Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

One of the most beautiful and haunting novellas of the twentieth century, Death in Venice is the tale of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famed German writer, who while holidaying in Venice falls impossibly in love with an entirely beautiful Polish youth called Tazdio, and remains in the city because of him, succumbing to cholera at the end.

Of course, it’s about a lot more than that. Mann’s text is about the conflict between reason and passion, the muse of art and the concept of beauty itself. There’s not much by the way of drinking, I can hardly imagine Aschenbach tipping back the proseco, but in a awkward moment at the beginning of the story, he comes across an old man, fraternising with a bunch of Adriatic youths on a the boat to Venice. The man wears a wig and dyes his beard to look young, which Aschenbach finds distasteful. The lads have all got tanked up on sparkling wine and are full of vim and bon viveur. The old boy can’t take his drink though, and is simply pissed:

The youths of Pola, perhaps also drawn to the military trumpet signals that echoed over the waters, had come on deck, and, enthusiastic from the Asti they had drunken, they cheered the Bersaglieri who were being drilled there. But it was repugnant to witness the state into which his faux communion with youth had brought the overdressed old man. His old and faded brain had not been able to resist the liquor to the same degree as the real youths, he was hopelessly drunk. Looking stupidly around, a cigarette between his trembling fingers, he swayed, barely able to keep his balance, pulled to and fro by his intoxication. Because he would have fallen down at the very first step, he did not dare to move, yet still displayed a sorry cockiness, holding on to everyone who approached him, speaking with a slur, winking, giggling, raising his ringed and wrinkled index finger to tease ridiculously, and licking the corners of his mouth in the most distastefully ambiguous manner. Aschenbach watched him with an expression of anger, and again he got a feeling of unreality, as if the world showed a small but definite tendency to slip into the peculiar and grotesque; a sensation which the resumption of the pounding work of the engine kept him from exploring fully, as the ship returned to its course through the San Marco canal.

Worse still, the old coot wants to speak to him:

He is unable to descend, as his trunk is taken with great effort down the ladder-like stairs. So he cannot get away for several minutes from the intrusiveness of the ghastly old man, who is compelled by his drunkenness to bid the foreigner good-bye. “We are wishing a most enjoyable stay. One hopes to be remembered well! Au revoir, excusez and bonjour, Your Excellency!” His mouth is watering, he winks, licks the corners of his mouth and the dyed moustache on his lips is ruffed up. “Our compliments,” he continues with two fingertips at his mouth, “our compliments to your sweetheart, the most lovely and beautiful sweetheart...” And suddenly the upper row of his false teeth drops onto his tongue. Aschenbach was able to escape. “To your sweetheart, the most pretty sweetheart,” he heard in hollow and somewhat obstructed speech behind his back while he descended the ladder.

Repelled, Aschenbach is glad to be shot of him, little thinking that in a few week’s time, and desperately stalking the beautiful Tazdio, he will also dye his hair and paint his face in a effort to recapture lost youth...

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Winner of the 2008 Man Booker prize The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, son of a rickshaw puller and chauffer to his rich village landlord, who was born in the rural darkness of India, but his dream is to escape into the light of riches and freedom.

Narrating his story in a long rambling missive to Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Balram sketches out the humble background of a half-baked Indian, taken out of school to work in the local tea shop, locked in the great chicken coop of a society that keeps the poor enslaved.

His luck starts to change when he gets a job as a chauffer, a role that also involves washing his master’s bad feet, looking after two small dogs and getting sent out on errands:

At least once a week, around six o’clock, Ram Persad and I left the house and went down the main road, until we got to a store with a sign that said: ‘Jackpot’ English Liquor Shop. Indian-Made Foreign Liquor Sold Here. I should explain to you, Mr Jiabao, that in this country we have two kinds of men: ‘Indian’ liquor men and ‘English’ liquor men. ‘Indian’ liquor was for village boys like me – toddy, arrack, country hooch. ‘English’ liquor, naturally, is for the rich. Rum, whisky, beer, gin – anything the English left behind... Coloured bottles of various sizes were stacked up on the Jackpot’s shelves, and two teenagers behind the counter struggled to take orders from the men shouting at them. On the white wall to the side of the shop, there were hundreds of names of liquor brands, written in dripping red paint and subdivided into five categories, Beer, Rum, Whisky, Gin and Vodka.

