Time to grab a book and get tipsy!
Back by popular demand, Books & Booze, originally a mini-series of sorts here on TNBBC challenges participating authors to make up their own drinks, name and all, or create a drink list for their characters and/or readers using drinks that already exist.
Today, Timothy J Jarvis gives a detailed synopsis of the his book The Wanderer, its boozey bi-parts, and ends with a strangely voluptuous drink complete with recipe at the end.
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I slightly dread having to
give a synopsis of The Wanderer, let
alone a terse summary, as it’s a touch sprawling, and I'm not at all sure
what's it's all about. But if forced to offer a high-concept précis, it would go something along the
lines of this: ‘The Highlander meets
Arthur Machen’s The Three Imposters,
meets M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud.
With booze.’ Or, as its somewhat fustian immortal narrator might phrase it: ‘With
topery, sottishness, and befuddlement.’ I’ve totted up all the instances of
quaffing in the text (see below), and, well, there’s a lot. Many, many
libations poured down throats in honour of Bacchus.
The Wanderer
is a strange text, and its provenance is weird also. I found it in the flat of
an obscure author of strange stories, Simon Peterkin, after he’d vanished in
uncanny circumstances. I read it, and something about it persuaded me I should
attempt to get it published. And the wonderful folk at Perfect Edge Books have
obliged. I’m not quite sure, though, what The
Wanderer is. Perhaps a fiction, Peterkin's last novel, or maybe something
far stranger? Perhaps more account
than story?
Much of it tells of its
narrator’s trials in the far-flung future, at the end of the world, of his
showdown with an old, old enemy. But another strand of the novel is a
portmanteau horror or club story, told in flashback, and set some time in the
early twenty-first century. The narrator gathers a group of unfortunate
individuals to tell stories of dread, eldritch experiences they’ve undergone.
Drink features heavily in these tales, indeed the protagonists of all,
including the narrator, are drunk, or half-drunk at least, when they witness
the rending of the veil, see the weird world beneath the skin of the mundane.
But despite his experience, the narrator choses, as the place where the stories
are to be related, a pub in
London’s Borough area, just south of the Thames. And despite theirs, the others
come.
English pubs are odd places.
I came across the following apt quote, from
Kate Fox’s Watching the English,
in Paul Ewen’s London Pub Reviews (a
book in which, for our hapless ‘reviewer’, various old London pubs become loci of disconcerting, and frequently
hilarious, surrealism): “Like all drinking places, [the pub] is in some
respects a ‘liminal’ zone, an equivocal, marginal, borderline state.” And I
would argue that old London pubs have a particularly strange charge, one that
arises from their being crucibles in which different social classes, and
various historical strata come together, react, meld, transmute – with alcohol
as the catalyst.
And the pub in The Wanderer is distinctly an old London
pub, a convivial antiquated boozer. Here’s how the narrator describes it:
“On reaching the
Nightingale, I saw fitful flickering behind the frosted panes; a fire was
burning in its hearth, and I was glad, because of the cold, the gusting wind,
and because it would make the place even snugger. The pub’s board, a painting
of the songbird it was named for, squalled as it swung restlessly back and
forth. I went inside, looked about. Many of the pub’s appointments dated back to when it
first opened, the late-Victorian period. The space was partitioned, by wooden screens inset with panels of etched
glass, into a public bar and saloon at the rear; the island bar was mahogany with
a pine counter, and had a canopy carved with a row of leering heads, Green Men,
foliage sprouting from their mouths, wreathing their faces; and the walls were
decorated with a lapis-tile dado and hung with fly-spotted mirrors in tarnished
gilt frames. Apart from the wavering glow of the fire, the only source of light
was a motley array of standard and table lamps, dim bulbs, but the effect was
cosy, not dismal.”
So why the link between
drinking and the weird vision in The
Wanderer? Well, taking the book as a novel, it could be argued this aspect
alludes to Poe’s “The Angel of the Odd”, a story that is specifically
referenced at one point. It’s one of Poe’s most comical and grotesque tales. It
describes the narrator’s encounter, while in a drunken stupor, with the
eponymous entity, a creature described as follows:
“Hereupon I bethought me of
looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at
the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable.
