All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills

I first read this around ten years ago, finishing it in a single sitting. I was captivated by the sense of Kafkaesque menace that pervades the story, despite the fact that very little happens for most of the book.

Ostensibly the tale of a holidaymaker who gets trapped in a small village in the Lake District after procrastinating whether to go on his travels to India by motorbike, Mills imbues the book with an increasing feeling of menace. By the time winter has arrived and the unnamed narrator has found himself taking on numerous odd jobs including the local milk round, an ice cream franchise and painting a set of rowing boats in a hideous shade of green, the claustrophobia is unbearable.

It all starts off innocently enough; the narrator decides to stay on a week at the end of the holiday season. As the rest of the campers disappear home, Mr Parker, the farmer who runs the site, asks him to paint a gate in return for the next week’s rent for his pitch. It seems a reasonable deal, and it saves him a few bob which he can spend on beer:

After that there was nothing to do except go down the pub. I had a choice between walking and going on the bike. If I took the bike it meant I would have to drink less, maximum three pints. Or I could walk and have five. I thought of the money I’d saved by painting Mr Parker’s gate, and decided to walk.

Pretty soon, he is invited to join the darts team at the Packhorse, the livelier of the two pubs in the village. There’s a new barrel of bitter on tap, just for him, and he’s allowed to run up a sizeable slate:

My opponent from the Golden Lion was a portly bloke called Phil who didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered when I beat him, and instantly rushed off to buy me a pint of lager. When I asked if it would be alright if I had Topham’s Excelsior instead he looked slightly sorry for me, as though I hadn’t been properly weaned or something.

Well, it’s not as if he’s staying for long, just until he finishes the painting for Mr Parker:

When I walked to the pub at night I could hear seabirds out in the middle of the lake, squawking and arguing. It sounded as though there were thousands of them. I had no idea where they’d come from, but they seemed to have settled in for the winter. I thought about the seven boats waiting to be painted, the darts fixtures and the endless points of Topham’s Excelsior Bitter, and realized that I’d settled in for the winter as well.

But disaster strikes. He doesn’t realise that away matches take place on Tuesdays... When he gets to the Packhorse too late to make the game in the nearby village, he gets a distinctly frosty reception. It’s hinted that he ought to keep his head down at the other pub for a couple of weeks until it all blows over. Sadly, the Ring of Bells is a purgatorial dump of a public house:

That night I began my two-week sentence at the Ring of Bells. Two weeks of sitting in a pub with no women, no darts and no Topham’s Excelsior Bitter wasn’t very appealing, so I put it off until about quarter to ten... The same people sat in the same places and stared at their drinks, while the landlord (whose name, apparently, was Cyril) stood behind the counter and polished glasses. The conversation was at best desultory.

After a while of this, he begins to question if it’s worth going to the pub at all. He’s saved from this terrible fate when speaking to the captain of the Packhorse darts team while on the new milk round he has somehow acquired:

Tomorrow being Thursday evening I assumed he was referring to the next darts fixture in the Packhorse. I took his remark as meaning that my period of exile was over and I could begin drinking there again. My resolution of the previous evening about ‘not drinking anywhere for the time being’ had seemed very bleak in the cold light of day. After all, what was the point of working if I couldn’t go to the pub at night?

What point indeed? But by the time he finds that there is only one way to leave the village, it’s a bit late to be thinking about beer...

Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

Somewhat of a literary sensation when published in its native Germany, Wetlands managed to cause quite a stir when it appeared in translation over here. Its protagonist, Helen Memel, is an emotionally damaged eighteen-year-old recovering in a hospital proctology unit from an infected shaving cut that occurred when depilating an area not traditionally kept hair free.

The book never leaves the hospital or Helen’s head, and the next two hundred pages consist of a rant against the over hygienic de-odorised concepts of modern femininity, a catalogue of Helen’s erotic experiences and predilection for anal sex, and a desperate attempt to bring her estranged parents back together which culminates in an incredibly painful complication of the original wound. It’s fair to say that Wetlands is not for those of a queasy disposition.

