever of these articles is used, the process is always the same. Supposing eggs (the cheapest) to be used,—Draw a gallon or so of the wine, and mix one quart of it with the whites of four eggs, by stirring it with a whisk; afterwards, when thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the cask through the bunghole, and stir up the whole cask, in a rotatory direction, with a clean split stick inserted through the bunghole. Having stirred it sufficiently, pour in the remainder of the wine drawn off, until the cask is full; then stir again, skimming off the bubbles that rise to the surface. When thoroughly mixed by stirring, close the bunghole, and leave it to stand for three or four days. This quantity of clarified wine will fine thirteen dozen of port or sherry. The other clearing ingredients are applied in the same manner, the material being cut into small pieces, and dissolved in the quart of wine, and the cask stirred in the same manner.
2167. To Bottle Wine.—Having thoroughly washed and dried the bottles, supposing they have been before used for the same kind of wine, provide corks, which will be improved by being slightly boiled, or at least steeped in hot water,—a wooden hammer or mallet, a bottling-boot, and a squeezer for the corks. Bore a hole in the lower part of the cask with a gimlet, receiving the liquid stream which follows in the bottle and filterer, which is placed in a tub or basin. This operation is best performed by two persons, one to draw the wine, the other to cork the bottles. The drawer is to see that the bottles are up to the mark, but not too full, the bottle being placed in a clean tub to prevent waste. The corking-boot is buckled by a strap to the knee, the bottle placed in it, and the cork, after being squeezed in the press, driven in by a flat wooden mallet.
2168. As the wine draws near to the bottom of the cask, a thick piece of muslin is placed in the strainer, to prevent the viscous grounds from passing into the bottle.
2169. Having carefully counted the bottles, they are stored away in their respective binns, a layer of sand or sawdust being placed under the first tier, and another over it; a second tier is laid over this, protected by a lath, the head of the second being laid to the bottom of the first; over this another bed of sawdust is laid, not too thick, another lath; and so on till the binn is filled.
2170. Wine so laid in will be ready for use according to its quality and age. Port wine, old in the wood, will be ready to drink in five or six months; but if it is a fruity wine, it will improve every year. Sherry, if of good quality, will be fit to drink as soon as the "sickness" (as its first condition after bottling is called) ceases, and will also improve; but the cellar must be kept at a perfectly steady temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, but about 55° or 60°, and absolutely free from draughts of cold air.

She also explains the correct way of opening wine and champagne:

2192. In opening wine, let it be done quietly, and without shaking the bottle; if crusted, let it be inclined to the crusted side, and decanted while in that position. In opening champagne, it is not necessary to discharge it with a pop; properly cooled, the cork is easily extracted without an explosion; when the cork is out, the mouth of the bottle should be wiped with the napkin over the footman's arm.

Now you won’t find any of that in Nigella...

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

In the alternate universe of Carey’s 2010 novel, Olivier de Garmont is a thinly disguised cipher of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker who travelled to the USA in the nineteenth century and wrote Democracy in America after his observations there. In this version of events, Olivier is accompanied by a frustrated artist called Parrot, who has the misfortune to end up working as the former’s servant.

Carey flits between the two narrators – cynical, world weary Parrot and cosseted, naïve Olivier – although it could be argued that the whole text is in fact written by Parrot, who acts as Olivier’s secretary in an effort to hide the fact of the noble’s atrocious handwriting.

In his travels across the US, Olivier meets and falls in love with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a prison owner in Connecticut. Smitten, he allows himself to be taken on a tour of the south by his prospective father-in-law, a journey that does not bode well for his already parlous health.

