Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Importance of Being Drunk, 5 Oct 2007
The Importance of Being Drunk, by Richard Gray
ISBN: 978-1-906206-14-7
Publisher: Pen Press
Publication Due: 15th October 2007
RRP £6.99
`Hey, you at the back! Not you - the junior behind you, the one with the nose.'
`Me?'
`Review this book, there's a good lad. Make it snappy. Local author.'
`What is it?'
`The Importance of Being Drunk by Richard Gray.'
`Review it for all those who haven't been drunk by Richard Gray, you mean?'
`That's it lad. The potential readership's enormous!'
`Where are you and the other editors going?'
`We're off to the pub.'
`Huh. Typical journalists.'
What should I say of Richard Gray? A new author on the scene, yes, but also one who's writing reflects madly from his own life experiences; an acclimatisation you might never earn; an insight into his unique angles on the world. Admittedly, as you may have gathered from the title, sometimes his view is of the underside of a pub table, but at least he isn't scared to tell it how it is.
The creative culture of Brighton is legendary, with its supporting cast of artists, musicians, sculptors, writers and performers. The ethos of this world, the flow of Brighton's eclectic humanity through the town, the lanes and, if anything, the very spirit of their culture, is hereby captured and broadly defined by the pubs these strays inhabit.
Would you have liked to sit on the Rue Royale with a sparkling glass of absinthe and converse with Toulouse Lautrec about this and that and how La Belle Époque was turning out? I'm sure you would. We all would. Well, it might be time to lower your sights, because this is Brighton and this, ladies and monsieurs, is proper drinking.
Pint after pint, into the night, this book unravels the ravaged lives of ale-folk. Denizens of the South Coast drinking dens, the ones to whom it isn't news that the police take away your shoe-laces as a weird punishment for being drunk and disorderly.
The leading characters, two of the inner-circle and renown gentlemen of the glass, are the utterly unstoppable, strangely unscrubable, brothers Bland. Fixated by beer and where to get it, they leapfrog across the town and ultimately the nation, in happy abandon, losing days of their lives along the way. Why, you might ask? Ah, that's where the plot sneaks over and cuts into their drinking time. Only it doesn't for long. Why? Well, that's because their wealthy businessman father has asked his secretary to give them a job and to, excitingly, put the boys on expenses.
The character of Eddie Bland is definitely an Eddie. In fact, Adrian Edmondson might have taken his correspondence course. That is, if the heir of the Bland trading empire was ever sober enough to have one. What Eddie has instead is a masterwork: `The Rules of Pub'. A lifetime's work of observation, neatly recorded on till receipts, beer mats and bus tickets, then stored in an old student bag. Without the Rules of Pub, Eddie is merely a straw man (something for drinks to pass through). With his brother in tow, it's as if there are two Eddies. Different names, different personalities, but in mind and spirit you could hold a wobbly fairground mirror up to one of them and get a reasonable reflection of the other. In fact, the distortion might help you empathise with their alcoholic loss of vision.
The brothers Bland have an agenda. Their father has a plan. If you want a job doing badly enough, these are the lads to do it. That's the absolute importance of being drunk.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scarily Well Researched!!, 7 Oct 2007
This story takes the form of a travelogue that follows the brothers Bland as they meander nay stagger their Bacchanalian way between the hostelries of our great nation, meeting a varied and colourful supporting cast of characters as they go. Its relaxed pace and warm descriptive style echoes the permanently fuzzy thoughts of the rarely sober, while gently drawing the reader into the always funny, oft tragic but never dull world of our two alcoholic antiheroes.
In spite of the nature of the central characters this is a story to be enjoyed equally by the teetotaller, the hardened drinker and anyone in between, with more than a few of us nodding and smiling wry smiles to ourselves as we turn the pages and recall half-remembered evenings after one or two too many.
Whilst it remains to be seen what the literary world thinks of Richard Gray's debut novel, in the eyes of this reviewer he deserves to be taken very seriously indeed, and I anticipate his next effort eagerly. In the meantime I think he may have hit the jackpot at his first attempt and created a "Withnail and I" for the 21st century!
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