The Book Tower

‘I’ve lost all sense of proportion regarding alcohol. You know how they say time slows down as you get older – or is it speeds up? One or the other. Days whizz by so that it’s Christmas every other week (God, what a prospect). Well, a similar thing happens with alcohol. Alcohol slows down as you get older as well, so that it takes more and more to get you pissed. Whereas when you’re young it flashes through your body like lightning, doesn’t it? You can feel it going into your blood, you can feel all the little blood cells getting drunk … and then you can feel it here – ‘ he touched the front of his head – ‘it gets you right in the frontal lobes. I remember in the army – that was the first time I ever drank much. And then you think, “What’s the point, how much time have we got left on this earth, do we really want to spend it feeling dizzy?” On the other hand, do we really want to spend it sober? You know there’s a theory that senility is nature’s way of stopping you from worrying about death? Alcohol does the same thing. What’s the difference between senility and drunkenness? Drunkennes is artificial senility.’

In A Curious Earth, Gerard Woodward follows the progress of Aldous Jones, first encountered in his previous two novels August and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon. I must confess that the premise of Aldous as a central character in a novel was somewhat unpromising. Anyone who has been reading this series may agree; previously Aldous stood on the sidelines of the action, an easy going and dreamy head of the mad Jones household of sixties and seventies English suburbia. With the more interesting characters gone, mostly due to the devastating effect of the demon called alcohol that haunts these novels, how could the gentle retired art teacher possibly hold his own? Thanks to Woodward’s skill as a writer, he does us proud.

We first met the Jones family in August, where Aldous takes his family to the same spot in Wales for the annual camping holiday. Innocent times, although we slowly begin to follow his wife’s Colette’s drift into addiction – firstly glue (sniffing something quite new and perfectly legal in the 60s) and then alcohol. I’ll Go To Bed At Noon follows a darker path, with Colette and other members of the Jones family in the clutches of the bottle, most disturbingly their son Janus – who is gripped by alcoholism and madness with tragic consequences. But although these novels deal with much sadness they are also terribly funny and I’ll Go To Bed At Noon is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last few years.

At first I wasn’t sure if Woodward could go any further with the Jones family but proceedings quickly fall into the familiarly entertaining style. It starts with Aldous, now widowed and living apart from his surviving grown up children, slowly taking comfort in the bottle himself. He slips into apathy and increasingly eccentric behaviour; one amusing scene has him proudly displaying the mouldy potatoes growing into a huge plant in the cupboard to his perplexed daughter. Following a health scare he attempts to get his act together and visits his son in Ostend, where Woodward can really let rip with his trademark humour – Aldous losing his false teeth on a cross channel ferry, his general confusion at being abroad for the first time since the War, the many characters he meets who far more eccentric than himself (these include an insane author of several volumes on sexual perversion, and the young and attractive love interest for Aldous and the sudden appearance of her irritating and bullying husband).

Best of all is Woodward’s prose. He is a writer who can work wonders with the everyday, and with ordinary thoughts, hopes and regrets. Aldous falls in love again, rediscovers life and has some very high hopes for the old Jones family home. A Curous Earth is a wonderful celebration of the ordinary, with Aldous Jones enjoying a late flowering before our very eyes.