After several weeks on the road, they make it as far as South Carolina, where their guest house boasts a wine list of some providence:

I forget the name of our hotel except it was considered the best place in Charleston. Godefroy had written to secure our lodging while we were still in Georgia. What he wrote, I do not know, but clearly an impression had been made, for although we arrived late at night we were greeted with much bowing and scraping and a boy was sent to the chef with an order to keep the fires alive. The landlord then held us under close engagement – I presumed to cover any likely delay in the kitchen – so by the time we were seated at table we knew he had purchased the cellar of the late Thomas Jefferson and had himself driven all the way to Monticello to collect his loot, sleeping beneath his carriage on return as he feared he would be robbed of his treasure by bandits or oenophiles or worse. Who knows how much he paid for his fifty cases? More, certainly, than he could afford, for we had been but a moment in the dining room – a place of extraordinary pretension – when hew as looming over us ready to discuss his carte de vin.

It’s the perfect opportunity for Olivier to indulge in a touch of wine snobbery:

He presented us each with his wine list explaining, ha-ha, that it would have been a good deal longer if my countryman Lafayette had not had such pleasure from it. I thought him tedious. Godefroy raised an apologetic eyebrow as the man happily recounted how the late president had died impoverished, and he had managed to get a great bargain from the estate. “The prices, monsieur,” the landlord said to me, “will gratify you, I am sure.” Grave-robbing to one side, the list saddened me, for it was not what you would expect in the cellar of a head of state. There was a Bergasse, a wine mixed together in some cellar in Marseille which was labelled claret in the English manner, also some Blanquette de Limoux, a great deal of Minervois and Languedoc. Only a Beune Grèves Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus seemed to rise above the ordinary.

Clearly the evening has not got off to a good start, and when Olivier finally leaves America, he has failed to secure Godefroy’s daughter’s hand in marriage...

Guernica by Dave Boling

It’s highly frustrating that the first post I’ve managed in several weeks is from a dud, but I’ve had a run of bad luck with books in the past month, partly my own fault, partly the choice of reading groups. Well, that’s the way it goes.

Guernica is the back story to the terrible dive bombing raid that the Luftwaffe perpetrated on the Basque town of the same name. Picasso’s most famous painting is a vision of the hell that took place there, so it’s a shame that a novel based on the atrocity and the work it inspired is such a mess of hackneyed prose and clichéd characterisation.

Even so, there are moments of diversion. The heroine’s dance on top of a wine glass during a traditional Basque dance is lively enough, and took my mind off the fact that there are still over 200 pages to go at this point:

Miren alone was the focus of the next dance, and cheers rose when she gathered a glass off a nearby table, filled it with wine, and placed it in the middle of the dance area. To a quickening beat, she stepped lightly on all sides of the glass. Without looking down, she stepped over it and beside it, side to side, front to back, barely missing it as her feet wove an intricate pattern. The breadth of her skirts at all times impeded her vision of the glass, making her avoidance of it an act of unfathomable precision. Then, impossibly, she rose and seemed to hover before gently landing atop the glass, one slipper on each side of the lip. And she was off again, levitating, flitting on each side, and then once more leaped back onto the glass, alighting softly with bent knees. Miguel was stunned to watch a girl so feathery and deft that she could dance on the lip of a wine glass. It was not stemmed crystal or a delicate flute, but it was nonetheless glass, and she danced so joyfully atop it, oblivious to the possibility that it could shatter beneath her. She not only didn’t break the glass but didn’t spill a drop of wine, either.A final leap, on and off, coincided with the last bar of music, and a greater cheer echoed across the courtyard. Accepting the applause with a deep curtsy, Miren retrieved the wineglass and drained the deep-red contents in a single gulp. She saluted the cheering crowd with the empty glass and licked her lips in theatrical enjoyment of the wine.

It’s a real feat and Miguel is suitably impressed:

“How could you possibly dance on a glass?” Miguel asked before she could speak. “Well, first you have to get a very strong wine,” Miren said.

Now there’s a thought...

Millennium People by JG Ballard

Middle-class revolt... Millenium People is a Ballardian examination of the vacuity of bourgeois existence, and the subsequent search for meaning that leads professionals in their thirties and forties to start a random bombing campaign in London.

