Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

The unreliable narrator is a useful device in fiction. The haziness that descends over the novel’s events gives plenty of scope for interpretation, and the principal character themselves is often gloriously deluded in the bargain, which is certainly the case with Barbara Covett, a former history teacher in her sixties who is now writing her account of a colleague’s affair with an underage boy.

She begins her notes explaining that she and another former teacher, Sheba Hart, are temporarily living in the house of Sheba’s brother while he is away, and in circumstances somewhat more straightened than Sheba is used to:

I don’t cook anything fancy. Sheba’s appetite isn’t up to much and I’ve never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she’s eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. Something in a bottle, at least, she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. We are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn’t seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff.

Barbara then goes on to relate what happened at a comprehensive school where they both taught, how Sheba, a newly started pottery teacher, started an affair with a fifteen-year-old student, destroying her marriage, her career and leading to an impending court case.

Barbara has taken a shine to Sheba from the start, and singles her out as a friend. Sheba confides in Barbara that a boy, Steven Connolly, has made a pass at her, and Barbara tells her in no uncertain terms to put the kibosh on any designs he has. Unfortunately, Sheba finds herself smitten, and an affair begins. There are liaisons al fresco on Hampstead Heath, furtive couplings behind the kiln in her pottery studio, and even, on a couple of occasions, something that might even be called a ‘date’:

At the restaurant in Hammersmith, Connolly apparently requested a sickly cocktail to go with his curry. Sheba suggested he have a soft drink instead, or a lager, but he was insistent: he wanted his rum and Coke. She did not press the matter. She could hardly hector the boy about the dangers of strong drink, she felt, when she was about to take him off the park for sex.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, but the fickleness of teenage boys is particularly notable. Connolly eventually gets bored with Sheba. Sadly, Sheba feels different about the matter and gets distinctly clingy. While her home life is collapsing around her, Connolly is going to parties, doing the usual adolescent stuff:

Sheba had tried to remain cool, but she had kept picturing him at the party, drinking his rum and Coke from a plastic cup, dancing with peachy-skinned girls in slutty dresses.

Meanwhile, Barbara is slowly inveigling herself more and more into Sheba’s life. She decides that Sheba is her best friend now, and when she’s rejected in favour of Connolly, she reacts by hinting to another teacher that Sheba has an unhealthy interest in year 11 boys...

While Sheba spends one last oblivious Christmas and New Year with her family and Sheba sits at home with a full glass and a book (I bought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while re-reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion) the word finally gets out, and Sheba’s life is about to spiral into scandal and catastrophe.

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

When I was thirteen, I found myself being given a book with a rather serious title along the lines of Your Preparation for Adolescence which dwelt long on the temptation to sin and the perils of marijuana. Seeing as all I learned from it were a few rather outdated slang words for puff, I can’t help but fantasise how things would have turned out had I managed to send this little gem back in time to my thirteenth birthday.

Part memoir, part rant and an attempt to rewrite The Female Eunuch from a bar stool, How to be a Woman is a hilarious amble through subjects both serious and not, that affect women in Britain today, the sort of stuff that people need a few drinks inside them to discuss:

So whilst How to be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

She marches through most of the above before getting to marriage; the obscene cost, and the ultimate disappointment of the ceremony itself. She illustrates this with her own nuptials:

I don’t want to exaggerate but, by God, it was a bad wedding... My father is in a suit he shoplifted from Ciro Citterio, and some shoes he shoplifted from Burtons – but he looks calm, wise and not a little emotional about giving away his first child in marriage. “Oh my lovely daughter,” he says, smelling a little of whisky.

Realising she is walking too quickly up the aisle, she slows down to a pace so slow, her sisters suspect that she has cystitis:

Still, I look fine compared to husband to be. He’s so nervous he’s a very pale green, and is shaking like a sock on a washing line. “I’ve never seen a more anxious groom,” the registrar confides, later. “I had to give him two shots of whisky.”

