Good Read: A Bottle In The Smoke by A. N. Wilson

A Bottle in the Smoke is A. N. Wilson’s second in the series of novels known as the Lampitt Chronicles. The title refers to a phrase in the Psalms in which the psalmist says, “I feel like a wineskin (or bottle) in the smoke (of the cooking fire).” That is, empty and dried-up, hung too close to the fire and therefore overexposed, cracked… useless. The title is also a reference to Julian Ramsay, our narrator’s new profession and new digs. Julian is now a barmen at a rundown pub called the Black Bottle in the Soho district of London -- a city known colloquially as ‘The Smoke’.

The novel is an excellent account of life in the restaurant and bar business. I’m not sure if Wilson was ever truly a barman, but he captures the ambiance well. There’s a saying the bar business that “a regular is just a regular pain in the ass” and Wilson captures the inevitable dreariness of the everyday drinkers whose worries and woes work their way into the bartender’s life and psyche.

In the novel, Julian becomes a Lampitt by marrying Anne Starling, daughter of Lady Sibyl nee Lampitt. The Lampitt family is his uncle’s long obsession and Julian was inevitably headed to collision with the family. The portrait of this marriage is very sharply drawn, and Julian and Anne go from all inclusive young lovers to wary housemates to bearers of each other’s heartbreak over the course of the novel. Wilson gives another achingly accurate picture of cuckoldry and the resultant despair.

As Julian’s romantic ideals are quashed, he begins to read the earliest Romantic William Blake when he comes across Gilchrist’s biography of the poet. Blake haunts the book and his deeply religious metaphysics are the counterpoint to Julian’s reality throughout the book.

The time period the book looks at is the 1950s, just as the wartime austerity is departing, and as Julian experiences his first adult freedoms. Several of the characters are drawn on people of the day. Pilbright, a co-worker of Julian’s early in the novel, turns out to be a secret artist who is discovered by Julian’s romantic nemesis Raphael Hunter. Pilbright’s paintings are often biblical episodes populated with people and locations scenes from his everyday life, i.e. The Miraculous Draught of Fish at Kew. Clearly, he is based on English painter Sir Stanley Spencer. Julian has an affair with a novelist who may be Barbara Pym.

(I hope to do a bit of research to find out if there has ever been anything written about which characters represent which real life personages. If anyone knows of such info, leave details in the comments section of the blog post.)

Julian publishes a novel called The Vicar’s Nephew, a thinly veiled roman a clef about his early upbringing. It causes hurt to his uncle and aunt, and in some ways represents the disdain of the generation of Britons that came of age in the 1950s and shoved aside the previous generation. The same happened in the US, but it seems particularly cruel in the English context, since that generation endured such hardship and later triumph during World War II. Julian’s rejection of his uncle is particularly piquant by the end of the novel when he has replaced, and in some respects become, his uncle as Sargie Lampitt’s aide de camp.

And as in Incline Our Hearts, Wilson presents Julian’s emotional and behavioral failings in plainly and painfully. He is ruthlessly honest in portraying the hurt felt by and the hurtful actions undertaken by his characters. When Julian becomes aware that his wife is having an affair, he winds up at the toilet bowl retching. No righteous indignation, but rather debilitation and a loss of all dignity. When Julian describes his retributive affair with Debbie, Wilson both creates and tears down the architecture of the cheater’s elaborate edifice of justification.

“The first time I had been to bed with Debbie it had seemed like a blessing, a balm sent to heal a broken heart. After half a dozen times, it threatened to become a habit, and I found myself becoming coarsened by the experience. In moods when I wanted to disguise this fact from myself, I expressed it in a cliché -- I had joined the human race. By this phrase I meant that life is punctuated by emotional calamity. If your wife falls in love with someone else, hard luck; but maybe she will fall out of love, or maybe you, too, can find consolation. I assumed that it had begun from Debbie’s point of view as a piece of harmless sensuality, or simple kindness. For me, it represented a fall. Secret bedroom assignations in the middle of the afternoon. Returns to the bar where Debbie’s lover sat getting drunk, or to my flat where my wife had perhaps been working or perhaps spending the day in a fashion similar to my own. This is the stuff which makes us cease to believe in life. It was the use of sex, and of people, to console. I did not know that we cannot be consoled, by people, by alcohol, by anything.” (emphasis added)

This to me is great writing. The insight and honesty that Wilson in this passage is what we read good novels for. In these few lines, Julian moves through rationalization, acknowledgment of the wrongs by him and to him, to an understanding of the impact of his deeds, and then to a profound understanding of his own condition and the human condition writ large. “We cannot be consoled… by anything.”

This passage is why I am a Wilson fan -- and passage such as these about in A Bottle In The Smoke as in Incline Our Hearts. I have a feeling that this installment is one of the least popular in the series. It’s not in the New York Public Library’s lending collection. I found a used copy on Amazon and snatched it up. I’ll bet this one proves to be a favorite of mine at least -- the life of a bartender and the recklessness that is part of that life and becomes part of your own life, is so well portrayed. These novels are so rich, so well written and so rewarding. I don’t want them to end!

Next up: Daughters of Albion.