Drunken Baker

by Barney Farmer

Characters born into the celebrated Viz comic strip, Drunken Bakers, are here for the first time immortalised in a book. A day in the the decline of the independent bakery, and the steeper decline of the independent bakers within it (cake and bargain booze included). A harsh reality displayed without apology, elbowing its way into our comfort zone bringing laughter and the smell of stale beer.

Genres: Fiction, Comics

160 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Barney Farmer is a writer, raconteur, pessimist, sceptic and aspirant public scourge from the North of England. He has worked with the artist Lee Healey for longer than either man cares to recall, and since 2002 they have graced the pages of iconic UK adult comic Viz with strips including Drunken Bakers, The Male Online, Hen Cabin and much, much more.

Farmer's lyrical and 'frequently repulsive' debut novel Drunken Baker was quietly published in April 2018 to various throwaway critical acclaim, and he anticipates a similar fate, at best, will befall his second, Coketown, when it appears some time in 2019.

He uses a yellow Bic biro for most things.

Reviews

[Sean Keefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just... brilliant. It’s dour, nihilistic, and at times downright horrible, but it’s also staggeringly beautiful, sharp, and a damning state of the nation to the woes of the high street. Completely recommended, everyone with a brain should read this. My book of the year.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slightly weird choice this, given that I haven't read Viz since sometime back in the early nineties and had no idea what the Drunken Bakers strip was about, but I heard about it on Robin and Josie's bookshambles (one of my two book podcasts) and it seemed intriguing. And I wasn't disappointed - it's a real small press gem, completely unlike a mainstream novel. It's a kind of stream of consciousness, punctuated by illustrations and even, at one point, lapsing into comic mode for a few pages. The rhythm falls in and out of poetry. It's funny, dark as anything, and has - somewhere at its core - something to say. What that is, I'm not quite sure: the eponymous pissed baker who narrates it has strong views about how small bakeries, and by extension most other kinds of shops, pubs, workplaces, in fact most of the other elements that hold communities together, are being supplanted by large chains, closed down, knocked down. And yet, when you see how these lads run their shop, you're not exactly gripped with misty-eyed nostalgia for the lost world of family-run businesses he describes. In fact, you could pretty much read it as an advertisement for Greggs if you felt like it. And yet, you sort of warm to his ideal of craftsmanship, even as he falls woefully and disgustingly short of it.
Part of the reason for the 5 stars is that I realised part way through that my home town of Preston had contributed something of itself to the mise-en-scène. Withy Trees is mentioned and he refers to conkers as "cheggies" at one point. So that put me in a good mood and bumped it up from a 4. I don't think it's everyone's cup of tea (or brandy? or lager? or TCP?) though, so I'd hesitate to recommend it to everyone. So, who would like it? Well, Alan Moore compares it to Beckett, and I'm sure he's right, but I'm no Beckett scholar. I was reminded of Trainspotting (regionally accented tales of lowlifery), Ulysses (although it's not as wordy or as hard to read), The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter (another bookshambles recommendation and another novel/poem crossover) and of course it's recognisably Vizzish even if your memories of that comic are as outdated as mine are... but it's not easy to fit into categories. Read it if you fancy something a bit different though. It's good stuff.

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Drunken Baker is a woozy Beckettian stagger through a day in the life of our eponymous sozzled dough puncher. Fans of the Viz comic strip will be thrilled, any neophytes dazzled by the profound Modernist poetry contained herein.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book for our times. Combines a profound sadness with wry humour, sprinkled with moments that thoroughly moved me. The whole creates a nuanced and layered book, with the added bonus of blistering invective.

[Helen Marquis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly incredible work of prose that borders on the poetic. Farmer expands on the characters that he and Lee Healey have been creating for Viz for many years, sharing their backstory and with it the recent decline of the Great British High Street.
Set in a small bakery that somehow hasn't been shut down by Health & Safety, despite them poisoning most of their remaining customers and using a bucket in the backroom as a toilet, this is a beautifully bleak portrayal of life in a declining industry, squeezed out of existence by mass production and price deflation. Truly outstanding with a hard-hitting message at its broken heart.

