Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks

The third book in Banks’s Culture Series concerns Cheradenine Zakalwe, an agent for the Culture’s Special Circumstances unit, employed to change the destiny of other civilisations and planets by intrigue, dirty tricks or even military action.

Zakalwe is humanoid, but not of the Culture, and finds his first time on one of the General System’s Vehicles, the Culture’s immense craft carrying millions of people through interstellar space, quite bewildering. A fighting man, he is unused to a life of leisure and limitless recreation. However, he does find time to indulge in one of his favourite hobbies: drinking.

A GSV contains an interesting diversity of drinking companions and some of the people he meets are clearly alien, even more so than Zakalwe:

It had eight limbs, a fairly distinct head with two quite small eyes, curiously flower-like mouth parts, and a large, almost spherical, lightly haired body, coloured red and purple. Its own voice was composed of clicks from its mouth and almost subsonic vibrations from its body; a small amulet did the translating.

This particular alien is also an agent of Special Circumstances, and is quite happy to spend its downtime with other spies:

It banged its drink-bowl on the table to attract a passing tray. “Let’s have another drink; see who gets drunk first.” “You have more legs.” He grinned. “I think I might fall over more easily.” “Ah, but the more legs, the bigger the tangle.” “Fair enough.” He waited for a fresh glass. To one side of them was a small terrace and the bar, to the other a gulf of airy space. The ship, the GSV, went on beyond its apparent boundaries. Its hull was pierced multitudinously by terraces, balconies, walk-ways, open windows, and open bay doors. Surrounding the vessel proper was an immense ellipsoid bubble of air, held in side dozens of different fields, which together made up the Vehicle’s real – though insubstantial – hull. He took up the recharged glass when it arrived, and watched a puttering, piston-engined, paper-winged hang glider zip past the terrace; he waved at the pilot, then shook his head. “To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.” “Agreed,” the alien said, and together they drank... The alien was called Chori, he found out later. It was only due to a chance remark that he discovered Chori was a female, which at the time seemed hilariously funny. He woke up the next morning lying soaked as well as soused half underneath a small waterfall in one of the acc section valleys; Chori was suspended from a nearby railing by all eight leg-hooks, making a sporadic clattering noise that he decided was snoring.

Sadly Banks does not tell us which of them ran out of legs first...

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

Burgess’s magnum opus begins with one of the more striking opening sentences in English literature: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” So start the memoirs of Kenneth Toomey, successful if mediocre writer and playwright, homosexual, and brother-in-law to the late pope, Gregory XVII.

Roughly spanning the period from the Great War to 1980, Toomey’s dubious recollections are being gathered for the purpose of canonisation of Pope Gregory, Toomey being witness to a ‘miracle’ performed while he was still Don Carlo Campanati. Toomey is unable to stick to the story, however, and meanders across the events of the twentieth century, a few of which take place inside Nazi Germany. In 1937 one of his novels has been turned into a film by the regime and is being shown at a gala hosted by Goebbels. Kenneth finds the whole event pretty ghastly from the start, although the appearance of sparkling German wine improves his spirits:

I passed on into the huge brilliantly lighted reception room. The only uniforms were on the members of the Hitlerjugend, delectable boys with straight hair, probably performers in Hitlerjunge Quex. They carried the canapés round; gloved and whiteclad elders brought chilled Sekt, a wine I have always preferred to champagne.

It’s quite a spread of food and drink, although Ken steers clear of the grub:

...not only goulash, but a kind of rich soldier’s stew with bobbing sausages, pork cutlets with mushrooms and radishes, beef in a sauces of spiced mugwort, wobbling pink pyramids of saffron custard, a cream cake in the shape of a fylfot, a Tower of Babel chocolate confection reeking like a barbershop of rum, berries of the German forests, cheese the hue of lemons or of leprosy, and, like a warning of heroic times in store, wedges of tough black bread. I ate nothing but drank thirstily of the ample Sekt, while the two hundred or so others spooned in hard, some of them sweating. A godling in mufti who I did not doubt was of the special SS intake in whom not even a filled tooth was acceptable said to me, accurately, “You do not eat.” “No, I do not eat. But I drink.” and I drank, promptly to be refilled. “Danke sehr.”

