Do you have to be cruel to be comedic? It often helps, says bestselling humour writer, Andy Borowitz. He picks his favourite comic novels.
Interview by Eve Gerber Marc 16, 2012
You’ve just turned the tale of a brush with death into a bestselling ebook that is by turns tragic, romantic, profound and just plain gross. Tell us about An Unexpected Twist and how you twist everything into comedy.
The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
In the third of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Kingsley Amis hails the second novel by the brilliantly imaginative science-fiction author
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and spent two years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. The devastated citywas the setting for several of his books, notably Empire of the Sun. The Drowned World, his second novel, established him as a major figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s.
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
Places you’d be desperate to avoid in real life provide a magnetic lure in books by authors from Dickens to Du Maurier and even Richard Adams
Xan Brooks
Wed 26 April 2017
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y novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, tells the tale of a girl who travels through a dark forest and arrives at a big house. The forest is bad but the house is arguably worse – a false sanctuary inhabited by decadent aristocrats; boozy and boisterous, on the brink of turning nasty.
At some point when writing the story, I realised I was naively blundering into a long and noble tradition of books about terrible houses, much as I’ve naively blundered into many awkward, unfamiliar houses down the years. Maybe I love these places in fiction because I hate and fear them in real life.
Below is a list of good books that fetch up at bad houses. These houses are variously frightening, unsettling or funny – but they all tap into the mounting panic and inadequacy that we (or possibly just me) feel on arriving at an unfamiliar place and realising within seconds that we don’t fit in, that we will never fit in, and that the best that can be hoped for is to avoid some awful faux pas. These are the houses where the flush doesn’t work and the doorknob comes off in your hand and where you say the wrong thing and the host decides that, on balance, he hates you.
Apologies to Sartre, but I think he had it slightly wrong. Hell is not other people; it is other people’s houses.
Rebecca is the name of the first Mrs de Winter, dead in a boating accident but still haunting the wings of lavish Manderley, on the Cornish coast. The house remains much as she left it. Her housekeeper Mrs Danvers remains stubbornly in situ, like an emissary from the spirit world. The second Mrs de Winter knows she can never measure up. It is all she can do to totter out in one piece.
At the start of her peerless 1959 novel, Jackson dispatches a quartet of thrill-seekers to conduct a paranormal experiment at a remote American mansion. Hill House, we are told, is “vile” and “diseased”. The trouble is that the woman who tells us is shy, reclusive Eleanor, who may not be altogether sound and stable herself. In this way, Jackson suggests that the scariest houses are a kind of Rorschach blot, or even a blank canvas. We bring the horror with us and sit it beside us on the couch.
In 1922, suffering from tuberculosis, Kafka sat down to write the story of K, a land surveyor desperate to gain access to a forbidding castle in order to clear up a bureaucratic error. Reports suggest that Kafka planned to have his hero eventually die in the nearby village, with his case still ongoing and his legal status in limbo – except that the author never made it that far. His death ensures that the mystery of The Castle remains forever unresolved.
Aickman was an eminently respectable Englishman (chairman of the London Opera Society, co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association) who wrote scary fiction on the side. The Hospice might just be the most purely unnerving short story I’ve ever encountered, despite (or because of) the sense that I’m not entirely sure whether anything truly terrible happens. It’s about a travelling salesman, Maybury, who stops for the night at a mysterious house that may be a hotel, or a hospital, or some kind of purgatory. Inside, the guests sleep two to a room because they hate to be alone. At mealtimes, they wolf down mountainous portions while fettered by their ankles to the table. At one point, in the night, there may have been a murder. But the rooms are too dark and the thermostat’s turned too high and besides, it’s impolite to ask awkward questions. Just eat your food; get some rest.
Ishiguro is the master of the dramatic side-eye, a writer who affects to position himself at one remove from the plot’s centre, quietly attending to the place settings and all but daring us to look elsewhere. The Remains of the Day, then, is the memoir of a dutiful butler (Stevens) at lavish Darlington Hall. But it is also (at heart, really) the tale of a passion that threatens to pop his starched collar and of a faithless, would-be quisling aristocracy in the runup to the second world war. Stevens clearly feels that certain doors are off limits. Ishiguro, very gently, invites us to prise them open.
Starched … Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the 1993 film version of The Remains of the Day. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia Pictures
How does one begin to navigate Danielewski’s literary hall of mirrors, let alone explain the damn thing? Ostensibly, it’s about the Navidson family, who return home to discover that their Virginia house has mutated. It’s bigger inside than out. A hallway appears out of nowhere; the spiral staircase seems without end. And audaciously, in the meantime, the book’s mutating too. Danielewski throws in references to illusory films and essays. His footnotes sprout footnotes and these lead us down the wormhole. One day I have to reread it, but the very prospect makes me nervous.