Passed on to look after his employer’s son Ashok, who has come back from America with a new wife, Pinky Madam, Balram moves from Dhanbad to Delhi, where he lives in the cockroach infested basement while his new boss lives in a plush apartment in the tower block above. As American born Pinky realises that Ashok isn’t going to take her back to the US, the marriage collapses, and Ashok hits the sauce. It’s the chauffeur’s job to clean up the mess:

“Stop the car,” he said. He opened the door of the car, put his hand on his stomach, bent down, and threw up on the ground. I wiped his mouth with my hand and helped him sit down by the side of the road. The traffic roared past us. I patted his back. “You’re drinking too much, sir.” “Why do men drink, Balram?” “I don’t know, sir.” “Of course, in your caste you don’t... Let me tell you, Balram. Men drink because they are sick of life. I thought caste and religion didn’t matter any longer in today’s world. My father said, ‘No, don’t marry her, she’s of another...’ I...” Mr Ashok turned his head to the side, and I rubbed his back, thinking he might throw up again, but the spasm passed. “Sometimes I wonder, Balram. I wonder what’s the point of living. I really wonder...” The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who’s going to pay me three and half thousand rupees a month?

Balram realises that he has to make his move in the ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor and turns on the hopeless Ashok. An empty bottle of Scotch provides the perfect murder weapon:

I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It’s a good, strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black – well worth its resale value.

Balram finishes his visceral account of 21st century India as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, running a taxi firm funded by stolen money. He has finally made the transition from darkness to light...

Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall by Luke Haines

I picked up this autobiographic tome on a recommendation, without any particular interest in the music scene in the title, or having knowingly listened to a single note by Haines’s group The Auteurs. I finished it sharing his disdain for his contemporary musicians and quoting sections of the book to anyone unlucky enough to get in my way. I even listened to a couple of his songs as well...

Haines starts his story in a band called The Servants whose career fizzled out in the beginning of the 90s. He’s been in the group a few years and likes a drink, although he’s nearly put off the sauce for good after a particularly bad experience on red wine one day:

On a dreary Tuesday autumn afternoon I line up three bottles of red wine. Three bullets, each with my name on. Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. I down the bottles in just over two hours. I could probably do more but I’m wearier that usual. I pass out on the couch. I dream about red. Swathes of crimson red. I am Isadora Duncan, in a red car, on a red road, with a red sky, and a red scarf caught in a red wheel tightening around my neck. My long skinny dancer’s neck. I’m thrown out of a feverish sleep by the need to vomit. Blood. Throwing up fucking blood. I am by nature a hypochondriac, but to have an irrational fear of death turn into the actual possibility of dying is quite something. Without too much prompting I see a scornful doctor. A severe eastern European lady of retirement age prods at my sides and back. Tuts and shakes her head. Dispassionately she tells me what I already know. That I most probably have serious liver damage. (Tests conform this.) All self inflicted. Give up drinking and smoking. Or die.

Faced with sobriety, Haines gets some solid songwriting under his belt and starts a new band which eventually becomes The Auteurs. The diagnosis of liver damage proves to be wildly inaccurate, allowing him to go back onto the booze, while The Auteurs start to pick up some interest from the music business, and end up lumped together with various chippy Britpop bands. After a couple of successful(ish) years, Haines recalls their nomination for the 1993 Mercury Music prize. He starts the show as he means to go on:

I am already drunk by the time I arrive at Grosvenor House, which is a good start as it is my intention to get colossally drunk this evening.

Just as well that Suede win instead... The evening, already going badly, gets steadily worse. Haines and his friends are

...led upstairs to a private suite in the Grosvenor. It’s the usual bullshit. Cocaine, champagne. More cocaine, more champagne. I fall into a table of glasses generously filled with Perrier Jouët. I have achieved optimum inebriation and am acting like a peasant. Alice is trying to coax me out of the suite. Even Vinall, in his advanced state, knows I am falling apart. The lance corporal makes one final obsequious remark and l let fly. Haymaker. Unlucky sunshine. I am too drunk to connect. Instead my fist goes through a glass panel about three feet wide of my intended target.

