I'll Go to Bed at Noon

The Jones Trilogy #2

by Gerard Woodward

Colette Jones has had problems of her own with alcohol, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to booze. Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy, has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who sees alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have turned violent and landed him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette's recently widowed older brother is desperate to numb his grief. This is a darkly funny novel about a quirky, troubled family as it lurches from farce to tragedy to pub and back again.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, 21st Century, Mental Health, British Literature, Family

446 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 2004

About the author

Gerard Woodward (born 1961) is a British novelist, poet and short story writer, best known for his trilogy of novels concerning the troubled Jones family, the second of which, I'll Go To Bed at Noon, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man-Booker Prize.[1] He was born in London and briefly studied painting at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall. He later attended the London School of Economics, where he studied Social Anthropology, and Manchester University, where he studied for an MA in the same subject. In 1989 he won a major Eric Gregory Award for poets under thirty and his first collection of poetry, Householder, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1991. His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. In 2011 he was writer in residence at Columbia College, Chicago. He is currently Professor of Fiction at Bath Spa University.

Reviews

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't bother reading this if you're looking for a primer on alcoholism- that seems more like a marketing tactic than an important feature of the novel. Yes, there is plenty of addiction here, but it'll be incomprehensible if you haven't read 'August.' A lot of reviewers, as with August, complain that 'nothing' happens; that there's no character development; that the characters are unsympathetic. Just to be clear: what exactly is meant to happen in a novel that doesn't? There's death. There's love. There's adolescence, aging and divorce. There's worrying about the place of art in the modern world. There are money issues. The narrator doesn't tell you what's happening, you have to think about it for yourself, but there's very little that isn't very well motivated- except for those actions which are important because they're unmotivated. On top of all that, the writing is exquisite. If you eliminated the subject matter, this is what Jane Austen would be writing in the 21st century: amused and ironic stories about dreadful, awful events acted out by a cast of fools who are frighteningly realistic. If this and August had been one novel, it'd be the best novel I've read this year.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one for my historic Booker shortlist project, and for the first half of this book I wondered what they were thinking - a black farce / family story about alcoholism which I struggled to find funny because the characters were so extreme. It is quite well written, and a couple of the characters eventually seem more rounded - the second half was a little better and added another star to my rating, but I can't really say I enjoyed this one, and have little interest in reading the book it is the sequel to.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Description: 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.

To the memory of my brother
Francis Woodward

Opening: Janus didn't usually leave his letters from Bill lying around, but this one had been left on the kitchen table, out od its envelope, half-unfolded, beside the glass cider tankard that held a posy of wilting daffodils, in a way that suggested, to Colette at least, that she was being invited, along with anyone else in the house, to read it.


This package was a joy to open. Hand written address (how rare is that nowadays), paddy envelope as usual but inside the book was lovingly wrapped in clear plastic.

Been so long since I read the first one in The Jones trilogy that I wonder if I will remember all the nuances. Only one way to find out and that is to dive right in...



Fun to be reading this whilst we wait for the results to start rolling in from today's UK election. From page 31:

'Now there was a minority Labour Government. Mr Wilson had won the election in February with fewer votes than Heath. There was likely to be another election in October.'

Page 120: Relentless alcoholism and feckless procrastination leaves me wondering whether to continue or wall-bang it!

AT THE END - glad to have made it through, some of the writing was blindingly good yet the subject matter was just so depressing and I much preferred the quirkiness of the first book. Chances of me getting around to #3 are pi% (3.14%)

4* August
3* I'll Go To Bed At Noon

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

What on earth was the Man Booker committee thinking with this one? The only prize-worthy thing about this book is the title; other than that, I can't imagine why this book was put on the long list, much less the short one.

Nothing happens here at all -- a family composed mostly of alcoholics acts mean to everyone, fucks up, commits crimes, and then a bunch of them die. That would be fine in the hands of a writer who had something to say -- what Jonathan Franzen could have done with this! -- but Woodward uses this promising-enough raw material to write nothing more notable than a few episodes of Eastenders. Now, I quite like Eastenders, and this narrative was pretty good, which is why I gave it two stars instead of one. But a Man Booker nominee? WTF? The characters are poorly drawn and hackneyed, and the writing itself is a bore. Really, don't bother.

