Message in a Bottle

A.L. Kennedy would rather not be doing this. She’s in London to promote her new novel, but she didn’t pack enough clothes before leaving Glasgow, the shops on Oxford Street are expensive and don’t open before 10 a.m., and at 39, Kennedy’s serious about the business of writing — “I lie for a living” — while interviewers have a bad habit of confusing book and author. Which could be embarrassing, since Paradise (Jonathan Cape; 344 pages) is written from within the tortured mind of a Scottish woman who’s almost 40, with a drinking problem so severe she can’t remember the previous night’s sexual encounter. “Fiction is fiction,” says Dundee-born Kennedy, and sips her peppermint tea. She has no time for “the idea that if you write about something dark, you must be dark; if you write about someone who’s annoying, you’ve got to be annoying.” Not to worry; she looks just fine in denim and handles the attention with patient and good-natured aplomb.

She’s had some practice by now. Alison Kennedy has been in print since 1991 — four books of short stories, two of nonfiction and three previous novels, including Everything You Need (1999). Yet she still features on those media-friendly lists of British young bloods to watch out for, and reviewers still struggle to pin her down; Kennedy harvests and grades their comments on her website and is particularly fond of an early one accusing her of “making misery tedious.”

Hannah Luckraft’s misery is making her drink herself to death: Paradise opens in hell, in the kind of hangover that is most quickly cured by getting drunk again. Her career — “something in cardboard” — is hanging by a thread, her grasp on reality starting to slip. Her loving family, in particular her brother Simon, can only watch her self-destruction in horror.

Kennedy plumbs the mind-crushing depths of alcoholism and the painful bends of drying out, but allows the blessings Hannah finds in the company of fellow drunks: “We study to move like wirewalkers, all mesmerising tensions and hot sweat, we cut away our languages, our names, and in return for this tiny effort we are given our wonderful smile and it protects us, because God is on our side.” Like God, Hannah too loves a drunk. His name is Robert Gardener, a dipsomaniac of a dentist, and though he seems to make her whole (“Nobody is complete — we all need topping up”) it quickly becomes clear that her void is spiritual, not spirit-based.

God, faith and salvation are ideas that regularly hover around Kennedy’s fictions. But in Paradise, He’s suddenly everywhere: in the form of a swan; shining erotically in her lover’s skin; serving coffee in Hannah’s nightmares. And even though Kennedy was raised a Methodist and is now a Quaker, there’s no evangelism here. God is in Paradise to do literature’s work: to throw light on why we do what we do. “I was interested in the idea of self-martyrdom,” Kennedy says. “In what happens when you’re in a place very close to not existing or leaving normal existence behind.”

Fiction may be fiction, but self-destruction is an impulse Kennedy knows for real. Her 1999 cultural history On Bullfighting opens with Kennedy preparing to throw herself from her fourth-story apartment, having lost the will to write. For someone who has never wanted to be anything but a writer — a brief career in door-to-door brush sales came to naught — that’s a terrible predicament. Compounding matters was the slipped disc in her neck. “I was in constant physical pain for about three years. It’s annoying and very tiring and it makes you very bad-tempered,” and, she says, may explain her reputation as a prickly interview. What broke her suicidal spell that day was the sound from a neighboring flat of a man singing a twee Scottish song, Mhairi’s Wedding. The prospect of jumping out of a window to the lyrics, “Step we gaily, on we go ” was more than her resolve could bear.

It’s a classic Kennedy moment, the kind of divine comedic intervention that lights up her best fiction and overwhelms the bleakest corners. There could be no more astute and no less tedious a companion than Kennedy on a bender to oblivion. Salman Rushdie said once that what he sought in his novels was to fill the “god-shaped hole” left by his loss of faith. Her faith intact, Kennedy knows that God can be discerned in many things, even in the perfect form — a “long, slim doorway to somewhere else” — of a bottle of Bushmills. Paraidise is a deep drink.