The Great Game: On Secret Service In High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

The advantage of an incomplete history degree is that the sense of unfinished business often prompts me to pick up a good history book. Aside from appealing to a sense of autodidactic self improvement, I feel that I’m making up for previous failure, in a small way.

The Great Game is certainly a good place to start for anyone with an interest in the history of Central Asia. The book is a cracking read, full of derring do and high intrigue, but as well as a fascinating story to relate, Hopkirk has the skill to tell it well.

One of the major players in what the Russians described as the tournament of shadows, was Alexander Bokhara Burnes, whose explorations of that desert kingdom made his name. In 1831, he was sent to Lahore to present a gift of horses to Maharajah Ranjit Singh from William IV, a ruse to survey the Indus river while transporting the animals.

Ranjit Singh ruled the kingdom of the Punjab and the British were keen to keep him onside, especially if, as they feared, the Russians were going to start pouring through the Khyber Pass and push them into the Indian Ocean. Burnes charmed the elderly ruler, who appeared to have been quite the bon viveur:

In all, Burnes and his companions were to spend nearly two months as Ranit’s guests. There were endless military parades, banquets, and other entertainments, including long sessions spent imbibing with Ranjit a locally distilled ‘hell-brew’ of which the latter was extremely fond. There was also a troupe of Kashmiri dancing girls, forty in number and all dressed as boys, to whom the one eyed ruler (he had lost the other from smallpox) appeared similarly addicted.

Burnes seemed sorry to leave, although he was sceptical as to how long the old chap would remain on his perch, especially given his penchant for booze:

‘Cunning and conciliation’, Burnes wrote, ‘have been the two great weapons of his diplomacy.’ But how much longer would he remain in power? ‘It is probable’, reported Burnes, ‘that the career of this chief is nearly at an end. His chest is contracted, his back is bent, his limbs withered.’ His nightly drinking bouts, Burnes feared, were more than anyone could take. However, his favourite tipple – ‘more ardent than the strongest brandy’ – appeared to do him no harm. Ranjit Singh was to survive another eight years – greatly to the relief of the Company’s generals, who saw him as a vital link in India’s outer defences, and a formidable ally against a Russian invader.

Ranjit Singh at least made it into old age. Burnes met a sticky end in Kabul in 1841...

Metroland by Julian Barnes

Growing up during the early 60s in the Middlesex suburbs, Chris and his friend Toni snigger at the Bourgeois world surrounding them and vow never to be that complacent themselves. Their time at City of London School is spent performing épats on unsuspecting shop salesmen and commuters, while wondering about the unsignposted life ahead of them and sex.

Chris later finds himself in Paris in 1968, researching in the Bibleotheque National for a post-grad paper on theatre and avoiding his fellow ex-pats, although his tone is mellowing a little:

I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés around the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.

Lodging in the XIXe arrondissement, he’s at least in possession of a good drinks cupboard:

I was lent a flat up in the Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).

The daily trudge through documents at the library is tiring stuff, and young Chris finds the lure of the nearby hostelries too much to resist:

...exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick vin blanc cassis at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.

And sitting at a chair nearby is a delightful Breton girl reading Lawrence Durrell. He fumbles an introduction, buys her a coffee and gets himself a date. Things with Annick move slowly, as Toni points out in a letter, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair. All in good time, Toni:

When we came out I mentioned, in a formally casual way, the stock of calvados at my place. It’s proximity was known. The flat was as I’d left it, which means as I’d half-arranged it. Reasonably tidy, but not obsessive either way. Books lying open as if in use (some of them were – all the best lies have an alloy of truth). Lighting low and from the corners – for obvious reasons, but also in case some eager, treacherous spot had come into bud during the course of the film. Glasses put away, but rewashed first, and rinsed not dried, so that the calvados wouldn’t have to be drained through its usual bobbing scum of tea-towel.