David Markham, a psychologist living in North London, is drawn into the conspiracy after his ex wife is killed by a bomb at Heathrow Airport. Going under cover, he infiltrates a group of dissatisfied home owners living in Chelsea Marina who, fed up with negative equity and the exorbitant cost of living, have begun to wage a campaign of arson against video stores in the area. Suspecting that they are behind the larger, more deadly explosion at Heathrow, he quickly gets involved, putting smoke bombs onto tape racks in Blockbuster and quickly graduating to helping his new friends set fire to the National Film Theatre.

As the South Bank disintegrates into an inferno, Markham flees the scene, already abandoned by the others. He finds himself on the Millennium Wheel, the perfect observatory for his crimes:

I stepped into the gondola and leaned on the rail overlooking the river, almost too weary to breathe. While we moved along the boarding platform an off-duty waiter swung himself through the door, a tray bearing two champagne flutes in his hand. He placed the tray on the seat and sat beside it, searching his pockets for a cigarette. As we rose above County Hall the fires lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within. The waiter pointed to a champagne glass on the tray. Without thanking him, I tasted the warm wine. The bubbles stung my lips, cracked by the fierce heat in the auditorium. I though of the smoke-swept corridors lined with portraits of the film world’s greatest stars. The fires set by Vera Blackburn had taken hold, burning fiercely throughout the NFT, engulfing the smiles of James Stewart and Orson Welles, Chaplin and Joan Crawford. My memories of them seemed to rise with the turning Wheel, escaping from a depot of dreams that was giving its ghosts to the night. I crossed the gondola, my back to the smoking waiter and the Thames, and searched the streets around County Hall. I almost expected to see Kay and Joan Chang darting from one doorway to another as the police cars sped past, sirens wailing down the night. Needless to say, they had escaped without warning me, through the riverside entrance to the theatre café, which they had left open to create a fire-spurring draught. The first smoke had reached the windows of the gondola, laying itself across the curved panes. I began to cough, tasting the acrid vapour that had churned outside the manager’s office. I retched onto the rail, and spilled the champagne over the floor at my feet.

The waiter is in fact Richard Gould, a disgraced doctor who acts as the movement’s Svengali. Markham already suspects how far Gould is prepared to go, the question is, how far is Markham prepared to follow him?

A fantastic and darkly humorous novel, Millenium People also contains this gem from the author in the Q&A at the back:

Q: How do you organize your time? Do you write by timetable? A: Yes. Unless you’re disciplined, all you end up with is a lot of empty wine bottles. All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re a professional. There’s no other way.

I’ll raise a glass to that.

Drink Me! How to Choose, Taste and Enjoy Wine by Matt Walls

I discovered this book through Henry’s World of Booze and given that my tastes in wine normally veers nearer to ‘pish’ than ‘posh’, I decided that a easy reading guide to getting more out of your glass was just what I needed and promptly ordered in a copy. What more do you need than a simple crib to which wines will impress the father-in-law, how to tell what a wine tastes like by the name of the grape variety, and which wines work with which foods?

It is, of course, a serious book on enjoying wine, and I’m learning a lot while reading it. That said, Walls has a good turn of phrase and not all the book is dedicated to the more erudite pleasures of oenophily. There are, for instance, occasions when you need to pretend to know more than you actually do. His chapter on ‘Blagging it’ is a good place to start:

At certain times you need to look like you know what you’re doing: at a wine tasting, for example, or if you’re going on a date with someone who’s really into wine. Here are a few things to remember to make you look like a pro.

