Paradise
is the fifth novel by A. L. Kennedy, one of Scotland’s foremost authors. The
ironic title of the novel belies its theme; there is little of paradise about
the life of narrator Hannah Luckraft, unless you count the bliss of yet another
alcoholic stupor. For Hannah though, being drunk is the only way the world
makes sense. And Kennedy describes her drinking in such sensuous, limpid prose
that you can see what Hannah means, although you know, as Hannah does, that
each blissful sip of whisky takes her one step further from heaven.

The novel begins in a room
somewhere. That’s about as much orientation as you get until you follow
Hannah’s bit-by-bit reconstruction of her last day, her last week, her life so
far. Hannah has had another blackout, and her most reliable guide back to her
life is what memory she has of other blackouts, the clues they provide, the
likely confusions that await her, the lies and deceit that will be necessary to
extract her from her latest predicament. From here, in a somewhat fragmented
fashion, we pick up the strands of Hannah’s life; a life that unravels over the
course of the book. Told in the first person, with a great deal of interior
monologue, the narrative is as compelling as it is relentless. At every point
where Kennedy provides some room for hope we simply can’t see how hope can be
maintained. When Hannah pours a drink after a period of sobriety we are as
relieved as she is that we no longer need to sustain the tension of wondering
when.

So why would a reader engage with
such a desperate and depressing individual? The answer lies in Kennedy’s skill
in creating an unsentimental character who, for all her self-justified scheming
and duplicity, possesses a genuinely moral nature, real emotions, and real
disappointments. Not that she lets this stop her stealing and lying, and
exploiting yet again the kindness of her parents. But there is also a sense
that she experiences real guilt and shame, and genuine affection for her
alcoholic partner, Robert.

Robert is a dentist, but not the
sort you would want doing your root canal work. The relationship is
characterized by the peculiar honesty possible only between two alcoholics.
Denied the refuge of deceit, Robert and Hannah accept each other’s addiction,
even planning weekend benders in which they get away from it all by getting
drunk in Dublin and London, rather than at home in Scotland. They also accept
the occasional lapse into sobriety; they’re always there to assist each other
in the recovery back to normal drinking. Together they enumerate the varieties
of drunkenness, from the warm and biddable sweet drunk, to Robert’s invention
of water drunk "Where the air, without warning, becomes liquid, this
causing you to fall, unnaturally slowly, to the ground." The relationship
between Robert and Hannah is one of the more optimistic aspects of the story.
They share a palpable fondness, are genuinely hurt when let down by each other,
and when they declare their love you believe them, even while thinking love
won’t get them through. The descriptions of their lovemaking are both visceral
and tender.

Hannah frequently reflects on her childhood
love for her parents, and her younger brother Simon. She recalls imagining that
she and Simon would have a life together, and feels bitter that Simon has been
influenced by his wife Allison to distance himself somewhat from her. Allison
is portrayed as tut tutting goody two-shoes who has come between the siblings
and turned little brother Simon into a self-righteous prat. She gloats over
Hannah’s self-debasing search for a drink in her (Allison’s) house, and forbids
contact with her baby. She’s something of a caricature. We know enough about
her puritanical type to hate it, but we don’t know enough about Allison to hate
her in a personal sense. While Kennedy allows us to feel sympathy for Hannah,
there is no such consideration shown to Allison.

During a sojourn at a sanatorium
with the thoroughly absurd but perfectly likely name of "Clear
Spring" Hannah recovers from the horrors of delirium tremens to face the
even worse horrors of amateur Freudians practicing group therapy. I suppose there
are such places, where acute withdrawal is left untreated, and nurses make
banal sexual interpretations of damn near everything. But Hannah had come to
Clear Spring after several alcohol-free days at brother Simon’s, and so would
not have been in withdrawal. And in such an ‘Ultra-Puritanical’ establishment,
miles from anywhere, why would the delightfully Korsakovian Mr. Hitt be allowed
to carry hundreds of dollars in cash, and why wouldn’t some drug seeking loser
have relieved him of it? I was left with a sense that Clear Spring was
something of a device to advance the plot, but a distraction from the real
business. Ironic that the only point of slippage in the novel coincides with
one of Hannah’s two periods of sobriety.

Hannah is not only a recorder of
her own self destruction; she is a acerbic, at time spiteful commentators on
the foibles on others. Her views are no doubt colored by the fact that she
finds herself drawn, through her own lifestyle, into the company, the lives,
and the beds of people, especially men, whom she despises. Nevertheless, the
language and acute observations that Kennedy provides in Hannah’s dialogue are
both amusing and entertaining. A man she has slept with the night before is
described as having "long, yellowish, curly hair, which was, perhaps, cute
at some time in his youth, but has thinned now into a wispy
embarrassment." A fellow passenger on an interminable trans Canadian train
journey says, with the breezy cheerfulness of a railway enthusiast "We’re
all equal, eh? You can talk to anyone on a train. Anyone at all." But
Hannah tells us that "he is called Mary Kershaw, that he used to work for
Canadian Pacific, and that he cannot succumb to a fatal heart attack remotely
soon enough."

Kennedy sustains what would
otherwise be a remorselessly depressing narrative with deft use of humor and
wit. On a visit to her mother, a new neighbor, Mrs. Anderson, inquires as to
what Hannah does for a living. Hannah has been fired from her job selling
cardboard packaging, so her mother explains: "She used to be in cardboard,
but now she’s moved on." In another passage Hannah buys a bottle of water
and tells us: "The water says ‘best before 2027.’ Ordinarily I don’t like
to drink things intended to last that long." There are passages of poetic
language in which common objects and experiences are brought to life with such
clarity and precision that you feel you must have been there yourself, with
Kennedy looking over your shoulder.

Kennedy offers no explanation for
Hannah’s alcoholic life pattern. There are enough scenes involving her parents
and brother to get a fair idea of her upbringing, but there is little about it
that would account for such a catastrophic life course. Her parents’ marriage
contains no more than the normal dysfunction, with her father seeking refuge in
his shed, occasionally sleeping there the night. But neither parent is
alcoholic, there is no abuse or trauma, and Hannah gets on well with Simon. But
her drinking began at school and seems always to have been excessive. In the
one sustained moment of sobriety we are shown, there is no revelation of a
long-suppressed conflict that might hold the key to Hannah’s alcoholism. We are
left to accept, as Hannah does, that she finds herself in a world to which she
doesn’t belong, and so she drinks: "I am delicate and the world is
impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped.
I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there
isn’t. So I drink."

Paradise
is not for everyone. The dissolution of a human life can never be described as
pleasant, and those who insist that stories are redemptive and uplifting, with
happy endings, are not going to enjoy this book. But for those who enjoy a taut
narrative, believable, if not altogether wholesome, characters, and above all
the inventive and original use of language, this is a great read.

©
2005 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story
writer, and lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Fiction