This second book of Woodward's trilogy is very sad. But, then again, one certainly feels after coming to its conclusion, perhaps life is very sad. The Jones family, or at least all of them with the mother Colette's Waugh blood in their veins - in other words, all save husband Aldous - are afflicted with what I suppose one would call an "addictive personality" if one knew what in the world this term meant in any concrete sense. Perhaps it says something that the most seriously afflicted of all, eldest son Janus, is a true artistic prodigy, but perhaps it doesn't. All these characters who end up drinking themselves to death in the end are rather disparate and impossible to categorise. But, contrary to most of the other reviewers here, I found the two characters around whom the story indisputably wends, Colette and son Janus, likable and fun, despite it all. I found myself pulling for both of them, especially Colette, in their altercations with other more sober members of the family. The feeling the book left with me was that life is an extremely plodding, spiritless affair, unless one indulges in, well, spirits in one form or another, even if it leads to death, which life is going to do, spirits or no. Also, Woodward's prose has so many moments of sparkling grace. Here's the description of the environs around which Janus finds himself stumbling in one of his many nocturnal, drunken perambulations:
"A rich odour of rotting pond life, of the sludge of countless fallen leaves, the sunken treasure of a hundred autumns, lurked in all the blind channels."
Truth be known, I'm not at all sure what to say of this book save that it is full of Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity." One is not at all surprised to find Wordsworth's famous view of Tintern Abbey described herein, if all too fleetingly. The title, as another reviewer has pointed out, is taken from the Fool's last words in King Lear.
Fool: And I'll go to bed at noon.
I suppose the overall impression taken from the book is, perhaps, that the besotted fools of this world have, if not more fun, at least a less dreary time of it. They live in a world both blessed and cursed in a way in which the other drab characters do not. We'll see how the last volume turns out.
Four stars, for, if nothing else, a textured, ambiguous view of persons in the throes of addiction without the resort to labelling, 12-step group think, or the other simplistic psychological caricatures to which most other writers resort.
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Top reviews from other countries
Amazon Customer
interesting and great writing style
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 17, 2017
Marguerite
Heart-breaking, Deeply, Darkly Funny, Painful and Brilliant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 30, 2016