Before anyone cries foul, my defence is that a) a burrow is basically a house for rabbits and b) that the evergreen Watership Down is a book that views the world at rabbit-eye level. Oh, and c) that the rabbits in Cowslip’s warren are the most peculiarly human of beasts. Creepily so – a group of pampered, indolent aesthetes who are permitted to lounge about like minor royals so long as they turn a blind eye when the farmer wants fresh meat. Adams’s vagabond heroes initially view the warren as a place of sanctuary. But it’s a horrible place, a terrible house, where the residents sleepwalk towards the snares.
Dickens’s novel peaks early, with Pip’s visits to spooky Satis House (apparently named after a real mansion in Rochester, Kent). This is the home of Miss Havisham, still wrapped in her wedding dress, who keeps an uneaten tiered cake mouldering on the table and ensures all the clock hands point to twenty-to-nine. Dickens, of course, wrote great ghost stories in his time. But I don’t think he ever conjured a phantom quite as tragic and creepy as this.
Stumble upon this novel at an impressionable age and the experience is like walking into the middle of a firework display; dazzling and colourful and a little scary, too. Fowles rustles up a gripping tale of seduction and betrayal as cocky Nicholas Urfe falls under the spell of a puckish Greek recluse. The island estate is a laboratory, which leaves Nicholas Urfe as the rat. In playing tricks on his hero, Fowles plays beautiful tricks on us, too.
For anyone who has ever misjudged a mood, wrecked a dinner party or generally disgraced themselves in polite society, there is always Lucky Jim, one of the flat-out funniest books ever written. This hits a comedic crescendo at the home of Professor Welch and his horrific son Bertrand, where the guests are dragooned into madrigal singalongs. The first time I read this – aged 18, on a train – I wound up laughing so violently that I first knocked my drink to the floor and then pitched head-first into the aisle when trying to retrieve it. A case of idiotic real life imitating great art.
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.
’Tis a strange serpent – 10 of the most entertaining drinking bouts in literature
From Viking magical mead poetry to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, here’s how writers have encapsulated an eternal boozy truth
Mark Forsyth
Friday 1 December 2017
T
here have been drunken poets and poetic drunkards ever since the dawn of time, or, to put it more properly, since the sun first rose over the yardarm of history. The Vikings believed that all poetry came from some magical mead that Odin had stolen from a giant, downed, and then regurgitated in Asgard. They even believed this of bad poetry because, according to them, Odin had regurgitated most of it, but, in the heat of the moment, some of it had leaked out of his arse.
That is the reason that some great literary drinking bouts are better than others. Some stories sum up an eternal boozy truth, some pinpoint perfectly how one particular culture saw their alcohol. Here are 10 of the best.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The first ever work of literature is about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is the musclebound king of Uruk and Enkidu is a musclebound wild man who lives happily among the animals. Enkidu is completely at one with nature until a beautiful woman offers him beer.
Enkidu eats food till he was satiated. Ale he drinks, seven goblets. His spirit is loosened, he becomes hilarious. His heart becomes glad and his face shines. The barber removes the hair on his body. He is anointed with oil. He becomes manlike. He puts on a garment, and he is like a man.
And after that he can never go back to the animals. They shun him now. Alcoholhas made him a human. That’s exactly the same thing that happens at the end of Animal Farm (written a mere 4,000 years later). The animals peek in the window to see pigs drinking with the humans and “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which”. It’s alcohol that divides us from the animals.
That’s not scientifically true, by the way. Most of the higher apes love to get drunk, providing that they can get their opposable thumbs on the stuff. Darwin recorded that the best way to catch a baboon was to offer it beer and then grab it when it was hungover.
Letters, Lord Byron
When not shagging his way across Europe or swimming his way across the Hellespont, Byron liked a drink. It’s not that he was a better drinker than anybody else, but he was much better at describing it. It’s probably best to simply let him speak for himself. This is from a letter to Thomas Moore dated 31 October 1815:
“Yesterday, I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris of Covent Garden and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Ds. Kinnaird, and others, of note and notoriety. Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling;—and, to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.
Both he and Colman were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the wine had previously carried away my memory; so that all was hiccup and happiness for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the conversation.”
‘Experimental literary chaos …’ An illustration by Gustave Doré from the novel Gargantua by François Rabelais. Photograph: Corbis via Getty Images
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare always gets things right. Though Falstaff is his most famous drunk, there’s one aspect of the business that the Bard nailed in Antony and Cleopatra.The three rulers of the known world – Antony, Octavius and Lepidus – are drinking together and Lepidus is very, very drunk. He’s so drunk that he doesn’t just say things, he insists on them.
