The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Now accepted to be one of the greatest poets of the 19th Century, John Clare led an unstable and fairly chaotic life. He died in a Northampton lunatic asylum, his second incarceration, and he suffered from delusions and bouts of alcoholism. His work was published in his time, but seems to have fallen out of fashion, hastening his descent into madness.

Foulds novel imagines Clare’s life in Mathew Allen’s private asylum at High Beach, Epping Forest. Allowed a certain amount of freedom, including that of leaving the hospital to go out into the forest, Clare still yearns for the old days of drinking with his literary chums in London:

John whistled enviously after him ‘Flash company been the ruin o’ me and the ruin o’ me quite’. An evening in London with the old, wild lads – that was what he needed. He felt his flesh strain towards the thought of beer, wanting drunkenness, wanting the world softened and flowing around him. To back in his green jacket, the country clown for his friends from The London Magazine with their bristling literary talk, their sharp, rehearsed epigrams scattered like cut stones through the thickness of talk.

It quickly becomes apparent that Clare is not himself as he becomes increasingly confused as to his own identity. He meets a band of gypsies in the forest and falls in with them for the night, returning a few weeks later to share a meal with them. His old nemesis, booze, makes its appearance:

A bottle of whisky was passed around to accompany the food. John took a swig, letting its fire wash loosely down into his chest. “Old John Barleycorn,” he said, saluting with the bottle. “Now there’s a fighting man. Seen him dust out many a strong fellow.” The other’s laughed. “Let’s be having you then,” he said, standing, raising his fists.

Convinced he’s now Jack Randall, bare-knuckle prize fighter, the five foot high Clare challenges the gypsies to a bout and is quickly knocked flat on his back. His return to the asylum the next morning, distinctly worse for wear, causes him to be incarcerated in a darkened room for the next two days. Sadly, by the time he’s let out, he’s under the firm impression that he is Lord Byron.

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

A friend about to travel to India enthused about Roberts’s bestselling story of life on the run in Bombay, and I felt compelled to find out more. There is something of a challenge to reading an autobiographical novel about a man who escaped a high security prison in Australia, entered India illegally, learned Hindi and Marathi, lived in a slum, established a health clinic, got involved with both the Bollywood film industry and the Bombay mafia and ended up fighting alongside the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan... Somehow, Roberts manages to fit all this along with a tale of personal redemption into only 900 pages.


Straight off the plane and pretending to be a New Zealander called Lindsay, he sets off to find somewhere to stay in Bombay. He’s accosted at the airport by a young tout called Prabaker, who procures him a good room and some marijuana. Roberts opens up the duty free and offers his guide a drink in return:

I pulled a bottle of whisky from my pack and cracked the seal. It was another ritual, another promise to a friend in New Zealand, a girl who’d asked me to have a drink and think of her if I managed to smuggle myself safely into India with my false passport. The little rituals – the smoke and the drink of whisky – were important to me... I was about to take a sip from the bottle, but an impulse made me offer it to Prabaker first. “Thank you very much, Mr. Lindsay,” he gushed, his eyes wide with delight. He tipped his head backward and poured a measure of whisky into his mouth without touching the bottle to his lips. “Is very best, first number, Johnnie Walker. Oh, yes.” “Have some more if you like.” “Just teeny pieces, thank you so.” He drank again, gluggling the liquor down in throat-bulging gulps. He paused, licking his lips, then tipped the bottle back a third time. “Sorry, aaah, very sorry. Is so good this whisky, it is making a bad manners on me.” “Listen, if you like it that much, you can keep the bottle. I’ve got another one. I bought them duty free on the plane.” “Oh, thank you...” he answered, but his smile crumpled into a stricken expression. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want it?” “Yes, yes, Mr. Lindsay, very yes. But if I knew this was my whisky and not yours, I would not have been so generous with my good self in the drinking it up.”

Over the next few weeks Prabaker and Linbaba become close as the guide shows him around Bombay. Eventually, Prabaker honours Roberts with the offer of a visit to his family in upstate Maharashtra. They stay there six months and Roberts picks up the Marathi language and is introduced to rural Indian life. He is also given the name Shantaram, meaning man of peace, by Prabaker’s mother.

On their way home, they decide to go out for a drink in a small town on the road back to Bombay.

As good as his word, Prabaker directed us to a hovel, about an hour’s walk past the last bus stop on the outskirts of the town. With a round of drinks for the house, we insinuated ourselves into the crush of the dusty, determined drinkers who occupied the bar’s one narrow stone bench. The place was what Australians call a sly grog shop: an unlicensed bar, where men buy over-proof alcohol at under-the-counter prices. The men we joined in the bar were workers, farmers and a routine assortment of lawbreakers. They all wore sullen, persecuted expressions. They said little, or nothing at all. Fierce grimaces disfigured them as they drank the foul-tasting, homemade alcohol, and they followed each glass with a miscellany of grunts, groans, and gagging sounds. When we joined them, Prabaker and I consumed the drinks at a gulp, pinching our noses with one hand and hurling the noxious, chemurgic liquid down our open throats. By means of fierce determination, we summoned the will to keep the poison in our bellies. And when sufficiently recovered we launched ourselves, with no little reluctance, into the next venomous round. It was a grim and pleasureless business. The strain showed on every face. Some found the going too hard and slunk away, defeated. Some faltered, but were pressed on by the anguished encouragements of fellow sufferers. Prabaker lingered long over his fifth glass of the volatile fluid. I thought he was about to admit defeat, but at last he gasped and spluttered his way through to empty the glass. Then one man threw his glass aside, stood up, and moved to the centre of the shabby little room. He began to sing in a roaring, off-key voice, and because every man of use cheered our passionate and peremptory approval, we all knew that we were drunk.