[Jayne Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite book ever! Although it needs to be read as part of a trilogy (August being the first of the 3). The family is completely dysfunctional, yet they don't seem to realise it. I could relate to several of the characters, from the addicted Mum, to the mad-genius musical son, and the daughter who just wanted to get away from it all. It is written so cleverly that the whole tragic situation is kind of humorous at the same time. I have read this book several times, and intend to read it (all 3) again soon, as the characters feel like a parallel family and I miss them! I have never read anything quite like it & think Gerard Woodward has created something completely unique & very special.

[Bernadette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent writing about alcoholism. The characters are really well developed. On the book someone writes that this is the best descripton of alcoholism since Kingsley Amis. Wholeheartedly agree. Gerard Woodward was able to show the ravages of alcohol on families and individuals. Not an upbeat read but well worth it.

[Melissa Lee-Tammeus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, I had really high hopes for this book - about alcohol addiction and a Man Booker Prize finalist. However, I had to read the first chapter twice just to get the family structure down and I was still confused. Then I realized there were two main characters with the same name - Who does that??? I tried reading this a few times with an incredibly open mind but found it hard to follow, pretentious, and very annoying. I actually put it in the garage sale bin that is growing in my garage. I NEVER not finish a book. This one I didn't - I got through the second chapter and that was it. Maybe I didn't give it a fair shake, but honestly, after reading the first chapter twice to try and get the gist, I really didn't care anymore.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the sequel to August, and follows the next stage of the Jones' lives, picking up about four years after the close of the first book. Colette has given up sniffing glue and become a low-key alcoholic. Janus continues down the the path of alcoholism and unbalanced behavior, which eventually results in his eviction from the family home. The Jones' other children gradually leave the home to forge their own adult lives and escape from Janus' menacing influence.
The characterizations remain full and rich, the prose well-formed, and the narrative elegantly devoid of melodrama despite the subject matter. It's amazing how a relatively quiet and even ordinary story about a family can be so absorbing in the hands of the right author.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A humorous, touching, tragic, interesting character based novel about the pains and joys of the Jones family, torn apart by individuals in the family being addicted to alcohol, set in 1970s England. The characters are very well developed and enough events occur during the story to keep the reader interested in what will happen to each of the characters. There are a number of unexpected moments.

Colette Jones’s family have an alcohol problem. Colette’s brother Janus Brian, becomes an uncontrollable drunk after his wife dies. Colette’s eldest brother, Lesley, drinks only at the pub, but then drinks excessively until he falls down. Colette’s daughter Juliette, is married to a butcher who drinks large quantities of beer. Colette’s eldest son Janus, a brilliant pianist, is the worst alcoholic of the family that leads to his family having nothing to do with him. Janus is self destructive and damaging to those around him.

Colette tries vainly to care for her brother and to believe the best of her son.

An elegant, beautifully written book. By the end of this memorable novel, I was deeply touched. A very satisfying reading experience. It is not an uplifting read but very worthy of being shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize. I will endeavor to read more novels of Gerard Woodward.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book about a family in North London and the ravages of alcohol - but don't read it if you are to be fretting over the health of the characters. I didn't know it was part of a trilogy - I will definitely read the others.

[Kbookchin · Rating 2 out of 5]

about 2/3 through it's become tiresome - I agree with some of the other reviewers -- a litany of life with a family of alcoholics without introspection or much else to offer. I've found myself skimming to get to the end. I should have known from the opening letter!

[Iain McNab]

This is a terrific and beautifully written novel, the second in the trilogy begun with August, focusing on a dysfunctional north London family grappling with drink, drugs and the 1970s. Grim, funny and very moving.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved loved loved this. How did he make an bad, alcoholic mother so sympathetic that I was haunted by this book for days after? Interesting complement to Glass Castle!

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic book about alcoholics, very funny and forty or so pages are set in my home town (Tewkesbury)- so added interest for me - but I'm sure everyone who can read will like this.

