John Bemrose: The Island Walkers

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

Do you know there is not one society in the whole history of humankind that has not discovered some form of alcohol? Drunkenness is our natural state, sobriety is a modern invention."

This is the second of what will be a trilogy of novels following the passage of the London suburbs-based Jones family through the 1960s, 70s and beyond. August, the first, published in 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel Award that year while this second novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker this year.

Publicity tells us that Woodward draws heavily on his own family history — in August on his mother's increasing dependency on glue and this second one on the bog of alcoholism in which the family is floundering.

Janus, the oldest son, is a gifted musician, a genius perhaps, who has been unable to manage his own promise. Alcohol has taken him over, turning him into a fearful figure in the home he still lives in with his parents. Frequently violent, his genius has become distorted into brutish cunning, culminating in the night when he drives his parents from their own home. "Janus had driven them all out of the house and lived there like some tyrannical, usurping duke, the giant in his castle scoffing the rations." It's only then that Colette reluctantly agrees to legally evict her beloved son.

Colette has overcome her glue addiction but begins each day with a bottle of Gold Label barley wine, finishing up each night with more glasses and a handful of Nembutal.

Her brother, Janus Brian, is grieving for his recently dead wife by finishing off every bottle of home-brewed drink in his cellar — Cucumber Wine, Brussels Sprout Whiskey, Cauliflower Champagne — before moving on to gin, first a bottle a day, then more.

Colette's younger son Julian (the Gerard figure) sips cider and beer as he does his school homework at the pub while his parents carouse.

In short, they're soaking in it (and in the various, gross human emissions that drunks are so unable to control). Yet novels like this, which visit the really grimy points of human experience, can be the most rewarding. Woodward writes with a great deal of humour and tenderness, and completely without judgment, something he manages without glamorising or romanticising the family and its predicament.

The space he gives for the story and characters to unfold (it spans 10 years and more than 400 pages) allows enticing subtlety. We see Collette's collusion in the alcoholism of her son and brother — co-dependency is the therapy group term — but Woodward never directly addresses it or judges it. It just is, and with compassion he lets us watch the inevitable consequences unfold.

The tiny and the dramatic facts of their lives are skilfully set against the background of a rapidly changing Britain — politics, social change, the Thatcher juggernaut about to unleash itself — but not so insistently as to distract us.

This is a lovely book, the kind that preoccupies you long after finishing it, and makes you resist picking up a replacement. The chances of the next choice being even half as good are slim.

* John Murray, $ 34.99