A.L. Kennedy: Paradise

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

One thing emerges clearly from Scottish writing sensation A. L. Kennedy's website apart from the fact she gives brilliant lectures and has won important prizes. She considers book reviewers a doltish lot. She posts excerpts from contradictory reviews of her books with her own pithy retorts. Some of this tinder-dry, up-yours view of the world shows in her latest novel.

Hannah Luckraft, nearly 40 with nothing to show for it, has an enduring affair with alcohol, the paradise of the title. It is her Holy Grail, her obsession, and her degradation and, whether befuddled by drink or drying out, she embraces this world with skewed clarity.

Being inside the head and skin of an alcoholic is a visceral experience and we are not spared its excesses. When Hannah engages in couplings with strangers and barfs up last night's bingeing we accompany her. She describes in detail the indignities and betrayals she undergoes in order to experience the ecstasy of that first drop on the tongue.

Because it is Kennedy, the writing is beautiful, lyrical, incandescent and unsparing. Hannah imagines her soul "as red as flesh, Jackson Pollocked with indiscretions, worn back to a dirty sliver like old soap. Still it's mine — never left me, never tried."

Hannah's selfishness, bleakness and cynical mirth make her thoroughly unappealing, but her self-hatred encompasses anything we might feel. Her journey takes us through bars, shabby hotel rooms and the treatment centres she invariably ends up in after one too many benders. Her ability to mock herself as well as others produces lashings of black humour and her participation in group therapy sessions is hilariously rendered. She meets a dissipated dentist, Robert, whom she feels she may love, but more so if she can drink with him.

Christian iconography permeates this novel and Hannah is oddly reminiscent of one of Graham Greene's flawed heroes in her relentless, semi-religious push to self-destruction.

But it can be hard, heartless going, a depressing ride despite the funny bits. Kennedy, however, would be pleased. "I don't want to hate the reader but I do want to drag them into hell's mouth — it's good for them." Whether the reader finds this exciting or insufferably self-righteous is up to them.

* Jonathan Cape, $49.95

* Susan Jacobs is the author of Fighting With the Enemy: New Zealand POWs and the Italian Resistance