Chris spends the next few weeks in a haze of sex and French cinema. The relationship ends in tears, of course, and he throws himself into his studies, spending his remaining time in Paris in the booking gloom of the Bib Nat. And what of the riots and protests, les événements de Mai 68? Rien. Chris has missed the lot.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Mitchell’s 1999 debut is an episodic musing on the nature of ghosts, a complicated inter-linked set of nine short stories, (starting in Japan just after the nerve-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway and wending their way through revolutionary China, post communist Mongolia, to a future war and artificial intelligence), and an exploration of the concept of free will and choice. The germ of Mitchell’s hugely successful Cloud Atlas appears in Ghostwritten with many of that later novel’s themes and motifs (including a reference to a birthmark shaped like a comet) appearing here first.

By chapter seven, the book finds itself in London, where musician and ghostwriter Marco wakes up in a bed that doesn’t belong to his on-off girlfriend and mother of his child:

My smirking hangover gave me a few moments to make my last requests, and to take in the fact that whoever’s bed this was it wasn’t Poppy’s. Whash! Then it laid into me, armed with a road-surface shatterer. I must have groaned pretty loudly, because the woman next to me rolled over and opened her eyes.

Connections, connections: the lady he has woken up with is the widow of a corrupt Hong Kong trader who died in chapter three, and Marco is about to save the life of a brilliant physicist who is fleeing to an island off the coast of County Cork in chapter eight... He’s blissfully unaware of this, of course, and is trying to piece together what happened to him the night before:

I’d been at the private view on Curzon Street. Oil paintings by some artist friend of Rohan’s, Mudgeon or Pigeon or Smudgeon or something. This redhead had come up to me then, and we’d done the old quantum physics equals eastern religion bollocks. Then – a taxi – a wine bar on Shaftesbury Avenue – then another taxi – that would be most of my money gone – and then another wine bar on Upper Street. Then to here, though how was anyone’s guess. What was her name... A little nest of tissues and condoms down my side of the bed, and a bottle of red wine with almost nothing in it, but 1982 on the label. Why do the best things happen when I’m too pissed to remember them?

Shown the door by his one-night-stand, Marco makes tracks to the subject matter of his book, an old spy who was part of a ring of double agents after the war. Hanging around long enough to hear a ghost story, he’s given the bum’s rush again when his host hears that a friend has died in St Petersburg. (We the reader have been aware of the man’s demise for at least twenty pages now...) Oh well, off to the literary agent, the well-to-do Tim Cavendish:

Glance at Tim’s desk and you’ll see everything you need to know. The desk itself was owned by Charles Dickens. Well, that’s what Tim says and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Terminally overpopulated by piles of files and manuscripts, a glass of Glenfiddich that you could mistake for a goldfish bowl of Glenfiddich, three pairs of glasses, a word processor I’ve never seen him use, an overflowing ashtray and a copy of A-Z Guide to Nineveh and Ur and The Racing Post.

He entertains Marco long enough to ladle him out a snort of whisky and explain that the act of memory is an act of ghostwriting before the phone rings with news that Cavendish’s brother has found himself financially embarrassed in Hong Kong and the proposed book is almost certainly off...

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...

Trespass by Rose Tremain

Dark goings on in the Cévennes mountains of Southern France. Rose Tremains’s novel Trespass examines the dark heart of two sibling relationships: Audrun and Aramon Lunel, living next door to each other in mutual antipathy; and Anthony and Veronica Verey, a writer and a failed antiques dealer who is looking for a new life in the rugged countryside of the Languedoc.

Audrun has put up with her violent and abusive alcoholic brother for her whole life but is secretly hoping that his health is finally going to fail him. Banished from the family home, an imposing mas on the side of a hill, she lives in a tiny bungalow on the edge of his land. Aramon lives in filth in the old house, permanently sloshed and surrounded by a fug of cigarette smoke:

She would see the strip-light blink on in the kitchen of the mas – that old green-tinged rod of light – and picture her brother stumbling to and from the electric stove, trying to fry lardons, gulping from his glass of red wine, dropping ash from his cigarette into the fat of the frying pan, picking up the bottle and drinking from that, his stubbled face wearing that fatuous grin it acquired when the wine excited his senses. Then, with a shaking hand, he’d try to eat the burnt lardons and a burnt fried egg, spooning everything in, with another cigarette smouldering on a saucer and outside in the dark the dogs in their wire pound howling because he’d forgotten to feed them... Upstairs he lived in grime. Wore his clothes until they stank, then hung them at the window to wash themselves in the rain, air themselves in the sun. And he was proud of this. Proud of his ‘ingenuity’. Proud of the strangest things. Proud that the father, Serge, had named him after a variety of grape.

