The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

I’ve been meaning to read Angela Carter for a while now, and after a failed attempt at The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (in retrospect, not the best place to start with her novels) I picked up The Magic Toyshop from the library. An absolute treat full of powerful surreal imagery and Carter’s strong feminist writing, it’s a formidable early work in her career.

Melanie is fifteen years old and fears that she will die unloved and a virgin. One night while her parents are away, she wanders out into the garden in her mother’s wedding dress but is locked out of the house. Her desperate attempt to get back in through her bedroom window by climbing up the apple tree see the dress destroyed and Melanie goes to bed distraught. The next day she and her brother and sister are told that their parents have died in a plane crash.

After this spellbinding beginning, Carter sends the newly orphaned Melanie, along with siblings Jonathan and Victoria, to live with her Uncle Philip, a toymaker in South London. He lives in a cold house without running hot water over his toy shop with his wife Margaret, who hasn’t spoken a word since they were married and communicates through a blackboard, and her brothers Francie, a sensitive musician, and the volatile Finn, a talented painter who spies on Melanie and kisses her in the ruins of Crystal Palace park one night. Philip dominates the household, forcing the children to work for their keep and forbidding Melanie to wear trousers.

Uncle Philip’s toys are hand-crafted wonders, but his main passion is for puppets, creating puppet shows in the shop’s basement for his wife and the children to watch. After Finn drops one the puppets, the belligerent and brutish Philip demands that Melanie acts in his next show instead – a rendering of Leda and the Swan in which Melanie plays Leda, molested by a huge mechanical swan...

Philip’s tyranny over the women finally breaks when Finn gets drunk and destroys the swan. The next day Philip is out of the house, leaving the place in near revolution. Free for a few hours, the brothers play music and rejoice:

Francie sat in the kitchen with his fiddle in one hand and a half-empty bottle of whisky in the other. “Jesus,” he said to Finn, “You made free with the Scotch last night!” “It was Chrismas, after all,” said Finn. “Besides, I was thirsty in the middle of the night.” “I can see that,” said Francie half derisively. “You must have been drunk as a lord, waving your little hatchet.”

Finn, especially, gets stuck in:

He was drinking Scotch again. Soon he would become sentimental. But he was not grinning at her; she was glad his satyr’s grin was safe on the face of the devil in the painting, never to embarrass her any more... “You’re drunk.” “I expect I will be, presently.” “You are quite your old self.” “No. Let’s not exaggerate.” And he was straining to be happy. It was not spontaneous, he was trying too hard. Melanie was sorry for him and moved closer to him. They sat together on the table. Francie’s whisky was almost done.

As they run out of booze, Finn gets sent out for more supplies:

When the pubs opened, Finn went out and returned clinking many bottles of Guinness, though Melanie did not know where he had got the money. “I got Guinness to prove we’re Irish,” he said. Francie and Finn pressed Melanie to drink a few mouthfuls of the treacly stuff... Finn unwisely gave Guinness to Victoria and suddenly she sank down and out on the rug, with her head between the dog’s paws. The room took on a debauched and abandoned look.

Philip will have to return at some point though, and when he does, the result will be apocalyptic...

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...

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

I picked this up after reading a rather interesting article on Huffington Post about Doris Lessing and the 50th anniversary of the Golden Notebook. It’s a book that still divides opinion; personally, I didn’t like it, but I enjoyed The Grass is Singing and wasn’t prepared to write Lessing off as an author simply on the fact that I just couldn’t get on with her most famous novel. However, the writer in the HuffPo handily suggests five other books to get on with, and this is one of them.

Set in the 1980s, the story follows Alice, a leading figure of the Communist Centre Union, a fringe Marxist revolutionary group. She has just moved into a squat in London with Jasper, a gay man with whom she is obsessed, and who ruthlessly exploits her affection, stealing her benefit money and scrounging off her family before frequently rejecting her for a week’s drinking binge, or pushing her aside when he becomes infatuated with the charismatic leaders of the group. Alice has, over the years, been reduced to the status of a domestic slave, her life dedicated to looking after Jasper and other members of the communes and squats they live in. She cooks, cleans, sorts out the electricity and gas, and when she needs money, she steals off her parents as well.

I have to admit that I found Jasper the most repellent character I have ever encountered in a novel. A nasty, self-serving ponce who has ruined not only Alice’s life, but that of her mother Dorothy – their years of staying rent free at her home bankrupted Dorothy and drove her out of her house – I longed for him to receive his comeuppance. Alice at least has the benefit of being utterly deluded. Her naivety in both her commitment to Jasper and in her devotion to the revolutionary cause is breathtaking and she seems completely unable to see that their group is being manipulated by the KGB, as well as getting itself into dangerous territory by trying to link up with the IRA. Although they are rebuffed by the Irish, they decide to start up a bombing campaign anyway, and despite their complete amateurism, they manage to cause bloody and violent carnage.

Just before the bomb is set to go off, Alice decides to visit her mother, now living in a tiny flat that she can’t afford to heat. Sitting wrapped in blankets next to a switched off gas-fire, Dorothy is drowning her sorrows:

The armchair her mother had been in had books stacked up beside it to the level of the arm. On the shelf above the gas-fire was a bottle of whisky and a glass, a third full... She half got up – she did not need to do more – reached over for her glass of whisky, and took a firm ration of it, her mouth a bit twisted. Grant’s whisky. Oh yes, Dorothy might be poor, though Alice bitterly, but she wasn’t going to drink anything but her brand of Scotch.