[Dassi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! The complexity of characters and disease is so accurate yet humorous. It is also brilliantly written in 1970's England... One of my favorites!

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collete Jones’ family is ruined by alcohol. This is not a histrionic anti booze tract or a series of jolly japes by a family with a weakness for a tipple. It is a moving level eyed view of the waste and damage this family endures shot through with some dark levity. A good sad read.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was drawn by the Booker Prize nomination for this book---and the quality of the writing is very good. However the subject matter of a family that has two members addicted to alcohol wore me down and I decided life was too short to continue. DNF.
5/10

[Yalan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of the precursor to this novel, August, so I had high expectations for I'll Go to Bed at Noon. I liked the first novel better; I enjoyed being transported to Wales and growing up with the Joneses.

This novel is also well-written and Woodward continues to strongly develop his characters - and it's precisely because of how well-written Colette and Aldous are in particular that this novel is hard to read at times. You want things to turn out well for them, you want for them to be happy, but that doesn't happen. It is a depressing novel, but that's only half the story; it's also a funny novel filled with deadpan humour (it's very English in that sense). This isn't a novel of major turning points or important, life-changing events; it's a novel about the effects of alcoholism on a bland, ordinary middle-class family in suburban London. Once again, just like with August, Woodward's memorable characters make this book come to life.

One quibble: The shoddy editing of this novel was very distracting. Small mistakes like "its" instead of "it's" and speech marks gone awry are really unforgiveable considering the reputation of the publishder (Vintage)!

[Kathy Ahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sad little story about a bunch of alcoholics before alcoholism was a commonly known disease. I didn't like any of the characters: none of them were compelling or sympathetic protagonists. You sort of hope for the best for both Januses but don't care that they end up the way they do. In fact, it seems fitting that most of them end up the way you might expect them to.

The writing wasn't especially beautiful, but it kept me engaged until the very end -- an impressive feat considering I didn't care about any of the characters and the novel wasn't plot driven. I think there's something to be said about that. It felt like a straightforward description of an alcoholic family without any judgment or bias. I found it worth the read, though I haven't read anything else like this to compare it to.

[Muthukumaran Ramalingam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not pass anywhere beyond the 50-page limit. The author or the editor should have bothered to draw a family tree. Names, relationships and genders are so confusing that at one point, you start guessing the character's identity. And a same name shared by two characters, added to this confusion. The events unfold for nothing and end up as loose ends at each chapter. Drab and one of the most boring-ever reading experiences I have ever had. Obviously, I did not read this book, but gave it a 3 star, for the only reason that it was in the long list. I don't know why such a dishevelled, mis-ordered and drenched-in-booze family would call itself a family at all. If you want to know more about alcoholism, you had better go through medical journals. Not this novel.

[Philippa Dissel · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a dysfunctional family! This was a very different book and I began to get irritated with them all. Very well written though. I could just imagine the messy house and brillent but odd bod family members.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does have potential. Some of it was very well written. Unfortunately I just got so bored, and by about page 200 gave up. I didn't care what happened to the characters, hopefully most of them die.

[Rhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty grim story with not much to redeem it. Also, it was poorly edited, which drove me nuts at times.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is nothing interesting or likeable about these middle class British alcoholics, nor does the writing have any flair. I gave up after chapter 4.

[Shabina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't think I have ever read a story as pathetic and depressing as this and ever will. Neither am I going anywhere near this author again!

[Celia Latty-steele · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can I please get my last few weeks back while I battled through this one

[Tish Oates · Rating 3 out of 5]

I stoped caring about the characters.