Drunk and vulnerable, unfortunately. Walking back to the hotel, they are mugged and the remains of Roberts money is taken. His visa has also expired and realising that he risks deportation back to Australia and imprisonment if the authorities discover who he is, Roberts now has the problem that he has nowhere to stay. His only option is to move to slum where Prabaker lives, and his long journey from violent criminal on the run to a man of peace begins.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

The last word in coming of age novels appears to be Catcher in the Rye, which was referenced in most of the reviews on the back of my copy of Submarine. I’m not entirely sure if Dunthorne has created a Welsh Holden Caulfield in Oliver Tate, but he’s a memorable mix of misunderstood teenager and youthful antihero.


Narrator Oliver lives in Swansea with his depressed dad and his mother who has recently embarked on an affair with her capoeira teacher, an ageing hippy called Graham. Determined to keep the family unit together at all costs, Oliver tries to keep his mother out of Graham’s clutches, with a spectacular lack of success. Finally convinced that she is pregnant with the man’s child, Oliver sets out on a mission to get Graham out of their lives for good:

I will make Graham realize what he has done to my family by giving him the impression that I’ve lost it and am capable of anything. I don’t feel threatened by him: capoeira is the art of not hitting each other. I take an empty bottle of Robinsons into the cellar, fill it with one-third vodka, one-third apple, one-third cranberry. It is important to seem genuine.

Setting off for Graham’s house on the bus, Oliver starts knocking back the vodka mix. By the time he gets to his destination he’s a little squiffy, but still functioning clearly enough to break in. He investigates the house, fixes himself another drink:

Next to a clay-coloured bread bin in one corner sits a wine rack containing Gordon’s gin, whisky still in its cardboard tube and a Gran Reservas brandy. I pull out the brandy. In a cupboard next to the cooker I find a bell-bottomed glass. I pour myself way too much expensive brandy. I don’t even like brandy.

Finally after defenestrating a couple of ornaments and committing a few other minor acts of vandalism, he waits for Graham upstairs, hoping to ambush him when he gets back. Unfortunately, he passes out drunk on the man’s arrival and the old philanderer takes him home, stopping once or twice for Oliver to throw up. He’s sobered up a little by the time he gets to the front door, but not quite enough to make a dignified entrance:

I turn the key in the lock and lean on the door. It swings open with me attached. My parents are still up, sitting on the stairs in the half-dark, each clutching a glass of red wine.

His parents are having a romantic tête à tête – the marriage is saved. Well, it is until Oliver starts blurting out what he’s been up to and how he’s been protecting his mum... Dad decides to get some coffee. Oliver staggers around for a few moments until antiperistalsis sets in:

I feel another surge. I bow, twirling my hand, as a first of vomit moves up my throat, out of my mouth – it is bright red – and on to the linoleum.

Poetic, moving and genuinely funny, Submarine is a remarkable debut.

Drunkard’s Tales by Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek’s book of boozy stories is a nice stop-gap when the book I’m supposed to be reading sends me into fits of narcolepsy on the train. (The current offender is Iris Murdoch, a brilliant writer, but one seemingly unsuited to public transport.) He is a great chronicler of drunken misfortune: one who sees the pleasures, perils and pains of drinking all in the same glass.

In his story Captured by Carthagians, Hašek has just come out of a rowdy political meeting where he and his party have won a decisive moral victory by being duffed up by the opposition. Nursing a shiner, he is accosted by someone in the street:

It was my friend Ladislav Hájek-Domažlický, whom I haven’t seen for two years, and who is a good friend of mine since that memorable day when he didn’t betray me in Hradčany, at the pub under the arcades where they serve beer from the Volseký imperial brewery.

While Hašek doesn’t go on to explain exactly what happened in the pub under the arcades in Hradčany, he does go on to relate another tale from back in 1902, when finding themselves on their uppers, they decide to tap a wealthy relative of Hájek’s for some cash. Uncle Hájek is now in a monastery, but they reckon he should be good for fifty crowns, so they write a long letter explaining how Hájek has fallen ill and has had to borrow money from Hašek to buy medicines:

We had styled the letter in the pub, where we had come moneyless, since the rich Strahov monastery was like a promised land. We had a great time, we drank, smoked, and at half past three I went to see the philanthropic priest, the uncle of my friend Hájek, in Strahov. When I had arrived, they informed me that the reverend vicar Hájek is at the evensong and will come back within the hour. I went back to the pub and again we ate, drank, smoked and played billiards. “On such a happy day we have to have wine,” said Hájek, “my uncle is an angel.”

Hašek finally gets an audience with the uncle, who listens patiently to his story before giving him an envelope that clearly contains a note. Hašek hurries back to the boozer and they rip it open, expecting to find cash. Unfortunately, Uncle Hájek appears to have got wise to their scheme:

You crooks! I saw you going into the pub! When I went to the evensong you were still there. Be ashamed! Vicar Hájek

This doesn’t auger well, considering that they’ve run up quite a tab in the pub:

And so we sat there imprisoned by the innkeeper, in a foreign atmosphere, far from friends, desperate, and outdoing each other in generosity, since each of us maintained that he’ll be the one to go down to the city and come back with money to pay the bill.

They draw straws as to who is to go back into Prague to get the money. Hašek gets left behind as the deposit:

At ten o’clock, when in desperation I doubled the bill, Hájek appeared and said, “Kill me! I borrowed six crowns off your uncle, and stopped in one pub. They were playing cards there, I wanted to double our fortune, I lost, and I am skint.”

As the author drily points out:

The old Roman hero, Regulus, came voluntarily back from Rome to Carthage in captivity, only to be tortured to death.

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...