The ceremony over, the guests decamp to the watering hole:

An hour later and everyone’s in the bar. Many of our invited guests haven’t been able to make it, because it’s two days after Christmas and they’re with their families in Scotland, Devon and Ireland. My family are taking advantage of the free bar – many of them can’t walk anymore, and, of the ones that can, two of the have found a memorial to a dead knight, and are giving his statue a ‘saucy’ pole dance.

The reader may now have drawn the conclusion that Caitlin Moran doesn’t do weddings:

I was similarly lacklustre at Cathy and John’s wedding, when Cathy’s dad gave me a tour of their beautiful, all-white house, as I trailed along behind, swigging red wine. “And this is my favourite view,” Cathy’s dad said, as we reached the master bedroom, and he strode over to the window. “On a clear day, you can see right down the valley.” Then a bat flew in through the window, and right into my face. I don’t know if you’ve every had a bat fly into your face, but you don’t have an enormous amount of time to work out your coping technique. You kind of... ride on instinct. My instinct, it turned out, was to scream “WHAT THE FUCKING?”, and hurl my red wine right across the world’s whitest room.

Still, she knows exactly how to rectify the situation:

Bombing into the kitchen, I returned with a bottle of white wine, and started sloshing it around, in a dedicated manner. “White wine gets red wine stains out!” I shouted. “I saw it on telly!” I maniacally started pouring the white wine into the now scarlet rug, and scrubbing it with a tea towel. Cathy’s dad came across the room – slightly faster than I thought a man of his age would be capable of – and gently prised the bottle from my hand. He stared at it – now empty – for a moment. “Ah,” he said, regretfully, “The ’93 Alsace Grand Cru.” There was a long pause. “Still,” he said, with enormous grace, touching the bottle with his fingertips. “It was a little too warm to drink.”

Her feminism is just as important as her humour and Moran tackles her subjects of sexism, motherhood, abortion, role models, weight and adolescence with equal gravity and laughter.

I feel I probably owe the author a bit of an apology, as I’ve never given her much time for her prodigious column writing. I grumbled that most of it wasn’t my thing, (to be objective, that goes for almost all columnists), missing the point that Moran writes well, and is very funny as well as being an excellent polemicist and debater.

I felt almost wistful for my thirteen year old self as I read How to be a Woman, and it is testament to the book’s clarity of thinking that I wish I’d had the chance to read it then. I’m sure it would have helped me muddle through just a little bit better than just knowing that a large weight of cannabis used to be called a brick...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I picked this up by accident while looking for something completely different, but as with most of my serendipitous finds, I’m ever grateful for whatever thought process dragged me to the particular shelf in the library that is the home of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The goon in question is time, forever beating on the interlinked characters in Egan’s novel which flits from late 70s California, to a dystopian New York in the 2020s. Chronological order is eschewed in favour of themes, her playful prose playing tag with ideas through the book. It begins with Sasha, PA to music mogul Bennie Salazar, who is seeking psychiatric treatment for her kleptomania. Each chapter is a separate vignette, seen through the eyes of another player: Bennie and his friends in a band called The Flaming Dildoes, listening to the Dead Kennedys and playing the punk clubs in San Francisco; Sasha’s friend Rob losing his mind at college in New York; her uncle Ted looking for her a few years earlier when she has run away to Naples...

Ted, a frustrated art history professor who dreams of writing something serious, but never seems to be able to, has been sent by his sister’s new husband to retrieve Sasha from whatever she’s got herself mixed up in and bring her back to the US. He spends each day in Naples wandering around museums, pointedly not looking for her, then going back and ringing his sister to report on his progress. The guilt, along with the realisation that his deliberate freezing of his desire for his wife has destroyed both her sanity and their marriage, is crushing:

After hanging up, Ted went to the minibar and dumped a vodka over ice. He brought drink and phone to the balcony and sat in a white plastic chair, looking down at the Via Partenope and the Bay of Naples.

Ted, in reality, is not much of a drinker:

He seldom drank; booze flung a curtain of exhaustion over his head, robbing him of the two precious hours he had each night – two, maybe three, after dinner with Susan and the boys – in which to think and write about art.

It’s best to put it all to one side, and get back to the serious matter of looking at great art. He sets off the next day to Museo Nazionale to see marbles of Orpheus & Eurydice. On his way back to the hotel, he wanders into the slums of Naples, and runs into Sasha.