1. Only fill a wine glass a third of the way up. This gives you room to swirl it around the glass before you take a sip – without getting it all over your companion’s shirt/dress.
2. Swirl the wine around the glass before you take a sip! Don’t just dive in, take a slurp, gulp it down and go ‘aaaah’. First, look at the wine to gauge its colour. Then take a sniff to see what it smells like. Only then take a sip.
3. Pause briefly after you’ve swallowed to make you look like you’re thinking about what you’ve just tasted.
4. Now say one of the following:
- If it’s a recent vintage: “Quite developed for a young wine.”
- If it’s an older bottle: “Lovely aromas coming through.”
- If it’s a red: “Interesting tannins.”
- If it’s a white: “Good minerality.”
- If it’s from the New World (i.e. not Europe): “Clearly New World; lovely, vibrant fruit.”
- If it’s from the Old World (e.g. France, Spain, Italy, Portugal or Germany): “Beautiful Old World character; not too obvious.”
5. Chuck in a few words listed in the glossary and you’re golden.
6. Now change the subject fast – or read the rest of this book.

I can recommend the second option in that last point...

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Every now and again I read a book that makes such an impression on me that I want to give copies to all my friends. Patchett’s Bel Canto is one of them, a novel ostensibly about the effect of a lengthy kidnap saga in an unnamed South American country, but which covers tragedy and high drama, romance and the redeeming qualities of opera.

A powerful Japanese businessman is persuaded to visit the unnamed country when the president manages to book the man’s favourite opera soprano, Roxanne Coss, to sing at a party in his honour. As the house lights go out at the end of her performance, a motley band of terrorists storm the house, looking for the president. Unfortunately, their target is at home, watching his favourite telenovela. Their plan in disarray, the terrorists take everyone hostage and a siege lasting several months ensues.

Patchett is unsparing in the violence that accompanies the armed group’s entrance, but as the standoff between the three ringleaders (‘the generals’) and the government outside develops into stalemate, the occupants of the house, both hostage and hostage-taker, find themselves adapting to their new life, trapped in the luxurious home of the vice-president. Illicit relationships quietly flourish; Roxanne Coss begins to sing again, enchanting the occupants of the house; the foot soldiers, barely older than children, begin to warm to their prisoners and vice versa. Now allowed the luxury of time for introspection, many re-evaluate their lives. French Ambassador, Simon Thibault, devotes his thoughts to his wife, safely on the other side of the vice presidential compound. His uxoriousness is ever present (as is her discarded shawl, which he keeps wrapped around his neck at all times) and he finds himself thinking about Edith even when he’s trying to make supper for nearly sixty people, without being allowed to use knives, or even obtain that ubiquitous ingredient in French cuisine, wine:

“What about a simple coq au vin?” Thibault said. “They confiscated all the vin,” Ruben said. “We could always send Gen out for another request. It’s probably locked up around here somewhere unless they drank it all.” “No vin,” Simon Thibault said sadly, as if it were something dangerous, as if it were a knife. How impossible. In Paris one could be careless, one could afford to run out completely because anything you wanted was half a block away, a case, a bottle, a glass. a glass of Burgundy in the autumn at a back table at Brasserie Lipp, the light warm and yellowed where it reflected off the brass railings around the bar. Edith in her navy sweater, her hair pulled back and twisted into a casual knot, her pale hands cupping the bowl of the glass. how clearly he can see it, the light, the sweater, the dark red of the wine beneath Edith’s fingers. When they moved to the Heart of Darkness they had wine shipped two dozen cases at a time, enough wine to quench an entire city through a drought. Thibault tried to make a cellar out of what was merely a wet dirt basement. French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. He handed it out like peppermints. Guests stayed later at their parties. They stood forever on the walk that led down to the gate and said good night, good night, but never seemed to leave. Edith would finally go inside and bring them each a bottle, press it into their resisting hands. Then they scattered into the darkness, each back to his or her car and driver, holding the prize. “This is my blood.” Thibault raised his glass to his wife when the guests had finally gone.” It will be shed for you and for no men.”

The siege can’t last forever, of course, and the end when it comes is as tragic as the operas that Roxanne sings so beautifully.

The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit

A quite incredible book on how flavours work together, Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus is part cookbook part reference work, with frequent digressions into anecdote á la Elizabeth David.
 