Hoping to inherit the mas that she believes is rightly hers when her drunken brother pops his clogs, Audrun’s plans go distinctly awry when Anthony Verey is shown around by a local estate agent who has promised Aramon a price of several hundred thousand Euros for the family pile. Unfortunately, Audrun’s shack is spoiling the view and Anthony loses interest. Furious, Aramon comes down the hill to remonstrate. He is suitably fortified for any encounter with his sister:

He was drunk on pastis. His gaze looped and swivelled all around him. The sun beat down on his wild head.

He then makes a few wild threats before throwing up on Audrun’s freshly cut lawn. She refuses to budge... Watching his dream of impossible wealth slip away from him, Aramon dwells on the terrible deeds in his past and the unspeaking things he did to his sister:

He drank because of the weight of things. More and more, the alcohol was making him ill, he knew this, but he couldn’t find a substitute, any other way of sliding out from underneath the slab of memories that tried to crush him, crush him with guilt and with love the could never express.

He’s drinking himself into the grave and his body is protesting every inch of the way:

Aramon walked slowly, painfully back to the Mas Lunel. His feet hurt all the time. There was an ache in his hip. His gut churned with some kind of distress that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite sickness, but a mortal unease he couldn’t identify.

Still, if he thinks he’s got problems now, it’s going to get a whole lot worse when Anthony Verey disappears...

Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

Notionally a work of fiction, but peppered with a hefty amount of travel writing, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi is a contemplation of life, love and enlightenment in the titular cities.

Jeff, a middle aged freelance journalist, has been sent to Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale for the magazine Kultchur. He meets up at the airport with the familiar crowd of hacks and arty types, who already getting stuck into the drink before the horrors of their budget flight:

It was like being on a school trip, organized by the art teacher and part-funded by a range of sympathetic breweries.

He’s ostensibly there to do an interview and cover the event, but things never entirely work out as planned:

That was the thing about the Biennale: it was a definitive experience, absolutely fixed, subject only to insignificant individual variation. You came to Venice, you saw a ton of art, you went to parties, you drank up a storm, you talked bollocks for hours on end and went back to London with a cumulative hangover, liver damage, a notebook almost devoid of notes and the first tingle of a cold sore.

As the group lurch from a free party to a bar, Jeff feels the artistic atmosphere beginning to rub off on him:

In the bar, waiting to get served, Jeff decided that, following the example of Tracy Emin’s Everyone she’d ever slept with tent, if he were an artist he would build a one-to-one scale model of all the booze he’d ever poured down his gullet. Beer, wine, champagne, cider, the lot. Christ, he’d need a gallery the size of an aircraft hanger just for the beer: the pints, the tins, the bottles. It would be a portrait not simply of his life but of his era. Some of the brands he’d started out with had since disappeared: Tartan, Double Diamond, Trophy, the inaptly named Long Life. And it would be international too; not just the domestic beers, but the ones you swilled when abroad – Peroni, for example, five of which he order from the busy barman.

Better than that, he meets a beautiful American lady called Laura, and he contrives to make sure their paths cross again. Even so, there are still artworks to view, interviews to conduct (badly) and parties to attend:

Inside, everyone was belting back bellinis as usual. The waiters were struggling to cope with the insatiable demand for bellinis. There was barely room to move and around the drinks table it was mayhem. Jeff had got it into his head that risotto has been promised. He assumed that he’d got this idea from the invite, but there was no mention of it there and, at present, no risotto was in evidence. In view of the numbers, producing risotto was an absurdly ambitious and labour-intensive undertaking, but it seemed that Jeff was not alone in expecting risotto. The risotto and its potential non-appearance was, in fact, the chief topic of conversation in the garden. People were counting on risotto to line their stomachs; a lack of risotto would have a significant impact on their ability to belt back bellinis.