Despite the boozy self destruction, the bouts of rage and megalomania and the drug taking, The Auteurs manage three respectable albums before things go totally pear shaped. Haines, like Mark E. Smith, is an unrepentant tippler, and also much prefers alcohol to other substances:

Alcohol became my drug of choice. I’m a good drunk – one of the best you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet. Uncle Lou [Reed] also knew about the booze when he wrote ‘The Power of Positive Drinking’. Booze is my muse. During the mid-90s the Britpop horde devoured the class As like hungry peasants at the eat-as-much-as-you-can meal deal. Really, some of the most unlikely sorts got Dequinceyed up to the gills. Proof, if ever it were needed, that heroin does not always unleash the dark creative beast.

Still, all good things come to an end, and the Auteurs finally disintegrate into an ugly mess of missed tour dates and recriminations. Still, there’s a fine body of work that’s aged a lot better than most of the tosh that was playing during the mid-90s, and by the end of the book, Haines is making music again, (although nothing that he can persuade anyone to buy...) this time with a man who wants to reintroduce absinthe to the UK:

...the potent wormwood spirit that helped turn the French army myopic during the First World War...

I’m rather looking forward to the threatened second volume of memoirs.

Gentlemen & Players by Joanne Harris

Years ago I had Harris’s novel Chocolat foisted on me in a reading group, an experience that didn’t exactly enamour me to her work. I think one of my more charitable comments was that it was ‘bad art’, so when a friend passed me a copy of Gentlemen & Players, I regarded it with a certain amount of suspicion. I was wrong to do so. It’s brilliant.

St Oswalds, a well established boy’s grammar in the North of England, has just started its new term. Roy Straitley, the eccentric Classics master, fond of a medicinal sherry, and last of a dying breed holding out against the inexorable march towards Information Technology, computer science and email, is reaching his sixty fifth birthday and is reluctantly facing retirement. But before Straitley can receive his carriage clock, the school is going to undergo a crisis that may well destroy it.

One of the term’s new intake of teachers is the poisonous ‘Mole’ who has a very nasty grudge against St Oswalds and who will stop at nothing to get revenge. Small acts of theft, suspicion planted in the minds of teachers and students; Mole starts small, but is working up to bigger things:

I celebrated my first week with a bottle of champagne. It’s still very early in the game, of course, but I have already sown a good number of my poison seeds, and this is just the beginning.

Soon enough, Mole has poisoned a pupil, caused the porter to be dismissed for selling cigarettes to the boys, raised merry hell with the local press and has indirectly caused Straitley to have a small heart attack (a scene that is so wickedly funny that I forever forgave Harris Chocolat...). Slipping into the teachers’ local after another act of sabotage, Mole spots several of the staff, including the thuggish sports master, Light, drinking with some of the boys:

And so I went home to my chintz-hung room, opened my second bottle of champagne, (I have a case of six, and I mean to see them all empty by Christmas), caught up with a little essential correspondence, then went down to the payphone outside and made a quick call to the local police, reporting a black Probe (registration LIT 3) driving erratically in the vicinity of the Thirsty Scholar. It’s the sort of behaviour my therapist tends to discourage nowadays. I’m too impulsive, or so she says; too judgemental. I don’t always consider the feelings of others as I should. But there was no risk to me; I did not give my name, and in any case – you know he deserved it. Like Mr Bray, Light is a braggart; a bully; a naturally rule-breaker; a man who genuinely believes that a few pints under his belt makes him a better driver.

By the time Mole’s plan is in full swing a large portion of the masters common room are under police investigation, a boy is missing, parents are withdrawing their children from St Oswalds and the head is refusing to answer calls:

All things considered, a nice little piece of anti-social engineering. I say it myself (because no one else can), but actually I’m very pleased with the way things have worked out. Remains one small, unfinished piece of business, and I plan to deal with that tonight, at the Community bonfire. After that I can afford to celebrate, and I will; there’s a bottle of champagne with Straitley’s name on it, and I mean to open it tonight.

It’s time for the endgame, when Mole’s identity will be revealed to Straitley, that is if he can last to the end of the night without a final, fatal, cardiac arrest...

Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Reading Renegade is a bit like being locked in a bar with its subject, a man described on the fly leaf as equal parts Johnny Cash, Brian Clough and the classic British pub contrarian with rather too much on his mind. It starts with a good old fashioned rant about former members of his band, The Fall, pauses for biographical notes about Smith and his life in Manchester and Salford, before carrying on in a stream of cantankerous grumbling about the state of the nation, the North, issues about drinking and a potted history of his music. Rambling yes, but never dull.