She devotes a whole chapter on the culinary properties of Globe Artichoke, a vegetable related to the thistle: 

Globe artichokes contain a phenolic compound called cynarin, which has the peculiar effect of making anything you eat directly afterwards taste sweet. It temporarily inhibits the sweet receptors in your taste buds, so that when you follow a bit of artichoke with, say, a sip of water, flushing the compound off your tongue, the receptors start working again and the abrupt contrast fools the brain into thinking you’ve just swallowed a mouthful of sugar solution. This makes for a diverting, if swiftly tedious, party game – sweet radicchio! – but it’s bad news for wine. And the enemy of wine is my enemy. The problem can be minimised by using ingredients that create a bridge between the wine and the artichoke (or simply taking a bit of something else before you take a sip of wine). Or you could ditch the wine altogether and drink Cynar, an artichoke-flavoured liqueur from Italy.

The obligatory recipe and anecdote follow. I reproduce it here with an eye to purchasing both a jar of artichokes and a bottle of cheap Italian white:

Globe Artichoke & Bacon: In Lazio, a boyfriend and I were speeding through a landscape of fairytale castles, well on our way to not living happily ever after. We had been arguing with such uninterrupted intensity that it was only a promising road sign that reminded us that it was well past lunchtime and we were hungry. Our motherly Italian hostess, perhaps picking up on the friction between us, took pity and led us to a table under an olive tree. Mercifully soon, she brought a label-less bottle of cold, dry white wine, an enormous spoon and a terracotta dish of something covered in breadcrumbs and cheese, molten bubbles popping on the surface like the meniscus of a volcano. My boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, or whatever he was at that moment, took the spoon and, breaking through the crust, emerged with a steaming heap of rigatoni, pancetta and artichokes, in a rich béchamel savoury-sweet with Parmesan. They say hunger is the best sauce, but if that lunch under the olive tree is anything to go by, the point in a relationship where it doesn’t matter any more runs it a close second. We smiled at each other. I topped up our glasses. He piled the pasta on our plates. The bitter, nutty greenness of the artichoke cut through the richness of pancetta and cheese. It was by far the best last date I’ve ever had. If your relationship is on the rocks, get 200g of rigatoni on to cook. Soften a finely chopped onion and 2 garlic cloves in olive oil with 75g sliced pancetta. Add 4-6 cooked artichoke bottoms (good jar ones will do), sliced into sixths. In a bowl, mix 125ml milk with 150ml double cream and 50g grated Parmesan. The pasta should be al dente now. Drain it, empty back into the pan and add the milky, creamy, cheesy mixture and the onion and artichokes. Stir and check for seasoning, then transfer to a baking dish. Cut a ball of mozzarella into slices and lay them on top. Cover with a mixture of 50g breadcrumbs and 25g grated Parmesan and bake for 30 minutes at 200oC/Gas Mark 6, covering it with foil if it looks in danger of burning. Serve with a bottle of cold, cheap Italian white.

It definitely sounds worth the trouble...

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

I’ve been meaning to read Pynchon for a while now, and stumbling across The Crying of Lot 49 in the library, I decided to start with one of his shorter novels. Showing a complete lack of culture on my part of any kind, I came to the conclusion that I had made a wise decision. The book, I enjoyed immensely (any novel that describes the violent finale of a Jacobean revenge play as like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse is worth reading for that line alone) but Pynchon’s prose is so dense, and the avalanche of ideas so unrelenting, that it is entirely unsuited for the commute to work by train and its attendant bouts of motion induced narcolepsy.

Back to the story: The Crying of Lot 49 follows Oedipa Maas, former lover of Pierce Inverarity, who has just died and rather inconsiderately named her as joint executor of his will. Leaving behind her disk jockey husband, Waldo ‘Mucho’ Maas, at their home in Kinneret, CA, she drives south to San Narciso, where Pierce had extensive business dealings. Checking into a motel, she is surprised by the arrival of her co-executor, a lawyer called Metzger, who has brought a bottle of wine with him.