At the heart of the book are Helen’s feelings of rejection from her parents. Her father his absent, she has no idea what he does, and her mother, with whom she lives, once tried to kill herself and Helen’s younger brother, leaving Helen behind. That said, her memory of this is distinctly hazy, something that can be attributed to both shock and the fact that she’s done her best to blot out the experience with drink and drugs.

One of her ex-boyfriends, Michael, was a small time drug dealer who kept his stash in a fake Coca-Cola can. He mistakenly leaves this round Helen’s friend’s house – not a good idea, really:

We blew off school, bought some red wine at a kiosk, and left a message for Michael on his answering machine: “If you’re looking for cola, we found a whole case in Corinna’s room. You won’t get pissed if we start drinking without you, will you?” ... Then began our race against time. The idea was to take as many drugs as possible before the first one took effect and before Michael showed up. Anything we didn’t slurp down we’d have to give back. At nine in the morning we starting taking two pills at a time, washing them down with wine. It didn’t seem right to snort speed and coke so early in the morning, so we made minigrenades out of toilet paper. Half a packet each for us – which is half a gram – poured onto a little piece of toilet paper, skilfully wrapped up, and gulped down with lots of wine.

Michael is not a happy bunny when he finally turns up, not that Helen and Corinna are in any state to care:

I guess everything started to kick in. I can only remember the highlights. Corinna and I laughed the whole time and made up stories set in a fantasy land. At some point Michael came by to pick up his can and cursed us out. We giggled. He said if all the stuff we’d ingested didn’t kill us, we would have to pay him back. We just laughed. Later we puked. First Corinna, then me from the sound and smell of hers. In a big, white bucket. The puke looked like blood because of the red wine. But it took as a long time to figure out why it looked like that. And then we realized there were undigested pills floating around. This seemed like a terrible waste to us. I said: “Half and half?” Corinna said: “Okay, you first.” And so for the first time in my life I drank someone else’s puke. Mixed with my own. In big gulps. Taking turns. Until the bucket was empty. A lot of brain cells die on days like that.

Helen is certainly one of the more interesting literary creations that I’ve encountered, and although Roche’s prose deliberately sets out to shock, she does have some valid points to make but ultimately, they are lost under a welter of bodily functions and a rather clunky translation by someone whose day job is writing for Playboy. It’s certainly not a book I'll forget in a hurry, though, and I'm not sure I'll ever look at an avocado in the same way again...

The Book of Judith

I was put onto the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes by my friend Pete who described her as an example of ancient girl power. Judith plays nemesis to Holofernes’s hubris, with the Assyrian losing his head both metaphorically and literally in the process...

The book of Judith is listed as one of the Apocrypha and has disappeared from modern printings of the King James Version, but it is still regarded as canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, as far as I can work out. I’ve resorted to Gutenberg and their text from the Challoner revision of the Douay Rheims translation here.

The story begins with the onslaught on Israel by the Assyrian army, led by Holofernes. He puts the land to the sword and demands that the people follow his king, Nebuchadnezzar. Naturally, the Israelites are having none of it, a brave and noble stand to take, and one that seems increasingly perilous as Holofernes advances on Jerusalem.

In the city abides Judith, a widow of just three months, who has spent the time since her husband died locked in her house wearing a hair shirt and refusing to eat. Hearing of the threat, she puts on sackcloth and ashes and prays to God for the city’s deliverance:

9:12. Bring to pass, O Lord, that his pride may be cut off with his own

sword.

The plot is then hatched... Judith, an exceptionally beautiful woman, is sent to the Assyrian camp where she will wile her way into Holofernes company and do away with him:

10:4. And the Lord also gave her more beauty: because all this dressing

up did not proceed from sensuality, but from virtue: and therefore the

Lord increased this her beauty, so that she appeared to all men's eyes

incomparably lovely.

10:5. And she gave to her maid a bottle of wine to carry, and a vessel

of oil, and parched corn, and dry figs, and bread and cheese, and went

out.

Holofernes is duly stunned, and responds by asking her to stay in his camp, the old goat. After four days of her refusing to eat his food, he decides that enough is enough and he must seduce her; it’s now a matter of Assyrian national pride that he gets his leg over:

12:10. And it came to pass on the fourth day, that Holofernes made a

supper for his servants, and said to Vagao his eunuch: Go, and persuade

that Hebrew woman, to consent of her own accord to dwell with me.