His body was a wine-pipe, or a rum-puncheon, or something of that character,
and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two
kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled
from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles, with the
necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was
one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box with a hole in
the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel on its top, like a cavalier
cap slouched over the eyes) was set on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole
toward myself; and through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth
of a very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling and
grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible talk.”
The Angel of the Odd
announces to the narrator, in heavy-accented tones, that he’s the “the genius
who preside[s] over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it [is] to
bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic.”
The Angel has manifested before the narrator because he’s scoffed at the
likelihood of such strange and terrible coincidences after reading a report in
a newspaper of a bizarre death which he believes “a poor hoax.” The protagonist
pays scant attention to the Angel, his contempt, after a time, driving the odd
creature away. As a punishment, the avatar of chance then subjects the narrator
to an increasingly absurd series of trials. The
Wanderer, if fiction, could be running with Poe’s conceit.
And if it’s not fiction?
Well, you can draw your own conclusions, I guess.
And what tipple to suggest,
should you read The Wanderer (which I
can’t necessarily recommend – I’ve not slept easily since I did)? I’d say it
has to be a punch, partly because a diabolical Punch puppet is one of the forms
the book’s major antagonist takes, and partly to honour probably the finest
description of the concoction of a beverage in all weird literature – the
following scene from Arthur Machen’s strange tale, ‘N’:
“‘What chops they were!’
sighed Perrott. And he began to make the punch, grating first of all the lumps
of sugar against the lemons; drawing forth thereby the delicate, aromatic oils
from the rind of the Mediterranean fruit.
“Matters were brought forth
from cupboards at the dark end of the room: rum from the Jamaica Coffee House
in the City, spices in blue china boxes, one or two old bottles containing
secret essences. The kettle boiled, the ingredients were dusted in and poured
into the red-brown jar, which was then muffled and set to digest on the hearth,
in the heat of the fire.
“‘Misc, fiat mistura,’ said
Harliss.
“‘Very well,’ answered
Arnold. ‘But remember that all the true matters of the work are invisible.’
“Nobody minded him or his
alchemy; and after a due interval, the glasses were held over the fragrant
steam of the jar, and then filled. The three sat round the fire, drinking and
sipping with grateful hearts.”
I’ll call my punch
“Tartarean”, after Tartarus, the name used in The Wanderer for a dread eldritch realm that abuts this world and
which the occultist can enter, and the unfortunate stray into, at certain
liminal sites. It is a place, “never the same twice, sometimes lurid,
grotesque, sometimes seemingly ordinary, but seething with menace.” As, I
think, this drink rightly should be.
So, therefore, what should
our punch’s ingredients be? I reckon every
intoxicating drink drunk (and all the coffees and teas, to keep us
alert) in The Wanderer, plus a measure
of absinthe, with genuine wormwood, for that authentic decadent weirdness, and,
for spice, some of the dust that lies thickly over all in The Wanderer’s depiction of a desolated far-future world.
So here goes:
Tartarean Punch
To a large pan add:
A pint of lager
A pewter tankard of ale
Two espressos
More beer (it doesn’t really
matter what kind)
Milky tea, two sugars
Whisky
More coffee
More lager and ale
A vodka and lemonade
A gin and tonic
A porter
Two bottles of red wine
More wine (this is where refined
drinking happens)
Hipflask of vodka
Vintage port
Yet more coffee (starting to
get the shakes here)
Good quality cognac (another
classy bit)
Rice wine
Firewater, one gourd
Rotgut (whatever that might
be)
Several slugs of la fée verte (sod it, just glug the
whole bottle in)
A handful of dust (with
apologies to Thomas Stearns Eliot)
Heat gently, stirring the
while. Remove from the flame when a pungent steam begins to rise. Leave to
stand, for neither too little a time, nor too long. Ladle into punch cups.
Settle back with a pipe of the finest aromatic flake.
Savour. And await what may come.
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Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the
weird, the strange. His short-fiction has appeared in 'Caledonia Dreamin':
Strange Fiction of Scottish Descent', 'Pandemonium: Ash', ‘3:AM Magazine’, 'New
Writing 13', 'Prospect Magazine', and 'Leviathan 4: Cities', and he writes
criticism for the WeirdFictionReview.com and Civilian Global. In 2012, he was
shortlisted for the Lightship International Short Fiction Prize. He lives in
North East London. 'The Wanderer' is his first novel.
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