Description

‘An instant classic’ Dazed

A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their loneliness. In hopes of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with them. He also knocks back pills indiscriminately and treats himself to gallons of Jameson’s.

But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to lose himself, trapped by addiction and indecision. When his wife leaves him, he embarks on a series of squalidly random sexual encounters and a downward spiral of self-damage and irrational violence. To cleanse himself and save his soul, he attempts to escape…

Publisher Review

Brilliant * The Times * An instant classic * Dazed and Confused * A brief, intense and carefully sustained piece of writing about the blurry edges of existence * Guardian * Hilariously gloomy … a sober reminder to stick to the diet tonic water * Independent * Drips with black humour * New Statesman * Sometimes poetic, sometimes terrible, sometimes funny, often all three at once… Remarkable * Scotsman * Evokes with good humour the lives of his crazed colleagues and clientele, whose nightly revels terminate in violence and vice … Ablutions doesn’t glorify alcoholism, but nor does it present a moral, skilfully dodging the traps it sets itself. That second-person narration, for instance, risks looking like a gimmick but you grow to view it as a symptom of the protagonist’s self-obliteration. And where a more conventional novel might have added a dollop of backstory as a key to his pain, here there’s nothing but a void — Anthony Cummins * Observer *