He turned out to be so good-looking that Oedipa thought at first that They, somebody up there, were putting her on. It had to be an actor. He stood at her door, behind him the oblong swimming pool shimmering silent in a mild diffusion of light from the night-time sky, saying, “Mrs Maas,” like a reproach. His enormous eyes, lambent, extravagantly lashed, smiled out at her wickedly; she looked around him for reflectors, microphones, camera cabling, but there was only himself and a debonair bottle of French Beaujolais, which he claimed to’ve smuggled last year into California, this rollicking lawbreaker, past the frontier guards. “So hey,” he murmured, “after scouring motels all day to find you, I can come in, can’t I?” Oedipa had planned on nothing more involved that evening than watching Bonanza on the tube. She shifted into stretch denim slacks and a shaggy black sweater, and had her hair all the way down. She knew she looked pretty good. “Come in,” she said, “But I only have one glass.” “I,” the gallant Metzger let her know, “can drink out of the bottle.”

Actually, Metzger is an actor, or he was once. One of his films is being shown on the television that night, back from the days when he was a child star. He tries to explain the plot of Cashiered, but the reels are being played in the wrong order and Oedipa is having trouble keeping up:

“But,” began Oedipa, then saw how they were suddenly out of wine. “Aha,” said Metzger, from inside a coat pocket producing a bottle of tequila. “No lemons?” she asked, with movie-gaiety. “No salt?” “A tourist thing. Did Inverarity use lemons when you were there?”

All this booze is bound to lead to horseplay, and Oedipa and Metzger embark on an affair. It’s the first of many peculiar happenings as Oedipa discovers that Inverarity’s legacy is proof of an alternative mail service called Tristero, locked in a centuries long conflict with Thurn & Taxis, the first official mail courier of Europe. Finding the muted trumpet logo of Tristero all over California, Oedipa believes that she is on the verge of uncovering an enormous conspiracy. Of course, it could just be an elaborate hoax, or even a product of Oedipa’s over analysed mind...

Not After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier

I’m plundering Daphne du Maurier’s short stories again, this time an account of an ill-fated trip to Crete.

The narrator, Timothy Grey, a teacher at a minor public school and amateur painter, beings his story with the confession that he has been brought down by an affliction that he picked up on his hols. What could it be? A dose of the clap, a skin condition?

I am a schoolmaster by profession. Or was. I handed in my resignation to the Head before the end of the summer term in order to forestall the inevitable dismissal. The reason I gave was true enough – ill-health, caused by a wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete, which might necessitate a stay in hospital of several weeks, various injections, etc. I did not specify the nature of the bug. He knew, though, and so did the rest of the staff. And the boys. My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society. Then we are given the boot. The passer-by averts his gaze, and we are left to crawl out of the ditch alone, or stay there and die.

Not giving too much away, he goes on to relate how he had gone to Crete to paint for a week. The hotel was quiet and not badly appointed, although to the unease of the staff, he insists on moving to a chalet that later transpires to have been previously occupied by a man who had drowned in the sea nearby only two weeks before. Grey is unperturbed by this and carries on with his painting. In fact, the only disruption to his peace and quiet is the presence of a loud and abusive American called Stoll and his silent wife. The man drinks like a fish, and, according to the hotel bar-man, he’s even making his own hooch in their chalet:

“The girls say he brews his own beer. He lights the fire in the chimney, and has a pot standing, filled with rotting grain, like some sort of pig swill! Oh, yes, he drinks it right enough. Imagine the state of his liver, after what he consumes at dinner and afterwards here in the bar!”