By the time the big speech by Goebbels is about to start Kenneth is feeling distinctly green about the gills. The poisonous little man begins his oration, bubbling with anti-Semitism and pomposity, while Ken takes a turn for the worse:

I had felt sick before and been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit. The Reichsminister seemed to have three or four closely typed pages still to get through. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be constructed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance. When it got back to listening to Goebbels he was on to point seven, which did not seem very different to point one.

It’s an inauspicious start to his stay in the country, but Kenneth, as his memoirs testify, is certainly used to living a colourful life...

Floyd on Hangovers by Keith Floyd

I’ve been meaning to post on this legendary book for a while now. Sadly, we finally discovered the fate of our last copy when we removed a whole load of rotting books from the bottom of a set of shelves in the lounge where the rain had made ingress. The leak is now secured, the walls dry, but Floyd on Hangovers ended up in the tip, so I’ve recently invested in a new edition.

Floyd liked a drink, although the trademark glass of wine during the filming was for show rather than getting sloshed, or so he claimed in his biography. Certainly by the time this was published in 1992, he had a reputation as a bon viveur, and who else could have published a book quite like this, declaring itself as an authoritative guide on the cover? There is also a five-day detoxification programme at the back of the book, which even includes a few recipes, for those of us who might have forgotten that he originally made his living as a chef. I certainly can’t think of anyone else who could written the following titled Findings on Congeners and Inner Peace:

If you have been foolish enough to drink three litres of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon, before moving onto a slightly heavier port wine, significantly bottled in Hartlepool, then the three miserable looking judges sitting at the end of your bed when you wake will give you 9.8, 9.8, 9.9 respectively. If you really had wanted to beat this score, then you should have had several large Scottish ones before starting on the wine. However, this is a fine score, as the hamster gnawing away on your cortex will testify. 
It is not just the alcohol but all those beastly congeners, so prevalent in the fermentation process in the making of red wine and port, that would have scored a direct hit on the intestinal tract and the nervous system. Very often chemicals are added to the drink to make it look more attractive - brighter and clearer - and it is these chemicals, which, combined with the amount of alcohol, are frequently the cause of the worst kind of hangover. Generally speaking, brandy, dark rum, red wine, port and sherries are the worst offenders followed by Vermouth, beer, whisky and gin, and then white wine, lagers and the purest of all - vodka.
With all of this congener-laden alcohol on board the simple task of posting a cheque to pay the gas bill would become complex and so full of important decisions that just addressing the envelope, if you were able to find one, would seem like writing a summary of War and Peace. This is as low as it goes. You feel that you are on the wrong end of a telescope with ‘The Big Eye’ gazing down at you as you fumble around the bedroom trying to decide what’s best. 
This is the time when you need someone who is in a worse state than yourself. Talking about how bad you feel helps. If there is no one around, go to the nearest railway station and look at the guys who have been sleeping rough. Look at those faces ravaged by strong cider, Carlesberg Special Brew, metal polish and broken dreams. You may think you can hear the faint strains of a heavenly choir singing ‘Never, ever, ever again’! You may also feel that is only a matter of time before you join them. This is good. Do not dally too long. Stride along out through the bus exhausts and Kentucky Fried Chicken packets of life. Cancel all appointments. Find a field, preferably with a small stream gurgling nearby, and ponder the marvels of nature. Soon an inner spiritual light will start to glow inside you and the hamster in your head will begin to snooze. 
Now is the time to make a private deal with yourself that you must swear will be honoured for the rest of your drinking life. Never touch a drop of Western Samoan Cabernet Sauvignon again. 

Sage advice indeed...

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks

The death of Iain Banks this year was a terrible loss to literature. He has at least left a prodigious output behind him with a fine body of both fiction and science fiction, as well as a paeon to the joys of whiskey. I have recently started reading a lot more sci-fi and when he announced his impending demise, it spurred me to read his entire set of Culture novels, in order...

The Culture, a sprawling, spacefaring human/machine utopian society, is the home of Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a great player of games, a master of strategy and skill. He is also bored, and therefore easily persuaded to travel to the fabulously wealthy and sadistically cruel Empire of Azad, where the outcome of the complex strategic game central to their society chooses who will be emperor.