“Nay, certainly, I have heard the Ptolemies’ pyramids are very goodly things; without contradiction, I have heard that.”
As though some invisible figure keeps contradicting him – something that I (and you) do after a few glasses. They’re so smashed that, when Lepidus asks Antony what Egyptian crocodiles are like, Antony replies: “It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth: it is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs: it lives by that which nourisheth it.”
And Lepidus is just about capable of considering this answer, nodding like he understands and saying, after some thought: “Tis a strange serpent.”
Right Ho, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse
For the pure unadulterated joy of drinking, you can’t really beat Wodehouse. Indeed it’s hard to beat him for pure unadulterated joy full stop. He had wonderful phrases for it – “tanked to the uvula” or “oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled and blotto”. He also has the wonderful story of Gussie Finknottle’s first encounter with alcohol. Gussie is a shy man who is shyly in love with Madeline Bassett. But he doesn’t have the nerve to propose to her. Bertie tries to persuade him that a stiff drink will give him the requisite Dutch courage. Gussie refuses and Bertie decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice. Unfortunately Jeeves also decides to spike Gussie’s orange juice, and Gussie himself then decides that he’ll do as Bertie suggested and downs half a decanter of whisky, which he washes down with the doubly-spiked orange juice. The result is a new Gussie Finknottle, who acts as though he could bite a tiger. “Make it two tigers. I could chew holes in a steel door.”
He proposes to Bassett, who joyously accepts. But he then has to give a speech at the school prize-giving in Market Snodsbury, and his drunkenness, now begun, must run its course through the classic stages of jocose, bellicose and morose, before finally arriving at comatose, by which time Bassett has called off the engagement.
The King in Yellow, Robert W Chambers
The story of an American in Paris in the 1880s who falls in love with a Parisian girl, but is too prim, proper and embarrassed to even introduce himself. So far, so Henry James. But this hero differs from James’s, because after a few bottles of wine, and a brief attempt to start a fight with the Arc de Triomphe (“Its size annoyed him”), he realises that it would be a fantastic idea to visit her street, and, once there, that it would be a fantastic idea to climb up to her window, and a simply superb idea to break in. Finally, they come face to face, but he still hasn’t the courage to speak, and, in a beautiful tragicomic ending, he retreats, wordless, with a rose.
Gargantua, François Rabelais
Long before there was James Joyce, there was the experimental literary chaos of Rabelais. The Discourse of the Drinkers is a crazy dialogue where you can’t work out who’s saying what or why, but everybody wants to drink. “The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity … There is not a corner, nor cunniborow in all my body where this wine doth not ferret out my thirst.” NB: a cunniborow is a rabbit-hole.
‘Bite-of-the-nail suspense …’ Alec Guinness (right) and Ernie Kovacs in Our Man in Havana (1959). Photograph: Ronald Grant
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
Decline and Fall starts with the famous drunk scene where Paul Pennyfeather is debagged by the Bollinger Club, but it ends with a better one. Waugh not only captures perfectly the ability of a drunkard to repeat himself ad nauseam, but he also uses those repetitions to make the final conversation of the book into a literary symphony of theme, repetition, variation and motif. And when the drunkard is told he drinks too much, he replies: “Oh, damn, what else is there to do?”
Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene
This is the only drunk scene I can think of that has edge-of-the-seat bite-of-the-nail suspense. The main character, Wormold, has to render the head of Cuba’s secret police unconscious. So he challenges him to a game of draughts played with whisky miniatures. When you take a piece, you have to drink it, thus handicapping yourself. The police chief begins to realise what’s happening and is caught in a battle between the desire to win, the desire to keep his head and the alcohol. A board game, some drinks, and the casual question: “Do you keep your gun loaded?”
The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Vikings believed that all poetry came from alcohol, specifically from the magical Óthrerir, the Mead of Poetry. This was guarded by a giant in the middle of a mountain, but Odin managed to break in, down it in one and then fly back to Asgard in the form of an eagle and regurgitate into a cauldron. Unfortunately, he was being chased by the giant and he was in such a hurry that, though most of it came out of his mouth, some sprayed out of his godly arse. All good poetry, believed the Vikings, came from the former; all bad poetry from the latter.
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Let us end with a hangover, as these things usually do. There have been some great descriptions, but this is the greatest. Dixon finds himself “too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning”. But the line that clinches it is: “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.”
•A Short History of Drunkenness is published by Viking.