First stops on a literary pub crawl
David Barnett
@davidmbarnett
Fri 26 Sep 2008 03.00 EDT First published on Fri 26 Sep 2008 03.00 EDT
A man sits reading in a pub, a pint of beer glows. Photograph: Andrew Fox
Fancy a pint? September has seen the publication of the Good Beer Guide from the Campaign for Real Ale and also the Great British Pub awards at the Hilton Hotel on London's Park Lane. But for bookaholics, the most intriguing pubs and bars remain tantalisingly out of reach - because they're fictional.
So it's time for us to get on our best clobber and party frocks, and make sure you've got your taxi fare and mobile phone fully charged, because you and me are off on a pub crawl to some of the greatest bars that never existed.
I'll get the first round in, and I'd like to do so in The Moon Under Water, the perfect pub posited by George Orwell in his 1946 essay of the same name published in the Evening Standard. What's so great about the place? Well, like Boston's televisually fictitious Cheers bar, everybody knows your name in the Moon Under Water - especially the bar staff. There's no music and you can always have a chat at normal volume. It's got a beer garden and you always get a glass with a handle if you order a pint.
Life imitated art some years ago when the pub chain Wetherspoon's - which prided itself on setting up establishments which followed much of Orwell's wish-list - actually named several of its pubs The Moon Under Water. There's one in my hometown of Wigan, which has had a love-hate relationship with Orwell after he turned his eye on the social problems of the north in The Road to Wigan Pier. Which, perhaps, is the sort of conversation we might have in the fictional Moon Under Water … but this is a night out, not a meeting of the debating club. It's time to move on.
Just down the road, spiritually speaking, from The Moon Under Water is The Midnight Bell, locus of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy and title of the first book in the sequence, published in 1929 when Hamilton was just 25 - he'd barely earned his drinking stripes. He described it thus: " … the whole atmosphere was spotless, tidy, bright and a little chilly. This was no scene for the brawler, but rather for the principled and restrained drinker, with his wife."
How about the Angler's Rest as the next stop? Miss Postlethwaite is behind the bar, and we could enjoy a Hot Scotch and Lemon with Mr Mulliner … let's not encourage him too much, mind, because this is PG Wodehouse territory, and Mulliner does go on somewhat with those rambling tales.
Some of you are in danger of nodding off. I think we need something less cosy, and perhaps a break from the booze. So it's off to the Korova Milk Bar. Milk does, after all, put a lining on your stomach - especially the stuff Anthony Burgess had them serving up in there to Alex de Large and his ultraviolent proto-hoodies in A Clockwork Orange. Synthemesc? Drencrom? Milk "with knives in it" indeed. Let's get out of here before it gets too lairy.
Okay, who slipped us all a vellocet in the Milk Bar? We seem to have turned the wrong corner … and things have all gone a bit odd. Ah, we must be in fantasy land. You can say what you like about fantasy fiction, but those writers certainly know how to dream up a good pub. Take The Vulgar Unicorn, for example, the hub of the "shared world" anthology series created by Robert Asprin, who died earlier this year, and the setting of stories from the brightest lights of the science fiction and fantasy firmament. Speaking of which, you could have a fairly hefty pub crawl through the imaginary inns and taverns of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth. One of the most popular in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is The Green Dragon at Bywater. It's a Hobbit pub, mind, so the biggest serving you'll get is a half a pint. I kid you not.
After all those mighty-thewed barbarians and elven binge-drinkers we certainly need somewhere more civilised to round off my literary crawl. I suggest the star of Arthur C Clarke's Tales From The White Hart collection of short stories, a place just off Fleet Street where drinkers are always guaranteed a lively tale, a debate on marital harmony or a discourse on real-time wave cancellation - and a good pint.
By my calculations it's your round now. Anyone else want to suggest in which literary pub, bar or even nightclub we finish the night? And does anyone know of a really good fictional kebab shop?