On a Booker High

Opening in ’74, I’ll Go… follows the sprawling Jones family through the turbulent pre-Thatcherite years. Though public life intrudes only subtly into the eccentric, even farcical, drama of suburban London life, the overtones are unmistakable.

At the centre of the story are Colette Jones and her eldest son, Janus. Janus is a genius pianist; he is also the family drunk, preferring to work at menial jobs rather than cope with the pressures of a career as a performance artist. His siblings are similarly happy underachievers: Juliette leaves school at 16 to marry a supermarket butcher, while Julian, the youngest, nurtures dark thoughts of murdering his brother and heaving the home anchor ASAP.

If family is the overt subject of Woodward’s story — so intimate it can only be rooted in first-hand observation — the binding theme is alcohol. Early on, one of the characters observes: ‘‘Do you know, there is not one society in the whole history of humankind that has not discovered some form of alcohol?… Drunkenness is our natural state, sobriety is a modern invention.’’

For the rest of the 430-odd drink-soaked pages, the protagonists go all out to prove the observation right. Colette, once addicted to glue-sniffing, graduates from barley wine to whisky, Janus steals the copper bathroom pipes to sell for beer money, Julian lugs along his geometry homework to the local pub, to complete it between mouthfuls of peanuts and sips of Woodpecker.

Yet such is Woodward’s skill, it is impossible to sit in judgement on the Joneses. Colette, particularly, is a wonderful creation, wry, scatty, humourous and all too human. She sunbathes in full make-up and black bra, kicks up a drunken ruckus while watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, indulges her disgraced son and, confronted with an empty nest, observes panic-stricken, ‘‘Soon there won’t be any children. There will be babies and there will be small adults… Childhood should be made to last as long as possible.’’

I’ll Go... is as much a portrait of the timeless puzzle of parent-child relationships as it is an examination of individual failings in a society that has lost its way. Though a sequel to Woodward’s debut novel August, it stands on its own, just as it holds its own against the inevitable comparisons with Jonathan Franzen’s dysfunctional family saga The Corrections.

Richly comic, deeply intelligent, emotionally mature, and unapologetically British, I’ll Go… is recommended reading for anyone with a family story to tell.