Following them into the nearby town one night, Grey is confronted by the Stoll, who is keen to extol the virtues of his home-made supply: 

“...The beer they sell you here is all piss anyway, and the wine is poison.” He looked over his shoulder to the group at the café and with a conspiratorial wink dragged me down to the wall beside the pool. “I told you all those bastards are Turks, and so they are,” he said, “Wine-drinking, coffee-drinking Turks. They haven’t brewed the right stuff here for over five thousand years. They knew how to do it then.” I remembered what the bar-tender had told me about the pig-swill in his chalet. “Is that so?” I enquired. He winked again, and then his slit eyes widened, and I noticed that they were naturally bulbous and protuberant, discoloured muddy brown with the whites red-flecked. “Know something?” he whispered hoarsely. “The scholars have got it all wrong. It was beer the Cretans drank here in the mountains, brewed from spruce and ivy, long before wine. Wine was discovered centuries later by the God-damn Greeks.” He steadied himself, one hand on the wall, the other on my arm. Then he leant forward and was sick into the pool.

Grey’s curiosity gets the better of him and he follows them again, this time to a deserted beach. It soon becomes apparent that the Stolls, keen divers and swimmers, have discovered an ancient shipwreck that has not yet been found by anyone else. In the past three years worth of holidays to the island they have stripped it bare. Thinking that Grey might be onto their game, Stoll’s wife leaves Grey an ancient rhyton (an ornate classical drinking vessel) decorated with Silenos, drunken tutor to the God Dionysus.

The next day they are gone. Grey is about to depart himself, but the Stolls have left him one last present in the care of the bar-keep:

He bent down and brought out a small screw-topped bottle filled with what appeared to be bitter lemon. “Left here last evening with Mr Stoll’s compliments,” he said. “He waited for you in the bar until nearly midnight, but you never came. So I promised to hand it over when you did.” I looked at it suspiciously. “What is it?” I asked. The bar-tender smiled. “Some of his chalet home-brew,” he said. “It’s quite harmless, he gave me a bottle for myself and my wife. She says it’s nothing but lemonade. The real smelling stuff must have been thrown away. Try it.” He had poured some into my mineral water before I could stop him. Hesitant, wary, I dipped my finger into the glass and tasted it. It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with ears of ripening corn.

With a few hours to kill before he has to drive back to the port, he decides to check on the deserted cove once again. Realising he’s dying of thirst, he takes another swallow of the home-brew, this time drinking from the rhyton. Taking the boat back, he looks into the water and spots the wreck that the Stolls have looted. Pinned under the anchor is the husband who has definitely had his last drink. Terrified, Grey throws the rhtyon into the waves:

It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim before long. The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well, as I should see them soon reflected in a mirror. They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair.

So Grey’s curse is Dipsomania, brought upon him by the poisoned beer... Or has the shock of seeing Stoll’s murdered body under the water tipped him into madness and alcohol dependency? As in the previous story, Don’t Look Now, du Marier leaves the supernatural elements of the tale delightfully ambiguous...

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier

Death in Venice again. Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novella was famously turned into a film with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christy but the source material is well worth checking out as well.

British couple Laura and John are on holiday in Venice, a hastily arranged break that takes place after the death of their daughter. Laura is withdrawn and consumed by grief, John unable to reach her. At lunch at the end of their stay, they notice two old ladies watching them, one of whom claims she is psychic and that she can see their little girl’s spirit sitting between them...

John reckons it’s all bunkum, but the change in his wife is instantaneous and her misery lifts. Unwilling to break the spell, John goes along with her, up to a point. He also decides that they ought to go out and enjoy themselves. He suggests a restaurant and pooh-poohs the idea of eating in the hotel:

“God, no!” he exclaimed. “With all those rather dreary couples at the other tables? I’m ravenous. I’m also gay. I want to get rather sloshed.”

They find a restaurant in a part of Venice they don’t know, reached by a tortuous route. When they get to their table, the first thing he does is order a drink:

“Two very large camparis, with soda,” John said. “Then we’ll study the menu.”

