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I'll Go to Bed at Noon
Gerard Woodward
Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems
as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her
oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job
behind the counter in a builders' merchants, and his drinking sprees
with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher
who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution,
have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette's
recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive
path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he's
now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her
youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband
hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act. As the pressure
builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses
begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their
lives.
By way of an odyssey through the pubs, parks and drying-out clinics
of suburban North London, Gerard Woodward's richly woven second
novel I'll Go To Bed At Noon charts in microscopic detail
the continuing history of a troubled but unforgettable family (first
encountered in August) as it lurches from farce to tragedy
and back again, and from one end of the 1970's to the other, and
at the same time presents an unflinching portrait of British society
in the unstable years leading up to the Thatcher revolution.
1. Before your first novel August you had written collections
of poetry. How far has the poet shaped and influenced I'll Go
to Bed at Noon?
I always feel that good prose should have something of the qualities
of good poetry, whilst remaining distinctively prose - not sure
what those qualities are but it is something to do with compression,
sonority, balance...
2. The Economist called I'll Go to Bed at Noon the
best portrayal of drunkenness since Kingsley Amis. Was it always
your intention to explore drink and drinkers to such a degree in
this novel?
Yes it was, although it is primarily a book about families and the
dynamics of families - this family happens to have a drink problem,
but at the same time I wanted to explore drinking as far as I could,
and even to celebrate it. I think the ambivalence of the novel rests
on the fact that the family are both sustained and destroyed by
drink. I was also keen to get in as much detail as I could about
the pubs of the era, and there are several epicdrinking sessions
which allow this.
3. The novel opens with a quote from Andrei Bely's Petersburg
about rooms and the Jones' house features prominently in the novel.
How far do you believe people's homes shape their lives and reflect
their personalities?
Someone described the house in the two novels as another character,
which I was pleased with, and it will feature in the third novel
as well. I believe houses almost literally shape the lives of their
inhabitants, it is something I have explored in my poetry as well,
and in the process the houses are also shaped, and bear the traces
and marks of the lives lived in them. If you think about this long
enough you even begin to wonder where exactly the boundaries between
houses and people lie - Heidegger (who was a big influence on me),
said a lot about this, as did other phenomenological philosophers
(eg Merleau-Ponty) I came across them during my years as a student
of anthropology, and became intrigued by the idea that categorical
boundaries are not as sharp as we might think, we might even question
whether any boundaries exist at all, and houses become a kind of
outer skin or exoskeleton. At the same time there is nothing so
clearly bounded as a house, and the rooms become compartments -
hence the beauty of the Bely quote.
4. The title of the novel is a line spoken by the Fool in
King Lear. Can you explain why you chose this particular
quotation for your title?
They are the last words spoken by the fool, and are taken to mean
'I'll die young', which was appropriate for Janus, who I think of
as being a bit like a fool or trickster in the novel. Also the quote
evokes drunkenness, and at one point Janus is on nightwork, so literally
goes to bed at noon. The theme of Lear is taken up elsewhere, Aldous
strongly identifies with the character of Lear himself
5. Your first novel August also features the Jones'
family. Was it always your intention to write more than one novel
about their lives?
Not always - but at some point quite early in the writing of August
I realised I would want to do another novel to follow the story
on. August itself seems so self contained as a narrative
that it didn't seem right to carry the narrative too far forward,
beyond the end of the Welsh holidays, and I saw that Noon would
need to be quite a big book to do justice to the characters. As
for the third part, I still don't know if it will be a big book
or a smaller book.
Also by Gerard Woodward…
August
'Gerard Woodward's first novel is founded on the brilliantly simple
premise of portraying a family and its inexorable implosion through
a succession of August camping holidays…A strong narrative,
powered by cunningly withheld information and the threat of crisis'
Independent
Ever since Aldous Jones careened over the handlebars of his bicycle
in 1955 and landed next to Farmer Evans's first field, it has become
a tradition for him to take his family camping in Wales. At Easter,
Mrs Evans writes to ask if he, Colette and their four children require
the third field for the summer; in August, their Bukta tent is brought
down from the attic and unrolled in the garden of 89 Fernlight Avenue.
Aldous has started to feel that a certain symbiosis has developed
between their North London home and the Welsh village that they
only ever see in August. When the Evanses acquire a milking parlour,
Aldous associates it with the acquisition of the Jones's first car
- but Colette is right in seeing 'the culling of the dairymaids'
as a premonition of far more radical change. As the years pass,
Aldous's family idyll starts to disintegrate and the farm becomes
a place drenched in memory.
Gerard Woodward has written a stunning and unforgettable first
novel. His beautiful prose skilfully turns the mesmerising story
of one family's happiness and grief into an elegy for the charms
of post-war English family life and for the child's eye view that
failed to see darkness lurking behind the jollity. From the wayward
genius of an eldest son, Janus, to the exuberant, witty but ultimately
unstable Colette - all the characters in this book will haunt the
reader long after they have put it down.
Click here to read
the guide
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