Smith, known for liking a drink or too, describes getting into LSD as a teenager in an attempt to avoid the drink of choice of his young contemporaries; bottles of booze purloined from parental sideboards:

If anything, I was doing acid to get away from the cider clubs and the sherry clubs. Kids of about fourteen used to nick their mam’s ‘British Sherry’ and be sick all over the house. You could tell where they lived by the drink and vomit stains on the carpet.

After leaving school and working at the docks in Salford, Smith formed The Fall, one of Britain’s most exciting and unpredictable avante garde rock groups, or a noisy racket, depending on your point of view. Smith’s song writing is a combination of distinctive wordplay and characterisation built from the experience of his native North West. Drink plays its part:

The problems started soon after Totale’s Turns, when I began thinking of albums more in the way of documents; elongated newspapers, so to speak. ‘Fiery Jack’ was a turning point; I guess in hindsight you could look at it as the beginning of Grotesque. I’ve always written from different perspectives, but that one seemed to have more weight to it. I still see ‘Fiery Jack’ types like that. They’re quite heartening in a way. Manchester has always had men like that, hard livers with hard livers; faces like unmade beds. Even though they’re clearly doing themselves damage, there’s a zest for life there. And that’s a rarity. They’re not as oblivious as you might think. They’re not all boring cunts. Drinkers have a good sense of the absurd. I like that.

The Fall are one of the more prolific bands in the country and have toured and recorded relentlessly since the 70s. Smith’s trip to Iceland where they record Hex Enduction Hour included a gig where about a third of the island’s youth came to see them (he apologises for almost certainly having brought about Björk and the Sugarcubes) and copious amounts of the local hooch:

We recorded parts of it in Iceland, which was a very inaccessible place at the time, totally unlike what it is now. Beer was against the law. You could only drink shit like pints of peach schnapps. I remember firing into it one day and night. I thought my legs had been stolen afterwards.

Continually messed around by hopeless record labels and enjoying a strained relationship with other band members (Smith has sacked over forty musicians over the years) things take a turn for the worse when he divorces his wife (and fellow band member...) Brix. He moves to Edinburgh, which introduces him to whisky:

I think that’s where the problems started. I got a real taste for it. There’s nothing quite like being drunk on whisky. Things can get mental on that stuff; and things did get mental years later; but while in Edinburgh I handled it well.

As the 90s progressed, the already uncompromising Smith started getting a reputation as a drunk who should keep of the sauce before the gig:

What gets me is when I get daft promoters like Alan Wise saying, “Don’t give Mark the whisky before he goes on.” It’s written into the contract – “Do not give Mark whisky before he goes on stage.” I’d rather have it upfront... To a certain extent I understand where they’re coming from. I did happen to lose it a bit when I was drinking too much whisky in the mid 90s, but I checked myself. I knew I had to curb it. And I did. I stand by Whyte and Mackay though, it’s a lovely drink. The worst thing I could do now is completely stop. You look at the amount of people who have died because they’ve just stopped drinking or doing whatever. The list is endless. The thing is with me, I don’t get hangovers. I’ve never been bothered by them. Red wine gets to me; it makes me very violent. I think it’s bad for you. Women who are into red wine are always manic-depressives.

He remarks that a lot of people who complain about his drinking are taking copious amounts of other substances as well. Stick to drink, he says:

At least you know where you are with booze. You drink two bottles of whisky and wake up in the morning, you know you’ve done something wrong, you know you won’t be doing that again. But experience tells you it’ll lift soon. And with liquor, if you drink any more you’ll be dead. You can’t move. But with E you start seeing chickens on the road – I know I was.

The boozy nadir is a fight with the band in New York when he is convicted of a drunken assault:

The bottom end of it was that the New York court said I had to go on this alcohol programme, twice a week for six weeks in Bury. But the staff there seemed to have more problems than I had. I didn’t have any problems, to be quite honest. I don’t think I did.

It’s a self justification, but it works for him. Anyway, there’s a method in the madness:

It’s sort of good for me, though, this idea that I’m a mad drunk. It makes people frightened of me.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

A truly disturbing novel about the eponymous alcoholic, sexually incontinent beauty product salesman, The Death of Bunny Munro is also gloriously funny, usually in the most inappropriate ways. At the heart of the novel is a demented road trip along England’s south coast, taken with his son, Bunny Junior. He sets out with the vague intention of showing the boy the tricks of the salesman’s trade, but the true goal of their quest is Bunny’s corrupted soul.

