Word: gin
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...Thus the gin-bashing cronies of Milton Hall, hero of this brilliant first novel, might have summarized his brief and dreadful career as a British colonial officer in Malaya. The story is set in the fictional district of Telebu. State of Mandore. a few hours by car from Singapore. To the usual tropical discomforts is added the barbed wire which confines the town within its perpetual state of siege; to the usual jungle noises is added the rumble of British 25-pounders as dispirited troops try to nose out Communist terrorists in the hills of the "vast sighing terrible peninsula...
Dostoevsky with Gin. The British run justice, administration and the drains, but they have the dead feeling that they are only caretakers for the Chinese and Indian merchants who run the rackets. The new sahibs come from unstately homes (with names like Kosy Kot) in dim English suburbs. They never had it so good ("We're on to a good thing here, and for Christ's sake let's enjoy it"), but it is not good enough. They are perpetually in hock to the merchants, forever struggling to make the frayed ends of their tropical pants match...
...this setting-much of it familiar Greenery-Milty Hall emerges as a boozy bounder who resembles one of Dostoevsky's moral idiots with gin instead of vodka to fuel his false fires. He is a middle-class spiv of genius, a portrait of all those who can make love or a piece of change among the ruins. In the wake of World War II armies, he had moved unerringly into the black market up the Italian peninsula into Vienna, but eventually he seemed condemned to living off his wife in London. The need for propaganda ("You just pick...
Died. Belle Livingstone, ninetyish, exuberant, high-living hostess who gave a gold-faucet elegance to the era of bathtub gin as the manager of a string of high-bracket ($5 a drink for "Jersey champagne"-grape juice and ethyl alcohol) Manhattan speakeasies; in New York City. Belle maintained (in Belle of Bohemia, a wildly inventive autobiography) that she was discovered under a sunflower in Emporia, Kans. by her foster parents, married four times and spent money faster than she could inherit or divorce it. She called her saloons "salons," outfitted them with overstuffed divans because she felt too many heads...
...Absence of Grace. When The Fall begins, Jean-Baptiste has long since abandoned Paris and the law for a stool in a sleazy Amsterdam bar. There he hangs like a gin-soaked albatross around the neck of a long-suffering listener, perhaps meant to be the reader himself. To this shadowy confidant, Jean-Baptiste bares his soul-or, rather, picks the scabs off it. The trouble with doing good, he reveals, is the monumental vanity of it. The moment comes when a man realizes that "he can't love without self-love...