[W. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly prose interspersed with some cartoon strips, the story appears to cover a working day in what constitutes the nihilistic life of one of the two "Drunken Bakers" of Viz fame. In a parallel universe, perhaps Mary Berry & Paul Hollywood?
Just like in the actual cartoon strip itself, the author skilfully & poignantly portrays the derelict lives of the protagonists, bringing humour to an otherwise grim existence based around uncertain nostalgia, bleak outlooks and the consumption of cheap alcohol in herculean quantities.

[Matthew Pennell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Received this book as a birthday present from my brother; only found out afterwards that it started life as a strip in Viz.

It was excellent, a sort of stream of consciousness prose poem touching on alcoholism, regret, grief, the death of the high street, and the dwindling prospects for young people over the generations. Highly recommended, and you can finish it in a single night.

[James Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Viz strip on which this is based is one of my favourite things in that magazine, so I was looking forward to this and was not disappointed. What I like about the comic is how it’s so visceral and grim: there was a strip a few years ago that had them make Christmas pudding using dodgy bootlegged vodka that ended up causing an old woman to throw up and go blind (!). It’s been described as Waiting for Godot translated to modern Britain, in that it’s basically just the dead-end lives of two men who spend the whole day drinking in their declining bakery business, focusing more on where to get the cheapest booze than on trying to keep the business afloat.

But this book takes it to another level, not of brutality or offensiveness, but of pathos. It tones down the grim, slapstick elements and becomes more about the decline of the high street and of industrial towns, and the effect that has on the lives of forgotten local people and left-behind communities. The two main characters reflect on the failures of their lives and how they have little left to live for but to reminisce about happier times, when a local factory meant their shop was full of customers, and both their professional and personal lives were good, but back in the present day they’re living a grinding existence that's barely tolerable and barely conscious. It’s actually surprisingly moving. I’d say it’s broadly about the decline of the industrial North in a post-Thatcher world, if that doesn’t make me sound too pretentious, and I’m well aware it probably does!

So many books either seem to focus on the lives of wealthy people in London or to have a patronizing view of people in working-class towns, so it’s refreshing to read something that doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles or romanticise its subjects. If you like this then I’d recommend Tim Etchells’ Endland Stories, which takes a similarly unglamorous life at modern Britain (even though it’s over twenty years old) and a newer one called ‘The Berks in ‘Season’s Beatings!’’, which is all about a family on a council estate living a life of endless booze and violence. But this is very good, and certainly deserves to be a set text. Hey, maybe in the same way that the ‘kitchen sink’ writers of the 1950s used to be taught in schools, this could be too as a modern update.

[Martin Mccann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barney Farmer is one of the contributors to Viz, in particular the "The Male Online" and "Drunken Bakers" strips, and this book is based on the latter. I had heard various people talking about the book and they were very forthright in their praise- I don't read a lot of fiction, but was interested to see how one of the more depressing-yet-funny set of characters would transfer from illustrated strip form into prose. Reading was an interesting experience- kind of a modern "Waiting For Godot" meets Ken Loach meets Great British Bake Off! Written from the perspective of one of the bakers from him leaving home one morning for work until he closes up, nothing happens at the same time as a lot happens. Social history and commentary, politics, human foibles, unremarkable lives lived and off course, as the title suggests, quite a lot of alcohol.
This is a short book, but the writing is spot on and will stay with you long afterwards. It is a weird feeling to finish this book- part of you wants to cry in despair and the other wants you to laugh. It is a great encapsulation of the complexities of even the most seemingly simple lives, and has to be up there with one of my favourite books ever- I have already pre-ordered his next one, "Coketown" and look forward to it coming out.

[Darren Corcoran · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, disgusting, heart breaking, hilarious. Barnet Farmer is a genius.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beer soaked rumination on the downfall of life itself, structured like a joke that keeps refusing to be funny. Blisteringly good stuff.

[Vicky Sharratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modern classic written in stream of consciousness which is thoroughly recommended. Makes you want a good cake and bread from a small local baker after reading it.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not since "How Late It Was, How Late" by James Kelman has a book-length stream of consciousness from a fictional British alcoholic been -- no, scratch that. Kelman writes serious fiction, while this is a spinoff of a strip in "adult comic" Viz. No comparison. "Drunken Baker" is better by far.

