Dangerous liaisons | 27 June 2009

Surviving, by Allan Massie
The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read
Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole

Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish littérateur, has written an empathetic novel about the loneliness of the long-distance boozer, always isolated, even in the company of fellow alcoholics who try to help. Some alcoholics in desperation submit to Alcoholics Anonymous, in the hope that mutual support may ease the daily fear of lapsing.

Massie once spent several years in Rome and evidently knows the city street by street. It is the perfect venue for his novel. The central cast is an AA group of foreign exiles, struggling with cups of tea against grappa. There is a horrific crisis, brought about by a middle-aged woman writer, ‘a recovering alcoholic’, who persuades an acquitted young English murderer to come and live with her so that she can write a book about him.

Surviving is an essentially grim novel, but there are black glints of humour — the oxymoron suits the dark brilliance of Massie’s style. He provides further relief with many allusions to great and almost great other novelists, including some who were eventually destroyed by drink, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the literary alcoholics’ alcoholic, Malcolm Lowrie. Massie aptly concludes with a celebrated line from Under the Volcano: ‘Nobody go there. Only those who have nobody with . . .’ Surviving may be an instant classic in the alcoholic literary canon.

Piers Paul Read presents a very different aspect of Rome, all the way up to the top, the conclave to elect a successor to Pope John Paul II.