The novel starts with Bunny in a shabby hotel room in Brighton, pissed on the contents of the mini-bar and awaiting a prostitute. He is also on the phone to his wife, Libby:

“I am damned,” thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. He feels that somewhere down the line he has made a grave mistake, but this realisation passes in a dreadful heartbeat, and is gone – leaving him in a room at the Grenville Hotel, in his underwear, with nothing but himself and his appetites. He closes his eyes and pictures a random vagina, then sits on the edge of the hotel bed and, in slow motion, leans back against the quilted headboard. He clamps the mobile phone under his chin and with his teeth breaks the seal on a miniature bottle of brandy. He empties the bottle down his throat, lobs it across the room, then shudders and gags and says into the phone, “Don’t worry, love, everything’s going to be all right.”

It’s clear that he’s in a bad way, even more obvious when he wakes in the small hours, the booze wearing off;

Bunny stumbles in the dark, groping along the bathroom wall for the light switch. It is somewhere in those dead hours, the threes and fours, and the prostitute has been paid and packed off. Bunny is alone and awake and a mammoth hangover finds him on a terrifying mission for the sleeping pills. He thinks he may have left the in the bathroom and hopes the hooker didn’t find them. He locates the switch and fluorescent tubes buzz and hum awake. Bunny moves towards the mirror and its merciless light and despite the hot, toxic throb of his hangover – the dry, foul mouth, the boiled skin, blood-brown eyes and his demolished quiff – he is not displeased with what greets him.

Complaining that his head feels like someone actually dropped the mini-bar on it, Bunny heads home the next day to discover that ten years of philandering and sexual misdemeanour on his part have finally driven poor Libby over the edge and she’s committed suicide.

Left alone with Bunny Junior, Bunny hits the bottle:

Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass. He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again.

...and the satellite porn...

Unable to palm his son off on his in-laws he takes him on the road. Bunny’s death is inevitable, but will the boy be able to help his dad find redemption before it’s too late? By the looks of things so far, he’ll have his work cut out.

Abandoned by Anya Peters

Peters’s disturbing memoir is easy to pigeonhole, and I confess that it isn’t the sort of book that I would normally read. It’s an account of a spectacularly miserable childhood of a little girl adopted by her aunt, a woman she always sees as her Mummy, into the violent household she shares with an unpredictable, drunken bully.

Alcohol, predictably, plays a part in the sorry saga. ‘Daddy’, her uncle, is frequently intoxicated, and drunkenly berates Anya, shouting that she doesn’t belong in the house with the rest of the children:

It’s what Daddy is always saying, screaming it out week after week in drunken arguments. “She’s not wanted here, right! She doesn’t belong here... They dumped her over here with you because they didn’t want her over there and she’s not wanted here either. I want her out,” he says snapping open another beer, “She doesn’t belong here.”

Mummy does her best to stick up for Anya, but succumbs to the bottle as well:

“Don’t worry about me,” she’d whisper to us those nights when we’d all tiptoed back down after he had staggered off to bed. “I’m as tough as old boots, me.” But she wasn’t; thought neither was she quite ready for the monster my uncle turned into after swallowing beer and vodka all night. She just wasn’t willing to be a victim. Soon she was fighting fire with fire, matching him vodka for vodka as they tried to scream an pummel one another into the kind of partner they wanted each other to be.

The constant abuse, often physical, progresses into sexual abuse. Anya’s uncle is eventually arrested for his crimes and sent to prison. Anya and her aunt temporarily move to the home of another daughter, but the effect on both of them has been terrible. Anya’s mother is nearly catatonic and drinking heavily again:

During the day, indoors, she sat in the front room with the curtains drawn watching TV, living on Silk Cut and milky tea and her nerves. When she passed me to go to the bathroom one morning after getting a postcard from the boys asking when she was coming home, I smelt drink on her breath.

Despite all these terrible events, Anya manages to pass her A-Levels and qualifies as a lawyer. Unfortunately, her self esteem is badly damaged by her past, and she finds herself in another abusive relationship. She ends up sleeping in her car in Brighton and London, finally breaking away from the spiral of despair by writing her story in a blog which eventually became this book.

Even after all the horrible things that happened to her, Peters shows a lack of rancour and a forgiveness that is humbling. I’m glad I read it for that, but I don’t think it’s an area I’ll investigate again.