Farmer (words) and Lee Healy's (art) "Drunken Bakers" strip probably occupies the niche once held by "Billy the Fish," which a reader survey found was simultaneously the most popular and most hated feature in the magazine. It's magnificently bleak - two barely functioning bakers in a decaying English ex-industrial town drink the workday away, occasionally making disastrous attempts to bake something, or sending the rare customer fleeing. Sometimes only the fact that it's in Viz reminds you that it's meant to be funny - though not funny ha-ha or peculiar; funny horrifying. The novelization dispenses with the funny part of that and amps the sadness up even further.

The book's title says "Baker," singular: Farmer has produced a 153-page meditation by the long-faced one over the course of a day at work, in the process delving into on how the pair came to be there, how they reached this sad state, and how they get along (not well).

Typeset to look like blank verse, with occasional short, more or less rhyming lines, for some reason. Loads of seemingly authentic baking lore - the narrator, to quote Peter Sellers as the crooked doctor in "The Wrong Box," "was not always as you see me now." The drawings, not by Healy, are awful. Ignore them.

[Stephen Toman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. A stream of consciousness day in the life of the drunken baker from the Viz comic who’s not a total c***. Often hilarious, elegiac throughout. A world that has left them behind, where skill no longer matters - they could keep making good cakes but nobody’s buying them because nobody cares. All they’ve got is booze and the hope that tomorrow might be better, even though it won’t be, while they work and drink (and spew) as the bakery declines before they end up on the street.

[xmikerx75 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant

Good grief. If you thought the strip was cheerful, this will bring you down even more.

Memories of times past, of not so long ago, through the red eyed gaze of the fairly terminal alcoholic.

From the glory days to what they are now, this fleshes out the back story of the strip.

Some very accurate social commentary in there too.

[Hakan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is art. This is brilliant. This is depressing.

[Mike Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a symbol of society’s changes the local baker might not be the most obvious candidate.
But take a walk down your local high street and just see if you have a local baker left making life’s essentials and tempting treats from scratch.
The arrival of Greggs, Poundbakery and the big edge of town supermarket with their low overheads - and prices to match the quality - has sounded the death knell for so many independents which were once a part of the fabric of daily life.
Like butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, newsagents and other traders who knew your name - and your parents’ too - whose decline all went largely unnoticed. Mourned for a few days then it’s off to Tesco with its free parking.
Not unnoticed by writer Barney Farmer whose ode to lost life in a northern town is haunting, harrowing, often hilarious, and quite brilliantly observed.
Drunken Baker views this culture slipped from grasp through the bottom of an ever emptying glass.
Shifting from prose to poetry and back, by way of beautiful lucid language to the basest of words while effortlessly slipping from internal monologue to third person narrative.
This is a melancholy but not maudlin nostalgia where the march of progress has trampled over the energy of anger or despair at the world left behind for the baker - and his customers - to fend for themselves in.
Not a word is wasted by Farmer as our baker recalls moments from a career, a community and a life across one working day.
Like catering for royal wedding street parties when a whole neighbourhood would come together in celebration around trestle table lined terraces under strings of red, white and blue bunting (who spotted the moment they fell out of favour between the 1981 and 2011 versions?).
Or the perfectly recalled mores of the pub lock-in as the licensing laws of generations called last orders everywhere at 11pm and illicit gatherings of those in the know drew together.
And all the while refilling a tumbler once enjoyed for pleasure now helping our baker through the working day, his skills and expertise - so well detailed by Farmer - no longer needed nor appreciated.
But Drunken Baker is not just about societal change it is also about the nation’s relationship with alcohol from its role in the good times and bad times, the everyday and occasional and every passing point in between.
Cleverly weaving so many booze fuelled moments together from love and laughter to dependence and despair, often within the same few lines, this is both a grim and glorious read.
Barney Farmer is something of a cult hero thanks to his astutely observed work in the likes of Private Eye and Viz and his first foray into full length work confirms he is a very special talent.
This is a wholly original piece of work which one day deserves to feel as essential as the likes of Orwell and Beckett.
As the book’s publisher says on the inside cover, ‘At Wrecking Ball Press we wait in great anticipation for stuff like Drunken Baker by Barney Farmer to drop through the letter box… All publishers wait for the next great book. We’ve been waiting 21 years and it’s finally arrived.’

[Stu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a great book. Perfect length for the story it tells. If it was a film, I'd go with Ken Loach directing Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as the two leads. It was bought as a gift for me by a friend and since Ive finished it a few months ago I've had trouble getting into other books. It's that good.