It’s all a bit awkward, but he manages to persuade her to come out for supper that evening. She opens up a bit after a second glass of red wine, and they go on to a nightclub:

After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. “Friends of mine own this place,” Sasha said, leading the way into the tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. “Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you?” she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. “Like that, with a little umbrella.”

I remember reading this with a palpable terror that something terrible was going to happen; would one of them make a pass at the other, would there be a fight with some of the criminals that she had befriended (we learn from an earlier part of the book that she has dabbled in thieving and prostitution while in Italy, although is this true?) What happens is more understated, but no less devastating:

Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached into his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’d robbed him.

The fact that Sasha eventually makes good of her life makes little difference. The deed is done, it’s part of her forever now. And even if it could be wiped away and forgotten, there’s still no escaping time’s Goon...

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

I recalled a passage in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet which involved champagne and disaster, that I thought seemed appropriate for the New Year and for the blog, in that order. I last read the book it nearly a decade back, having just read and loved her second book, Affinity. Tipping the Velvet seemed at first to be the lighter book, and it’s obvious that Waters had bloody good fun writing it, but looking back, she’s managed to do more than just create an entertaining Victorian romp. A whole imagined world of lesbian history is intertwined with her sumptuously detailed descriptions of London in the 1890s and her impressive research into gay and lesbian writing of the late nineteenth century; it’s a rather marvellous achievement and also a cracking read.

Nancy, know as Nan, lives with her family in Whitstable, where she works shelling oysters for their restaurant. Captivated by Kitty Butler, a male impersonator who she sees at the local theatre, she becomes close friends with her, taking up an offer to work as her dresser in London. Soon performing as a double act on stage, they become quite famous, with a burgeoning physical relationship growing in secret. Unfortunately, Nan comes back one day to find Kitty in bed with their agent, Walter, and she leaves in a hurry.

Taking to the streets and the grim world of prostitution, going out ‘renting’ dressed as a young man for male clients. It’s here that she runs into Diana, a wealthy widow with a rather outré taste in sex toys. She lives with her for a year, but Diana and her rich, boorish lady friends treat her as little more than an object of titillation and erotic indulgence, and Nan misses Kitty terribly.

After a rather debauched party thrown by Diana for Sapphists Only, Nan has a fight with her after she tries to strip Zena, her maid, in front of her friends. Sent upstairs while the rest of the party continues its drunken whirl, Nan finds herself consoling Zena:

“Just listen to them!” I said, growing bitter again. “Partying like anything! They have forgotten about us, sitting miserably up here...” “Oh, I hope they have!” “Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’t matter to them. Why, we might be having a party of our own!” She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: “Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?”

Her new friend scuttles downstairs and returns with a dewy bottle and a glass straight from the cold store:

I went to her and took the bottle, then peeled away the lead wrapper from its neck. “You’ve shaken it up,” I said. “It’ll go off with a real bang!” She put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. I felt the cork squirm in the glass for a second; then it leapt from my fingers, and I gave a yell: “Quick! Quick! Bring a glass!” A creamy fountain of foam had risen from the neck of the bottle, and now drenched my fingers and soaked my legs – I was still, of course, clad in the little white toga. Zena seized the glass from the tray and held it, giggling again, beneath the spurting wine. We went and sat upon the bed, Zena with the glass in her hands, me sipping from the frothing bottle. When she drank, she coughed; but I filled her glass again and said: “Drink up! Just like those cows downstairs.” And she drank, and drank again, until her cheeks were red.

With all those bubbles and emotions, there’s bound to be horseplay. Which there is, but unfortunately Diana and friends come upstairs to check on their charges at a rather inopportune moment...

The Olive And The Caper by Susanna Hoffman

I’ve mentioned before that there are many joys to be found in reading cookery books, not just for the references to booze; a lot of them are also well written and contain much more than just recipes.


