Where the funny meets the horrible

A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased, lugubriously breakfasts, having just committed a sexual act with an unappetising fellow-guest known only as ‘Mr Wispy’. However close its moral proximity to one of those Victorian temperance hymns with titles like ‘Don’t sell no more drink to my father’, A.L. Kennedy’s third novel is, in its relish of bedrock-level physical detail, quite thoroughly up to date.

By the time we first meet her, at 8.42 a.m. here in this low-ceilinged amnesiac’s hell-hole, late-thirtysomething Hannah Luckraft (her name one of several pieces of obtrusive symbolism) has been haplessly in thrall to the bottle for the best part of two decades. Subsequent chapters confirm the almost cosmic extent of this alcoholic debility: a relationship with a similarly challenged dentist named Robert degenerating into sozzled weekends away; members of her long-suffering family standing stoically-cum-disgustedly by; job as a travelling salesman for a firm of cardboard-container manufacturers on the slide. Laid seriously low after a particularly violent binge, Hannah is scraped off the floor by her doctor brother and shipped off to a Canadian dry-out clinic. Here, surrounded by all manner of weeping confidence-brokers, the bolshie ingrate plots her escape.

Paradise’s length — upwards of 100,000 words — is, you feel, more or less arbitrary. As the study of a consciousness rather than a conventionally ordered piece of fiction it could have been done at a quarter or three times the length. Its distinguishing mark, as ever in Kennedy’s writing, is the precise exploitation of that uncomfortable space — uncomfortable because it leaves the reader with no room for manoeuvre — where the funny meets the horrible head on.