Alice, away with the fairies as ever, laments the fact that Dorothy has had to leave the family home. Mother tries to spell it out, once again, in words that her daughter might understand. She’s wasting her time:

“It’s funny,” she said, “How you simply don’t seem to be able to take it in.” If Alice seemed unable to grasp an essential point about the situation, then Dorothy was unable to take in an essential fact about Alice. “Why can’t you?” she inquired, not of Alice but of the room, the air, something or other. “I simply cannot make you see ... the point is, I would be there now, at home, if it weren’t for you and Jasper. No, Alice, I am not blaming you, I am blaming myself.” Another good gulp of Scotch. At this rate she would be tight soon. Then Alice would leave! She hated her mother tight; it was when she began saying all those negative things.

Quite unable to understand what her spoiled, selfish behaviour has done, and that she in turn is wasting her life (Dorothy’s simple suggestion that degree educated Alice get a job and do something with her time meets a prim retort from the crusading leftist that there are three million people unemployed) she leaves in a state of muddled outrage. Dorothy is now alone with the bottle and the unlit fire and the next day five people will lose their lives.

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...

Henry IV Part II by William Shakespeare

As promised, I have returned to The Bard.


Sir John Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters. A mucker of young prince Hal in the two Henry IV plays, he is a lecherous, booze-soaked criminal and braggart. He appears in three works in all and was so loved by the audience at the time that Henry IV Part II finishes with a promise that the old beast would be back in Henry V. There, he makes a single off stage appearance when Hal, now king, hears of his demise.

It’s not hard to see how that came about. Falstaff is a man for whom restraint is more than a bad word, it is the fatal weakness in those around him:

I would you had but the wit: ‘twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me; nor a man cannot make him laugh; but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine. There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof; for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness; and then, when they marry, they get wenches: they are generally fools and cowards; which some of us should be too, but for inflammation. A good sherris-sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes; which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes: it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

Sir John carries on drinking until the end, although his hopes on becoming a favourite of the new king are dashed when the Henry publically disowns him. Still, who needs fancy friends when you’ve got Sherry?

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...

The London Nobody Knows by Geoffrey Fletcher

To mangle a quotation by LP Hartley, the past looks distinctly foreign sometimes, especially when you consider the matter of licensing hours in the UK, which until living memory (and in my case, drinking memory) were quite restrictive. Getting a drink of an afternoon was hard work in a lot of the country, and if you wanted a beer after eleven o’clock at night, you could forget it unless you were prepared to pay money to go to a club or could find a hotel bar that wasn’t too fussy about serving guests only.


In this light, Geoffrey Fletcher’s descriptions of the pubs in London in his marvellous The London Nobody Knows, are almost despatches from a newspaper correspondent posted abroad:

If you have a mind for it, you can pretty well drink all round the clock in London pubs, by an elaborate system of timing which includes visiting dockyard pubs with special licensing hours and those of Covent Garden also with special arrangements for the convenience of market men.

A collection of drawings and pen sketches about the small places in London, easily missed, ignored or unappreciated, The London Nobody Knows lovingly describes the crumbling Victoriana and Edwardiana that Fletcher saw around the capital, which in the 1960s when he compiled this book from his newspaper column, was in distinct risk of extinction, swept away by the clean lines of glass and concrete brutalism. Fortunately, the city didn’t turn into this predicted mix of the Westway flyover and Paternoster Square, but a lot has gone since. I cannot find any trace of the King and Queen in West London, and fear the worst:

London pubs are rich in all the trappings of the Victorian age, which knew exactly how a town pub should appear. A fine one is illustrated here – the King and Queen in the Harrow Road. This is nineteenth-century Baroque at its most florid. Grey marble columns rise from a mosaic floor, raised a step above the pavement. There is splendid ironwork – iron letters and wrought iron – over the door. The words ‘Saloon Bar’ have a bucolic abandon, showing the influence of art nouveau... The architects of the late Victorian pubs and music-halls knew exactly what the situation demanded – extravagance, exuberance, and plenty of decoration for its own sake.

I believe that the late Victorian period was the highpoint in pub building and design in this country, especially in London, but then I like bevelled mirrors and dark wood with my beer:

The bar counter and its imposing fittings is invariably the pièce de résistance of the London pub. Mostly horseshoe-shaped on plan, the island rises in an infinite number of curly brackets, railed shelves with turned balustrades, brilliant mirrors and bottles (the display of bottles is a later innovation – during the nineteenth century spirits were kept in barrel shaped porcelain containers) – the whole thing rising up like a great organ, often surmounted by a clock under an elaborately broken pediment.

He finishes with a description of one of my favourite pubs, the Black Friar:

The Black Friar is Victorian above and art nouveau below. The door I have drawn is of white stone and marble with an infilling of coloured mosaic; the metal plates by the doors, ‘To the Saloon’ and ‘Worthington Ales on draught’, have figures of monks, and the interior is as rich as the exterior, slightly tinctured with an underlying hint the Art and Craft movement.

I realise that times, like licensing hours, have changed and things move on, but whereas the preposterous restrictions on pub hours have been replaced with something a bit more civilised, the loss of Victorian public houses and their replacement with faceless vertical drinking establishments is something to lament.