Hoffman’s homage to Greek cuisine is a rambling compendium of culinary history which often strays into culture and language. Wine has been an essential part of Greek life for millennia, and she devotes several pages to it, starting with amphora of the ancients, and running up to the modern day. A glass of local wine is now part of the main meal, however:

...in ancient times wine was reserved for the second part of the dinner, called the symposion, the time when conversation, games, and entertainment took over. There, after a first sip of undiluted wine taken as a libation to the gods, the wine was always diluted with water. Drinking undiluted wine was considered dangerous, with possible dire consequences.

The ritual of the symposion is described thus:

At the symposion, the wine part of the banquet, three kratirs, or mixing bowls, were thought the proper, moderate amount of wine to imbibe. The host was in charge of the pace of the drinking, and since rituals accompanied the first three bowls, he could even force guests to finish the number of bowls served. At some gatherings a wine watcher was in charge to see that all received an equal amount of wine. In a play by a writer named Euboulos, the god Dionysos describes the bowls: The first bowl, he says, is for health, the second for love and pleasure, the third for sleep. At this point wise drinkers go home. Should guests drink onward, the fourth bowl belongs to hubris, which in Greek means “boastful talk among males.” The fifth leads to shouting, the sixth to revelry, the seventh to black eyes, the eight to court summonses, the ninth to bile, and the tenth to madness and people throwing the furniture about.

They knew a thing or two did the Ancient Greeks. Along with wine, they were also known to imbibe beer, indeed, Aristotle notes its effects:

Aristotle compared the intoxication caused by beer to that of wine: Wine, he said, caused a drunk to pass out and fall face down, whereas beer caused one to fall belly up.

I think proof of this might require further research...

Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser

I’ve had this on the bookshelf for a few years now, and having some time ago given up on a rather foolish attempt to read all twelve in order, I picked this up, reasoning that Flashman withdrawal was a good enough reason to break sequence.

MacDonald Frasers’s eponymous anti-hero is a liar, a bully and a toady, who ducks and skives his way through some of the more colourful parts of nineteenth century history. In this episode he finds himself caught up in the Sikh War of 1845, and once again, Flashman has unwitting found himself in a tight spot.

He volunteers for a political role in an effort to avoid the inevitable fight between the Sikh kingdom in the Punjab and the East India Company, but is instead sent off to the court at Lahore. He is supposed to report back on court intrigue from the lions’ den itself, but after being dramatically rescued from falling off a high balcony by his servant, Jassa, his mind is strangely elsewhere.

I’m not certain what line our conversation took, once I’d heaved up my supper, because I was in that state of blind funk and shock where talk don’t’ matter, and I made it worse – once I’d recovered the strength to crawl indoors – by emptying my pint flask of brandy in about three great gulps, while Jassa asked damnfool questions. That brandy was a mistake. Sober, I’d have begun to reason straight, and let him talk some sense into me, but I sank the lot, and the short result was, in the immortal words of Thomas Hughes, Flashy became beastly drunk. And when I’m foxed, and shuddering scared into the bargain ... well, I ain’t responsible.

Flashman has overheard that the safest place for him to be is the durbar room (court) and he makes a sharp exit in that direction. Surprised when he gets there by scenes of utter debauchery, he’s quickly accosted by Mangala, slave and chief adviser of the Maharani:

She said I needed something to warm me, and a lackey serving the folk in the gallery put a beaker in my hand. What with brandy and funk I was parched as a camel’s oxter, so I drank it straight off, and another – dry red wine, with a curious effervescent tang to it. D’you know, it settled me wonderfully... I took another swig, and Mangala laid a hand on my arm, smiling roguishly. “That is your third cup, bahadur. Have care. It is ... strangely potent, and the night has only begun. Rest a moment.”

That might be hard work. The durbar is in the throes of an orgy, and Flashman feels ill disposed to restraint. He’s quickly brought to a booth at the end of the room and realises that he was in the presence of the notorious Maharani Jeendan, Indian Venus, modern Messalina, and uncrowned queen of the Punjab.

She’s quite a character:

...she was simply the lewdest-looking strumpet I ever saw in my life. Mind you, when a young woman with the proportions of an erotic Indian statue is found reclining half-naked and three parts drunk, while a stalwart wrestler rubs her down with oil, it’s easy to jump to conclusions.