Perhaps because of the lack of blotting paper, everyone seems more pissed than usual. Conversation gets increasingly complicated:

You could say anything at this point in the evening. It didn’t have to make sense and you didn’t have to wait for the other person to finish what they were saying before you said it, but, by the same token, no one had to listen to what you were saying, or wait for you to finish saying what you were saying. “Constable–,” said a woman Jeff didn’t recognise, but that was as far as she got because the Kaiser was saying, “There’s only one artist in the Biennale I care about.” Unusually, there was a pause as everyone waited for the result of this declaration. “Bellini!” he said, raising a glass in acknowledgement of the enthusiastic applause with which this remark was endorsed.

The evening is not entirely wasted as Jeff and Laura end up going back to the same hotel, and the rest of his stay in Venice is spent in a trance of athletic sex, endless bellinis, cocaine and art. The last day comes all to quickly and they say goodbye, promising to meet again but not exchanging numbers. Jeff wanders slightly shell shocked into the bar where they first met and tries to order a drink:

The bar was open, but quite deserted. Even taking into account the fact that it was a Sunday afternoon, it was surprisingly empty. Staff were stacking chairs on tables. It had the look of a place that had been looted. “What’s happened?” Jeff asked. “We run out.” “Ran out of what?” “Drink.” “You mean there’s nothing left to drink?” “Si, nothing.” “Nothing?” “Niente. Is all gone. Beer, wine, whisky. Finito.” He seemed exhausted, proud, amazed and a little appalled by what had occurred. He had, evidently, never experienced anything like this. Or expected it. If an English football team had been playing in Venice, then he might reasonably have assumed there would be a huge demand for booze, but he had seriously underestimated the insatiable thirst of the international art crowd.

After all this, it’s perhaps not surprising that the second section, set in Varanasi, is the more contemplative part of the book...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

A meditation on fate, a surreal journalistic account of an honour killing and a visceral account of the booze fuelled murder itself, Chronicle of a Death Foretold has been my introduction to the writing of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez.

The plot itself concerns the killing of Santiago Nasar outside his house. Named by a bride rejected by her husband as the man who took her virginity, her twin brothers butcher him outside his house the morning after the ill fated wedding. The narrator, investigating the crime nearly thirty years later, discovers that although everyone in the town knew that the brothers were going to kill Santiago Nasar, the event itself could not be stopped. Even the victim, waking up with a hangover from the wedding, has a faint inkling that things might be awry, although he misinterprets his bad dreams:

Nor did Santiago Nasar recognize the omen. He had slept little and poorly, without getting undressed, and he woke up with a headache and a sediment of copper stirrup on his palate, and he interpreted them as the natural havoc of the wedding revels that had gone on until after midnight.

He gets up, leaves the house and walks past his executioners:

That morning they were still wearing their dark wedding suits, too heavy and formal for the Caribbean, and they looked devastated by so many hours of bad living, but they’d done their duty and shaved. Although they hadn’t stopped drinking since the eve of the wedding, they weren’t drunk at the end of three days, but they looked, rather, like insomniac sleepwalkers.

It has, by all accounts been quite a hooley:

He recounted that 205 cases of contraband alcohol had been consumed and almost two thousand bottles of cane liquor, which had been distributed among the crowd. There wasn’t a single person, rich or poor, who hadn’t participated in some way in the wildest party the town had ever seen.

As the narrator recounts the details of the story from what the surviving witnesses can tell him, he realises that small pockets of resistance have occurred here and there. The police chief takes the twins’ knives away from them, believing their threats to be drunken bravado. The twins themselves make sure to tell everyone they meet their intentions, but are unable to make anyone stop them. The lady at the local bar gives them more drink, in attempt to make them incapable of action:

The Vicario brothers came in a four-ten. At that time the only things to eat were sold, but Clotilde Armenta sold them a bottle of cane liquor, not only because of the high regard she had for them but also because she was very grateful for the piece of wedding cake they had sent her. They drank down the whole bottle in two long swigs, but they remained stolid. “They were stunned,” Clotilde Armenta told me, “and they couldn’t have got their blood pressure up even with lamp oil.” Then they took off their cloth jackets, hung them carefully on the chair backs, and asked her for another bottle.

Over-fortified and doomed to avenge their sister, the twins inexorably go about their duty and Santiago Nasar is hacked down at his front door. Like the hangover on the morning after, some things in life are just inescapable...