12:11. For it is looked upon as shameful among the Assyrians, if a woman

mock a man, by doing so as to pass free from him.

12:12. Then Vagao went in to Judith, and said: Let not my good maid be

afraid to go in to my lord, that she may be honoured before his face,

that she may eat with him and drink wine and be merry.

And eat drink and be merry they do:

12:16. And the heart of Holofernes was smitten, for he was burning with

the desire of her.

12:17. And Holofernes said to her: Drink now, and sit down and be merry;

for thou hast found favour before me.

12:18. And Judith said: I will drink my lord, because my life is

magnified this day above all my days.

12:19. And she took and ate and drank before him what her maid had

prepared for her.

12:20. And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank

exceeding much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.

Silly boy has got a bit carried away, and has passed out on the couch, overcharged with wine:

13:1. And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their

lodgings, and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

13:2. And they were all overcharged with wine.

13:3. And Judith was alone in the chamber.

13:4. But Holofernes lay on his bed, fast asleep, being exceedingly

drunk.

13:5. And Judith spoke to her maid to stand without before the chamber,

and to watch:

13:6. And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion

of her lips in silence,

13:7. Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look

on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise

up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have

purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

13:8. And when she had said this, she went to the pillar that was at his

bed's head, and loosed his sword that hung tied upon it.

13:9. And when she had drawn it out, she took him by the hair of his

head, and said: Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.

13:10. And she struck twice upon his neck, and cut off his head, and

took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body.

He probably never felt a thing... Judith then stuffs his noggin in a bag and decamps back to Jerusalem, and the city is saved.

St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley

I’ve had a thing for Gothic Revival for many years and still believe that one of the finest examples of the style can be seen in London: the Midland Grand Hotel, George Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece on the Euston Road.

Bradley’s book gives the history of the building that along with William Henry Barlow’s trainshed make up St Pancras Station. Now recently reopened as a hotel once again it has had a chequered past; it failed its fire safety inspection in the 1980s and for a long time British Rail were itching to get rid of it. They weren’t alone in their passion for cultural vandalism, the architectural trends of that century were seen as grossly outdated and impractical, even by the 1920s and 30s:

Even P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster got the drift, remarking somewhere that if he knew one thing about the Victorians, it was that they weren’t to be trusted around a pile of bricks and a trowel.

The trainshed is another marvel of its age, a cavernous space created by a single arch roof over the platforms. A stunning feat of engineering, its design is part of the changing drinking history in the capital:

Barlow’s first intention was that the spoil dug out for the tunnel should be used to infill the basement under his elevated platforms. Wiser counsels then suggested that this space would be better turned over to commerce, especially if this could be tied in with the railway’s own goods traffic. As it happened, there was growing demand in London for the fine ales of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, near the heart of the Midland system. The soft water and improved brewing techniques there allowed the production of a clear and stable brew very different from the capital’s darker and cloudier stouts and porters, a change in taste that also contributed to the slow disappearance of pewter tankards from pubs in favour of drinking glasses. The railway had already erected a beer trans-shipment warehouse for Messrs Bass alongside the nearby canal, a structure big enough to provide six acres of storage space: in brewer’s terms, enough for 100,000 thirty-six-gallon barrels; in drinker’s terms, enough for 28,800,000 pints. The huge void beneath the new station platforms, with its deep plan and stable temperature, was ideal for the same purpose and could easily be reached from the track level by means of hydraulic lifts.

Keeping this vast space stocked up with booze was hard work:

Such was the capacity of the new beer cellar that three dedicated trains loaded with casks arrived every day to replenish it, with even more coming in October, the peak month for brewing.

Best of all, the whole structure was purpose built:

The spacing of the columns at centres just over 14 feet apart was calculated to match the plans of the warehouses of Burton-upon-Trent, where the same figure derived from a multiple of the standard local cask. And so, in Barlow’s words, ‘the length of a beer barrel became the unit of measurement upon which all the arrangements of this floor were based.

Who said that the Empire was built on tea?

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...