Indeed it is. And it’s all too easy to get carried away. Flashman has another close shave before the night is out and has to get rescued by an American... and the war with the Sikhs hasn’t even begun yet.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

Last week’s post on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trek through Mitteleuropa prompted me to mention Joseph Roth and Jaroslav Hašek, so I thought I’d carry on the theme and return, once again, to Drunkard’s Tales, Hašek’s boozy stories from old Prague...

Mr. Motejzlík’s Fatherly Delights concerns the eponymous new father and reprobate, who in the run up to the arrival of his son and heir, has been putting it about in the bars and shops around town that he’s already got a little boy at home. Realising that his wife might give birth to a girl, he back pedals and tells everyone it’s a daughter, then twins, then...

Finally, when the moment came that he was to become a father, he disappeared in the neighbourhood even though his in-laws were present, and at the pork butcher’s, the baker’s the chemist’s, in two pubs and one wine house claimed that it is a done thing, and again in his lying ways – a girl, boy – boy, girl – twins, triplets – boy, girl – girl, boy – to cut along story short he left himself a back door open. And when in the wine house he had his fifth glass of vermouth tucked inside, he exclaimed, “You don’t know how happy I am!” and went home.

Back at home, the drunken father is presented with the newborn:

When the midwife brought in the red infant, Mr. Motejzlík took hold of him and was in the hallway in a jiffy. He wanted to show it to the neighbours next door. They wrestled it away from him, and Mr. Motejzlík, shouting at the whole house in the quiet of the evening, “I have a son!” ran down and out to the restaurant opposite. There he ordered ten beers and told everyone he has a son. Since he told them half an hour ago that he had a daughter, an argument arose while Mr. Motejzlík was shouting, “I know better, it’s mine!”

The in-laws aren’t happy and show him the door, so Motejzlík spends the night on the toot, before trying to kip at a friend’s house. When this goes wrong (he sneaks in through a window and startles the man’s wife...) he creeps back home and sleeps on the sofa.

Still, Motejzlík is a doting father, if a little prone to festivities:

When somebody becomes a father, there are many little delights... What a great joy to note into your diary every gram that your offspring gains, slowly but surely, according to the implacable rules of nature. Then a new pleasure – your boy wants to drink. You take him to his mother and get back to your guests, take another bottle of cognac out of the cupboard, and while your little dear drinks, so do you and your guests to his health.

Once again, the in-laws show him the door and he ends up out on the pop. He comes back with a hare-brained idea that he wants his lad christened Hector, after the Trojan hero, but the family put the kibosh on that pretty quickly and tell him there’s no way the boy is having the same name as a butcher’s dog. Motejzlík storms off in a huff, but comes back a couple of days later, seemingly repentant:

Then he got ignored, shut in a room and when he spoke up at the door all contrite, “Could I please see my dear little son,” he received a curt answer, “When you sober up!” – “Sorry, I am really not drunk today, I would really like to see my own blood, dearest madam." The dearest mother-in-law did not answer and started to whistle an aria from the Huguenots, the part when they are starting to slaughter the Huguenots.

Father-in-law decides that Motejzlík is sober enough to make himself useful and sends him out to buy a pram, furnishing him with 150 crowns to fund the purchase. Motejzlík dutifully shops around, comparing prices and finally sits in a coffee shop working out which one is best value. Unable to decide, he goes back out to the street, only to find that it’s eight in the evening and all the shops are shut. The shadow of opprobrium has been cast on the night and he doesn’t dare go home:

All of a sudden Mr. Motejzlík began to feel the need to distract the thoughts of a hunted man with a jovial talk with his true friends, whom he saw daily at the restaurant U Zvěřinů in Košíře, whenever he managed to escape from home. So there he tried to banish his dismal thoughts with good beer, but still it was not the real thing, some excitement was needed to forget his sad lot.

Some wiseguy suggests a nightclub where they play cards, and before he knows what he’s doing, Motejzlík is changing a 100 crown note. Before long he’s down to his last 20 so he goes all in – “Everything for my little son!” – and scoops a monkey:

It was the next day around ten o’clock, when Mr. Motejzlík came back to his family and home. But in what condition!