Over Laura’s shoulder he sees the two old ladies again. Convinced that they’re being followed, he tries to distract her, but she sees them and goes for another long confab about the astral plane. For John, the evening is ruined:

“All right,” thought John savagely, “Then I will get sloshed,” and he proceeded to down his campari and soda and order another, while he pointed out something quite unintelligible on the menu as his own choice, but remembered scampi for Laura. “And a bottle of Soave,” he added, “With ice.” The evening was ruined anyway, what was to have been an intimate, happy celebration would now be heavy-laden with spiritualistic visions, poor little dead Christine sharing the table with them, which was so damned stupid when in earthly life she would have been tucked up hours ago in bed. The bitter taste of the campari suited his mood of sullen self-pity, and all the while he watched the group at the table in the opposite corner, Laura apparently listening while the more active sister held forth and the blind one sat silent, her formidable sightless eyes turned in his direction... He began on his second campari and soda. The two drinks, taken on an empty stomach, had an instant effect. Vision became blurred. And still Laura went on sitting at the other table, putting in a question now and again, while the active sister talked. The waiter appeared with the scampi, and a companion beside him to server John’s own order, which was totally unrecognisable, heaped with a livid sauce. “The signora does not come?” enquired the first waiter, and John shook his head grimly, pointing an unsteady finger across the room. “Tell the signora,” he said carefully, “Her scampi will get cold.”

Cold scampi is the least of their problems. The psychic sisters warn John that they must leave Venice as his life is in danger. Advice that he fatally chooses to ignore...

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...

London and the South East by David Szalay

I picked up David Szalay’s London and the South East on the strength of a review of his latest novel, and once again I am grateful that the vagaries of the library catalogue meant that I had to choose this one instead.


Paul Rainey is a dissatisfied ad salesman, hurtling into middle age and incipient breakdown, aided and abetted by the booze and cannabis that he uses to keep himself going through the day. When he gets an offer of a much better job from his old colleague Eddy Jaw, he finally thinks that things might be going his way. Unfortunately, it would appear that the salesman has been sold down the river. When he turns up late and hungover for his first day of work at Eddy’s company, Delmar Morgan, it quickly becomes apparent that the whole thing was a setup to lure Paul’s sales team away from their present company. Without Paul.

Alcohol drinks as a way of life started for Paul, he supposes, in the Northwood days. Simon was a serious drinker. They would get drunk at lunchtime every day, and then go back to the Cheshire Cheese after work. That the pub was so quaint made it seem unserious somehow. And everything was going well – money was being made – the boozing was exuberant, not morose. Now when he is sober, there is always a sense that he is waiting for something. Walking out of Delmar Morgan, Paul’s first thought had been of alcohol drinks. It was eleven, and the pubs had just opened. In truth, part of him had started thinking of alcohol drinks the moment Eddy had said, “There isn’t a job for you here, Paul.” And a part of him had – if he is honest – even been pleased to hear those words. He had immediately felt licensed, permitted, almost obliged, to go out and drink until he was very drunk. There was nothing to stop him doing that anyway, of course – he had money – but he was not the sort of uninhibited alcoholic who pours beer, or mixed a Bloody Mary, first thing in the morning. He did not have – as George Best was said to have had – a wine bar by his bed, so that waking in the middle of the night (probably still in his clothes, lights burning silently all over the house) he could top up his blood-alcohol level before passing out again. Paul’s alcoholism still operated within limits – very substantial limits – but limits nonetheless, and to exceed them he had to have, he insisted on this scrupulously, a reason. Of course, he could always find a reason – and he always did – but it was nevertheless a sort of luxury to have a real reason; and terrible misfortunes, disasters, vicious setbacks and disappointments, were superbly fit for purpose. His shock and humiliation, his stunned sense of collapse as he walked down Victoria Street, were entirely unfeigned. His legs were trembling under him. He felt awful, weepy, as if he’d been beaten up, and he entered the first pub he saw, which was the Albert.

It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. He now has Christmas to get through...

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.

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.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the author drily points out:

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