Their Lips Talk of Mischief by Alan Warner review – thinking and drinking

In Thatcher’s Britain, two aspiring writers quench their thirst while chasing their dreams (and the same girl)

Douglas Cunningham is a 21-year-old aspiring writer who, after being “booted out” of both university and his “digs”, spends his days sleeping on the tube and his nights in A&E waiting rooms. One night in A&E, Cunningham befriends Llewellyn Smith, whose stitches have split following a heart operation. They bond over a love of books, and Llewellyn offers Cunningham a spare room in the Acton flat he shares with his fiancee Aoife and their baby. Cunningham develops a burning crush on Aoife and a broken heart, as the entertaining narrative develops into a sharply sketched love triangle.

“For their heart studieth destruction, / And their lips talk of mischief”, is the novel’s epigraph, taken from Proverbs 24:2. Much of the mischievous talking takes place in pubs – a key setting in many of Warner’s novels – in a vivid, vernacular dialogue set into high relief by pictorial prose. As it’s 1984, the pair talk much of aspiration, failure and class conflict in Thatcher’s Britain, while also philosophising about the nature of writing. In a novel filled with drinking and thinking, the thinking becomes more engrossing .

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