BEST BOOKS FOR... SOBER OCTOBER

I HAVE just emerged from a soberish September, with hopes to continue on a more temperate path.

I am not expecting plaudits for this. After a sociable summer, I felt quite pickled, as if someone might accidentally tread on my toe and sauvignon trickle out.

Even though the preening phrase ‘sober curious’ makes me want to chuck drinks around like Leonard Rossiter in those ancient Cinzano adverts, I am adjusting my spirit levels.

Yes, I am still irked by the virtue-signalling, chivvying tone of the Go Sober For October campaign. Of course, raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support is irrefutably a good thing, but I dislike the cartoonish advertisements billing a booze-free month as a super-heroic challenge.

If it is, then see a doctor! Fundraising aside, who benefits but the brighter-eyed, temporary teetotaller? Still, if you seek encouragement in temperance, fiction offers some truly sobering portraits of alcoholism. In Never Mind, the first of Edward St Aubyn’s semiautobiographical Patrick Melrose novels, his supine, spent mother Eleanor is introduced stumbling towards her Buick, having already vomited twice that morning.

A fistful of uppers and downers, chased with brandy, and she feels back in gear. ‘Pink suits her so well . . . matches the colour of her eyes,’ drawls her sadist husband.

Sasha in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight is another weepy, washedup exile in France. Dispatched to Paris by a friend who ‘can’t stand to see you looking like this’, she measures out her days in drinks.

Patrick Hamilton’s scabrous, mordantly funny Hangover Square is set among the seedy watering holes of London’s Earls Court on the eve of World War II.

The unstable George Harvey Bone harbours obsessive, even murderous, thoughts about Netta and more innocent dreams of escaping to Maidenhead, where ‘he would not drink any more — or only an occasional beer’.

Enjoy using a clearer head to binge-read, not drink, this October.