A heady punch of humour and poignance

Gerard Woodward's I'll Go to Bed at Noon opens with an intoxicated rant of a letter that includes half-sentences like: "What with so many demons flying around forcing gentlemen such as us to take too many drinks and whoop too loud and too often and even more strange and ludicrous actions."

And, a little further down: "I'm afraid coughing and spluttering I must bring this letter to its terrible and inevitable end."

Which is appropriate enough, for this is, loosely speaking, a novel about drunks and drunkenness. The tone is summed up at one point when a character who isn't drinking (but that's only because he's 14 years old at the time, he catches up later) tells his mother "You'd be happier if the whole world was drunk." A running joke is that almost every one of the characters is an alcoholic to some degree or other.

This is an unusual, whimsical little book that gets better as it goes along. It doesn't promise much at the start, despite that intriguing letter, which occupies the first page and a half.

What one notices at first are the awkward sentences ("The strange, wine-taster's lip-poutings she gave, or the whole-face grimaces, produced for no reason, that came from nowhere")""though there may also be something to be said for the earthy directness of a line like "She heard behind her the wet noise of loose mucus being sniffed". The past and present tense are distractingly confused too.

But these things soon cease to matter as the book draws you into its fold. It's set in the 1970s, the central character is the middle-aged Colette Jones and we are introduced to her immediate family""her husband Aldous and their children, including the perpetually drunk, and dangerous, eldest son Janus "" as well as a large cast of other characters including Colette's siblings and their relations.

There's little love lost between Colette and much of the extended family: she walks about in a confused haze during a family funeral in the opening chapter, startled by grown-up nephews and nieces she doesn't recognise; trades barbs with a catty sister-in-law, and empties the contents of a blackberry jam jar in the latter's purse as the evening draws to a close.

The sibling Colette is closest to is the other major drunk in the story, and another Janus""Janus Brian, her recently widowed brother who we discover early on has been searching for ways to extract spirit from a can of shoe polish. (His condition gets worse.) Much of the plot involves her efforts to look after him, all the while dealing with the idiosyncracies of her immediate family and her son's gradual descent into delirium.

This is a book of vignettes, of droll little moments: Colette's youngest son Julian reading Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End as a nasty altercation breaks out between his family's adult members; Aldous driving home backwards because his car is stuck in reverse gear, and Colette waking up in the passenger seat and not commenting on it; Janus bringing home a human brain from the mortuary he works in, and giving it the Hamlet-Yorick treatment; Colette thinking the "recently deceased Sid Vicious" might be a reference to a pet dog (which isn't so far-fetched given the elaborate pedigree of Janus's cat Scipio); a funeral attended by burglars, barmaids and blackmailers with hastily combed hair and badly ironed shirts.

Woodward is very good at mixing dark humour with little observations on the complexity of relationships in a large family. Take this bit, where Colette gives her primly supercilious sister-in-law tips on how to take care of Janus Brian:

"The diarrhoea is the worst thing," said Colette, after a pause, "worse than the vomit. That's the first thing I learnt. The second is that Janus Brian tends to neglect his toenails. You need to trim them for him once a fortnight. The third thing is not to be bothered by nakedness. Janus Brian likes to walk around in the nude. If he's very far gone, he is likely to take hold of your breast. He will eat steamed fish, nothing else. Also, he needs to be talked to, for hours on end, sometimes. Or read to. I'm reading him the complete works of Dickens, but so far we're still only on Bleak House. You will need to visit him every other day. If you leave it any longer he is likely to die. And he won't thank you for anything you do for him. Is that enough information for you? Do you think you can cope with that?"

But this isn't black humour for its own sake. Woodward uses it as a conduit to make some very moving observations about the tenuousness of human relations; rarely have I seen humour and poignance mix so well as in the book's gentle closing chapters, where Colette and Aldous try to cope with a great loss.

The author manages the difficult task of gleaning something uplifting from what might have been a depressing, even unpleasant story.

This very low-profile novel was named in the Booker shortlist last month, a decision that by all accounts astonished its author as much as it did anyone else. It's atypical by recent Booker standards, for not only is it eminently readable, it actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you can find it in your local bookstore, and that's a big if, it's highly recommended.

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I'll Go to Bed at Noon

Gerard Woodward
Random House
Price: £12.99
Pages: 437