Gurgeh is met with suspicion and hostility in Azad and his only friends are an ornithology obsessed library drone and The Culture’s representative in Azad, the louche and fast living Shohobohaum Za. One of the first things Za does when he gets the chance is to take Gurgeh out for a night on the toot, which ends in attempted blackmail, a fight and a quick escape for the two of them. Surprisingly, Gurgeh is not too keen to repeat the experience. Able to synthesise his own highs using glands in his body like all people in The Culture, he is also unable to understand quite why Za drinks as much as he does:

“Za,” Gurgeh said, sitting forward, chin in hand, elbow on knee, “Why do you drink so much? You don’t need to; you’ve got all the usual glands. Why?”
“Why?” Za said, his head coming upright again; he looked round as though startled to see where he was for a moment. “Why?” he repeated. He hiccuped. “You asked me ‘Why?’?” he said. 
Gurgeh nodded.
Za scratched under one armpit, shook his head and looked apologetic. “What was the question again?”
“Why do you drink so much?” Gurgeh smiled tolerantly.
“Why not?” Za’s arms flapped once. “I mean, have you never done something just... just because? I mean... it’s um... empathy. This is what the locals do, y’know. This is their way out; this is how they escape their place in the glorious imperial machine... and a fucking grand position it is to appreciate its finer points from too... it all makes sense, y’know Gurgeh; I worked it out.” Za nodded wisely, tapped the side of his head very slowly with one limp finger. “Worked it out,” he repeated. “Think about it; the Culture’s all its...” The same finger made a twirling motion in the air. “...built in glands; hundreds of secretions and thousands of effects, any combination you like and all for free... but the Empire, ah ha!” The finger pointed upwards. “In the Empire you got to pay; escape is a commodity like anything else. And it’s this stuff; drink. Lowers the reaction time, makes the tears come easier...” Za put two swaying fingers to his cheeks “...makes the fists come easier...” Now his hands were clenched, and he pretended to box; jabbing. “...and...” He shrugged. “...it eventually kills you.” He looked more or less at Gurgeh. “See?”

Empathy, then... Sadly for Gurgeh, The Culture have more in mind than him just taking part in a great games tournament and by the end of the competition he may well need a very stiff drink.

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd

Some books deserve more than just further discussion and I would suggest that there is enough backstory and intertextuality in Ackroyd's novel about a series of gruesome murders in the East End to warrant another book entirely. (In the meantime this essay gives you a reasonable idea of how much he manages to cram into under 300 pages...)

In some respects the murders, perpetrated by the eponymous 'golem', are peripheral to a story about nineteenth century London which involves Karl Marx, George Gissing, music hall legend Dan Leno and a pastiche of Somerset Maugham's first novel.

Leno is mentor to Elizabeth Cree, who at the book's start is to be hanged for the murder of her husband. But is she also connected to the Limehouse murders? Ackroyd lets the readers draw their own conclusion, shrouding the golem's identity in the murk of history. Even Marx and Leno are briefly suspects, although instantly discounted as having anything to do with the crimes.

Leno and his art are examined at length and Ackroyd goes to great trouble to recreate the lost world of the music hall. His hero is an ultimately a tragic figure whose boozing got the better of him in the end:

“Hall people have their jealousies and their rivalries, but it’s all very mock-heroic. In any case, most of them drink too much to remember if they bear any grudges.” He may have been referring here to his own reputation as something of an ‘old sock’ or ‘blotting paper’; when Leno drank, he drank wildly and incessantly until he woke the following morning without a care in the world. He knew that, in his drunkenness, he would enact many of his familiar stage characters – but he took them to such fantastic and elaborate lengths that even his closest friends could not keep up with him. When he woke up, in a strange chair or upon an unfamiliar floor, he felt as much at peace as if he had performed an exorcism.”

Not exorcised enough, sadly. By the turn of the century his alcoholism and increasingly erratic behaviour had finished his career and he died in 1904, aged just 43.

Ablutions by Patrick de Witt

Subtitled Notes for a Novel, Ablutions is a second person crawl through the broken lives of LA’s drinking classes; ‘you’, the narrator, are a drunken barman who works in a seedy bar frequented by alcoholics, chancers, and derelicts at the end of their luck. It doesn’t help matters very much that the barman is drinking just as much as his customers and spends the majority of this novella thoroughly pickled.

