Cape £14.99 pp344
The taste of paradise is at hand — all you have to do is lift glass to mouth, and drink. It might be cough syrup, sherry, or white rum — in the world of Hannah Luckraft, anything liquid with addictive propensities is not only welcome but essential for survival.
Not that this logic is immediately evident in A L Kennedy’s gripping, stylistically consummate new novel. Though the book is narrated entirely in Hannah’s voice, we only know as much as Hannah does at any given moment — a movable feast, dependent on her state of sobriety. Whether she’s at home in Scotland, in Budapest or holed up in an airport hotel, she is always trying to make sense of her life, her articulacy fuelled by rough courage, yearning poignancy, and a dignified self-knowledge which yields wit and irony even in her darkest moments.
Approaching 40, Hannah sells cardboard boxes to taciturn farmers. She meets Robert, a dentist, whose life appears conventional, but is in fact a fellow lost soul. Despite the vagaries of her collapses and his disappearances, they find a kind of paradise together, lyrical and passionate.
But this is not the end of the story. Despite a foray into a detox clinic, Hannah’s loyalty to the bottle is her one constant companion. The novel avoids easy psychologising about alcoholism; Hannah started on cider at school, and her parents pick up the pieces whenever she lurches home. Nor is this an apologia or an implied critique. It is Hannah’s life: chocolate drunk, sweet drunk, ghost drunk, fire drunk, transparent drunk. “Nobody is complete,” says Hannah in a philosophising moment, “we all need topping up.”
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The line between drunk and sober is finer than you think.
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