[Pete Camp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Depressing drivel

[Colin Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much in this intensely sad book that is simply unbelievable, much that makes me think I’m looking at the wildest inventions of a fiction writer’s notebook rather than at real life.
And yet, I found myself horrifyingly gripped by this tale of the inexorable decline of a talented, middle-class family destroyed by drink.
The drunken debauches of a Kingsley Amis novel don’t come close to the truly eye-popping excesses of Janus Jones, a young man blessed with the talent to become an international pianist, but condemned not so much by his alcoholism as by self-loathing and self-destructive urges.
His behaviour is obnoxiously offensive, violent after a few pints, deliberately and explosively vomiting over others, including at his cousin’s wedding.
His unforgivable actions are ignored by his art teacher father, glossed over by his mother Colette. Even so, it is entirely incredible that when Janus removes the lead waste pipes from the bath and sink to sell as scrap metal to pay for his booze, that they should not realise he has taken them. Nor that little is said after he improbably throws a dressing table through the bedroom window.
Much doesn’t ring true. Would this family, living in a large, upmarket house in 1974, really have neither a fridge nor a telephone? Would Janus and Colette really be unable to find anywhere to meet except in a pub during the brief time he is trying to give up drink, except if necessarily so for the development of the plot?
There are little clichés too, too easily adopted as signifiers – the fishing gnome to denote a disdained relative’s lack of taste, the stuffed stags’ heads to denote a pub’s past, the house names of the bourgeoisie living in Lonely Birches or Whispering Willows.
There are nevertheless some vividly-drawn characters, such as the uncle after whom Janus is named and who therefore is referred to, for distinction, as Janus Brian. Solitary and fastidious, his ‘face was a game of Kerplunk and someone had just extracted the crucial straw sending all the marbles tumbling.’
Janus Brian is another drunk, but Woodward cannot help pushing his characters to the brink of absurdity, for what JB drinks is his home brew – tomato sherry, brussels sprout whisky and cauliflower champagne. Charming, until it becomes gross, as he turns to brewing up shoe polish, and inviting his sister to inspect his faeces.
Are we supposed to take this concatenation of depravity seriously? Perhaps I lead too sheltered a life. Or perhaps Woodward is playing a game. When he introduces three minor characters called O’Flaherty, O’Hogarty and O’Malley, Kieran, Seamus and Marcus, it seems he may be and doesn’t mind if we know it.
Sometimes the descriptive writing is glorious. This on two contrasting characters: Angelica - ‘a well-farmed landscape of woods and streams where you could walk all day over styles and little footbridges getting covered in mud and burrs and thorns;’ Mary: ‘a little desert by comparison, where one’s own footprints are a sort of monument.’
And the put-downs can be pithy, such as on the widower Reg who tries to renew his youthful courtship of Colette, but whose ‘personality after a lifetime of working in insurance, had shrunk. He’d become a chauvinist, a bigot and a pedant.’
Interesting random characters are picked up in pubs, such as Miss Steed, the old dear who regularly drinks two halves of shandy, the second inevitably paid for by a stranger whom she cons by offering too few new pence and complaining ‘I can never understand this new money.’
The book offers only one explanation of Janus’ extremely disturbed and disturbing behaviour, and that unfortunately sounds pretentious and unsatisfactory. ‘To play the piano truly well you have to know something about life. .. He knows he doesn’t know it, and that’s why he drinks and why he’s so arrogant, to cover up that profound ignorance of his. .. He needs to have found someone, and to have lost someone,’ says his uncle.
I could not believe that any more than much of the rest of this book. And yet, the feeling of powerlessness to prevent these not unworthy people from destroying themselves moved me very mcuh, and at the end I didn’t much care if it was all too far-fetched. In a disappointing year, 2004, for the Booker Prize, this strangely would have got my vote over the other six short-listed novels.

[Candice · Rating 3 out of 5]

The short review sentence on the front of the book says “A loving and harrowing account of the havoc alcohol can wreak on a family”, while a quote on the back describes it as “Wonderfully generous and funny”. Whoever wrote the back of the book quote must have been suffering the havoc of alcohol because, friend, that is a wildly inaccurate statement. If you are wondering what you’ll be getting into by cracking the spine of this 437-page-family melodrama, go with the front of the book description.

It was engrossing and Woodward’s specialty seems to be painting bastards with a skillful brush. Boy, I hate the bastards he writes about. They are BASTARDS. I felt he could have cut this book by at least a hundred pages, though the repetition of themes certainly contributed to the “harrowing account” description.