His life is clearly falling apart rapidly. His marriage is collapsing, his behaviour is erratic and frequently dangerous to both himself and others and his health is deteriorating fast. Periodically, he does however decide to go on a health kick and give the hard liquor a rest for a while:

You are often drinking or drunk but lately are dependent more on beer than whiskey. Your motive is to give aid to your liver, flush the redness from your face and neck, and appease your wife. For a time the campaign is a success: You feel healthier and an unknown energy illuminates your eyes and limbs and your sleep and appetite are restored, but the beer is fattening and you gain ten pounds; the weight sits like a cat on your stomach and your slim profile is blemished. When some happy-hour funnyman asks how far along you are your vanity is wounded and so it is with great relief and enthusiasm that you return to whiskey, but in your hiatus you have lost your tolerance and the whiskey poisons you and after a week everything tastes like milk. The whiskey itself tastes like milk, cola tastes like milk, anything you eat or drink leaves a taste of milk in your mouth. This has happened before and you are not alarmed, it is merely a sign that you have passed into the arena where your body has divorced itself from your mind. The mind is the master, the place where appetites are formed and born; the body is the servant. The mind has proven to be an unfit leader and the body is taking measures to protect itself from the mind’s desires. For reasons you don’t understand or care to understand this has affected your sense of taste. While the forces of the body and mind battle it out, you comfort yourself with the thought that after all you like the taste of milk and always have, ever since you were a greasy little baby.

Needless to say, he’s back on the hard stuff soon enough. His futile attempts at escape involve a boozy road trip to the Grand Canyon and a final desperate theft of the night’s takings, but he never seems to realise that what he really needs to get away from is the drinking lifestyle itself.

The Centauri Device by M John Harrison

I don’t usually read much science-fiction but I’d been recommended Harrison’s novel Light, which typically wasn’t in the library, so ended up taking this out instead. Bleak and disturbing, it’s nonetheless a truly inventive novel, credited with revitalising the ‘space-opera’ genre.

Lowlife space-ship captain John Truck is loafing his way around a seedy, dystopian future, when the discovery of his connection to the titular device puts him in the middle of a war between the last two Earth based power-blocks who have carved up the galaxy between them, interplanetary drug pushers, a religious cult devoted the human digestion and a gang of aesthetes called the Interstellar Anarchists.

Rescued from the dealer Chalice Veronica by the dandy Himation, Truck and his crew are brought to a hollowed out asteroid floating between our sun and Alpha Centauri, the base of Sinclair-Pater, the Anarchists leader. His domain is an Aladdin’s Cave of art treasures, both authentic and recreated. The white-suited Pater is an artist as well as the pilot of a fantastical space-ship named The Green Carnation. Truck is brought to his apartment and drinks are served:

By contrast, the suite of rooms adjoining the studio was frugal and austere, with little chintz curtains, stained floorboards bordering Turkey carpets and an atmosphere of cherished isolation. In the sitting room, which was achieved by way of a low passage and a Gothic doorway, there were a few short shelves of old books, a scrubbed deal table and some stiff but charming high-backed chairs. For ornament, a bowl of dried rose petals stood in the precise centre of the table. On the walls of this prim apartment were hung two pictures: one of a head of some wine-god, unfathomable and sensually cruel; the other a rough sketch of a morose, stooping young man – thin, heavy jawed, with deep, close-set eyes, dressed in the garments of a defunct High Church order. Here, they sat down, Himation disappeared into the depths of the suite, returning shortly to flourish his cloak over the table-top (rose petals stirred like leaves of another year, and a remote scent filled the room) and manifest a bottle of wine. He held up his hand – prolonged the moment – four glasses appeared, their stems between his fingers. A faint musical tone. Pater smiled on indulgently.

Pater explains that he wants the Centauri Device simply because everyone else does, and goes on to execute a daring and suicidal raid on the convoy he thinks is carrying it. When the dust settles Truck finds himself on the run from his enemies who are prepared to kill anyone in their way. He must now face the device itself alone...